CAM Through Quality—Introducing CAM to Fusion 360 Production Workflows

PRESENTER: Tying together those products and being able to build seamless workflows between them so you could always access your data wherever you are. Fusion Production is built on the cloud. So you can log in from your mobile device, you can log in from any browser, you can access your data wherever you are, whenever you want to see it.

So the learning objectives is to go through and talk about some of the structure of Fusion Production, talk about the idea of a digital work instruction or a digital thread that identifies a product that you're making and you're shipping and attaches all the information relevant to that product, to that digital entity. And I'll show some examples of where we are with our CAM products today. And I think I'm actually going to try a live demo, which is a little bit risky, but I think it'll work.

So I want to start with some of the customer challenges, things that we see today, and the customers that we're targeting with Fusion Production. We're starting out with a machine shop/job shop type customer. And we're thinking about the operators and the operational managers. The operators need to understand what they need to do, and the operational manager needs to keep the whole shop running. He needs to know where jobs are, he needs to know what the utilization of the machines are, tracking the status of jobs, dealing with unplanned downtime, shipping to the customer on time, change orders-- all of the chaos and the changes that come through and disrupt the production environment.

With the job shop customer, you're dealing with low-volume production, and you're dealing with changes, and you have to keep your customer happy to stay in business. These are not production lines. You don't always know what your production is ahead of time. You have to be quick and react on your feet.

For the machine operator, guys running CNC machines want to understand what they need to work on. They want to know if they have to capture data. They want to know what job they are working on, and have any of the information associated with that job at their fingertips-- things like tool lists, setup sheets, documentation, drawings for inspections, pictures of fixturing, where to locate your co-ordinate system.

It's all the information that gets shared today on paper or through some other communication method. And we think that there's value in centralizing that into a single digital work instruction. If you have process changes, being able to make them in a digital work instruction and push them out to the floor instantaneously allows you to react quicker and get the right information to the right person at the right time.

If you don't have something like this, like Fusion Production, and you're dealing with existing management systems, there's a risk of lost productivity, especially when machines go down and you have to react. You can lose jobs. And you don't know what your status is. We've talked to a lot of customers who employ people full-time to run around their shop and just give them update on where jobs are and what machines are running.

We've seen a lot of machine data collection that's done by hand. So you get a weekly or monthly update on your uptime and your utilization in your machines. Machines tend to be the highest capital cost that you have, so you want to keep those running as much as possible to increase profitability.

With paper instructions, there's a lot of waste. And your cycle loops, if you have to make changes, are slow and laborious. You have to run out to the shop floor, you have to find all the drawings that are of the old version, replace them with the new version, and hope that you catch them all. With a digital work instruction, you always know that you have the right data at the right time.

One of the key benefits that we think of moving to digital is that you can have this feedback loop that is accelerated. You can go from design, to make, to verify, and adapt based on changes or deviations that you find in the process. With data at the center, we want to start connecting things like estimated time in CAM with actual machine time from the machine. So we can start doing comparisons and say, I thought this job was going to take 30 minutes, it actually took 50 minutes-- what was the difference and what can I learn from that process?

There's a lot of benefit that we can pull out of coordinating data that today is kept in separate silos. And bringing that all into Fusion Production is what we want to do as Autodesk as a whole. It's fulfilling on the data at the center vision, and it's unlocking the insights that we can get from having all of that data at our fingertips.

There's multiple personas within any business. Being able to coordinate and collaborate effectively allows them to react as a unit instead of as individuals in silos.

The future that we're envisioning here is the idea of a digital job shop, a job shop that's connected, that connects people to the Cloud, machines to the cloud, and all of the programs that you're using, the software tools, to the cloud as well. Having a single source of truth in that data and being able to say, I chose to go do this job, I planned it to take two weeks, what is my actual status, what are the issues that I'm encountering on the floor, what am I-- the feedback I'm getting from the customer, and how can I react based on all of those sources of data that are coming to me.

With better communication and production awareness, you can make sure that you have complete work instructions, simple production tracking, and you have a tool that anybody can pick up on the floor and use to make decisions on the fly.

The value of this, I think, speaks for itself. Being able to make faster decisions allows you to produce faster, allows you to reduce the defects in your shop, allows you to increase the utilization of your machines. Basically, you're increasing your production, increasing your profitability.

So for Fusion Production as a whole, it's built on the Autodesk platform. I think we've talked about it several times over the last couple of days, the idea of the Forge platform being our cloud-based source of data. Fusion Production is built on top of Forge. All of the data is centralized in a single secure location. And it can tie into all of our other products. We have this framework where we can start pulling in CAM. And CAM can start pulling data from Fusion Production. And over the long term, we can integrate these products together to make workflows across products more efficient. We have a lot of silos, and we want to gradually tie them together to help our customers be more efficient.

On the Forge platform we also have the opportunity to integrate third-party services. So, Autodesk will build certain workflows and will optimize for some core features. But then we can bring in tooling libraries or tool management systems. We can integrate ERP systems and inventory management, and keep all of this data in the Forge platform in one single location.

Getting into some more of the details about Fusion Production itself. We see a lot of solutions for production management that are disconnected and incomplete. Siemens has a lot of ERP and CAD systems. SAP does a lot of ERP work. You see job boss and shop tech trying to do a little bit of an ERP-light type product. Quality control is spread across a variety of products, depending on what kind of quality assurance you're doing. And in-between all of these products, you have paper, you have PowerPoint, you have email, you have other communications methods that are essentially filling in the gaps where these products don't provide good workflow.

We want to build Fusion Production to give a baseline across the entire production workflow from designing the product all the way through quality, verifying that you made the right thing, and collecting the data of that execution process to feed back and make your process better over time. Understanding the impact that your designers are having on your production, what decisions they're making-- both on CAM time, on material usage, on defect rate-- how well can you machine a certain strategy-- is all valuable for the long-term viability of a business.

So Fusion Production is a cloud-based platform combining production, planning, tracking, and machine monitoring. We have a solution that we can hook up to any machine that has MTConnect protocol and immediately start pulling data from it and integrate it into Fusion Production. We've connected with several of the Autodesk CAM products, and we can start pulling data from CAM into Fusion Production as well. But overall, we want to connect to everything that's on the shop floor and centralize that data within Fusion Production.

Our target is a machine shop customer dealing with low-volume production, high variability-- very different products every time you're making a new job, very demanding customers, a lot of pressure around cost, and a lot of pressure around lead time. Challenges are optimizing the manufacturing process in that type of environment, tracking the jobs, understanding the status, reacting to change, and being on top of the production process in case the customer calls.

Of course traceability and compliance are a big deal as well. We're thinking a lot about AS standards and how Fusion Production can help shops become compliant with AS standards by having processes documented and having information easily accessible.

Some of the things we've seen and some of the challenges. Tracking jobs, a lot of people do this on paper today. We've seen lots of different variants of the board that you can see on the screen here, with stickers, with slots that you can put paper travelers in. It's a very flexible way of doing business. But it doesn't give you a lot of insight. And there is no data that you can run analytics on top of.

Understanding capacity is a particular pain point. If your machine is down 20 minutes every hour, you're losing a fifth of your machining time. But you could miss it just in the daily workflow, not capturing the fact that that machine is offline.

Being able to respond to changes if a machine does go down, if you crash a spindle, if you have other problems and you need to react on the fly, having data that is real-time and accurate is a huge competitive advantage. And of course, quality management, making sure that you're taking the right dimensions off of a machine, making sure that the parts are inspected and up to spec.

Benefits that we think we can provide. Compliance is a big one; having a digital work traveler; ensuring that you're going through quality checklists; ensuring that you're capturing information off of a particular product; being able to capture photos or video and attach it to that product to ensure that it was shipped in the right condition, or if there was a defect that you dispositioned and corrected that defect in the right way is all great traceability and great evidence in case you need to prove to someone that the product shipped in the right condition.

Optimizing the manufacturing process over time. I'm sure you're all very familiar with optimization. Making sure that your productivity increases over time, you have to have data to be able to do that. Any Lean or Six Sigma process starts with collecting the data to understand the process. Of course, improving utilization, a very similar concept.

So I want to do a quick demo of Fusion Production and show some of the capabilities that we have, and then also show how it connects to our CAM products.

So this is Fusion Production. It loads in a browser. You can access it from anywhere that you have a browser, which is anywhere in the world, because I am a member of multiple tenants.

So this is what we're calling a digital work instruction. And this is the heart of Fusion Production. It's the idea that you can define a product and you can define the router of how you make that product, all of the tasks that your operators need to complete, all of the machines that are required to complete those tasks, and any details that you might need in one single location to be able to go and create this product.

Within the work instruction I can say what my setup time is expected to be. If I'm running multiple parts, I can say what my time per part is expected to be as well. Additional data, such as setup sheets, tool lists, fixturing, or pictures of the final part can also be included in the work instruction.

When this gets dispatched to the floor, all of this data is going to be accessible to the operator so they can verify that they're working on the right thing and they know what the final product is supposed to be before it ships.

We also have the ability to add checklists to tasks-- and I'll show that in a minute-- to ensure that quality control steps are taken. And we're investigating how we can allow the operator to input data from those quality control steps for tracking and logging purposes.

So this work instruction is currently called a job instruction, which means it's just a template. It's the idea that I'm going to make this product, I have to go through these steps to make it, but no one's actually working on it.

To actually work on and tell the operators that they have to make this product, you need to dispatch it to the shop floor. When you dispatch it, you can say, hey, I need to make five of these, or two of these, and I only want to make one job sheet. You can set a due date. You can set a flag on it as well, if you think this is a hot job and it's important, to let the operator know. You can add a custom ID number to coordinate with any ERP or purchasing system. And then you can dispatch the work instruction to the floor.

Once it's dispatched, this work instruction is now on the shop floor and it's available to any operator to see in their queue of work. It has gained some additional features. Here you can see the status of this work instruction is currently staged-- nothing's been done on it yet. But operators can go into these tasks, observe the data-- the things that they have to do. And if we start this task, a clock in the background stars running. So we're collecting the information of who is working on the task, what machine they're occupying, and the amount of time that that task takes. All of that time data gives you the insight into how your shop is operating.

For this task, the operator has two checklist items that they need to complete. And you can set this to force them to complete these items before being able to proceed.

When the task is done, you can add additional data if you have defect quantity, if you want to capture photos or video. Especially with the mobile component of Fusion Production, it's very easy to snap a couple of pictures and add it to a task once it's been completed.

As tasks on the job sheet get completed, you can go into this tab called Status Report. And this gives you all of the background of what has happened on that job up to the current point. It tells you what tasks were completed, what operator completed them, what machine he worked on, and what the current status is. And the idea is that if a customer ever calls you and says, hey, where's job ABC123, you have a quick reference place to go in and see exactly where that job is in production.

From a manager's standpoint, there's a couple additional features. One of them is the schedule. Here you can look out over your shop. And you can see all of your machines that are in your shop. You can see what work is queued up on each machine. And if you want to rearrange the schedule, you can just drag and drop tasks to a different machine or a different work cell.

Right now, we have a queue-based schedule, but soon we're going to be moving to a time-based schedule. So you can drag tasks out over a certain period of time that they're expected to be executed on a machine.

Another view of the shop floor is just looking at a list of your workstations and a list of the job sheets that are currently active. On the workstation page, you have a representation for a machine that's on your shop floor. And in this location you can store any additional data that's relevant to this machine. You can store maintenance records, you can store processes for how the machine needs to be maintained. You see a queue of work of all the jobs that are queued up to be executed on that machine. And we also have an integration with the machine data that I mentioned earlier that will show you what the actual utilization and runtime of that machine is.

Right now this is a preview, so the data isn't real. But you can look at it and see how we can start pulling this data into Fusion Production, looking at your uptime and your downtime on an hourly basis and then being able to tie that information with the job information to know what job the machine is working on.

On the back end, there's a reporting framework so you can download all of your data into a CSV for any kind of detailed analytics and look at any completed job sheets and all the details that are associated with them. So these are all jobs sheets that were completed in this factory.

So that's a brief introduction to Fusion Production and job tracking in general. Now I want to show some of the integrations that we have with CAM tools. Authoring the digital work instruction is something that we consider to be a pain point, so we want to make that as easy as possible. Want to enable you to go from design in CAM directly into Fusion Production.

So I have a nice video that shows how this is done from PowerMill. So if you have a project in PowerMill, such as this piece of a mold, you have a variety of NC programs here. And if you have a release of PowerMill that is newer than this September, I believe, you can go into this command pane and you can type in "preview Fusion Production." And it will load an add-in into PowerMill that will enable this integration. So here it is in this NC program section.

So within this integration, you can pick what facility you want to send the job to. You can add some notes or some details. And it lists all of your NC programs and pulls in the estimated execution time of those tasks.

For every NC program, you can also assign a machine and add any task notes that you would have. And here it's generating setup sheets and it's exporting directly to Fusion Production.

When you're done, it will open Fusion Production, and it'll take you directly to this digital work instruction. And then you can go in and edit it should you need to-- add additional information, add checklists, add setup time per task. Here you can see the setup sheet is attached with all of the information coming out of PowerMill. Here I'm adding a checklist to a task. This could be something like making sure you have the right tools or checking critical dimensions before the task is complete. When I save it, now I have a job instruction in Fusion Production that I can dispatch to the floor and execute.

So this is the first step of moving data from CAM into Fusion Production. We want to moving forward in the future find ways of leveraging Fusion Production data back into CAM and finding other ways to leverage that data and access it from various Autodesk products.

I am feeling brave, so I'm going to try the integration with Fusion live. So here I have a project in Fusion. I have a variety of tool paths. Here I happen to have three setups. And in my Actions tab, if I have a Fusion Production tenant, I will have a button that says Sent to Fusion Production. So I will now take this program job and I can send it to Fusion Production. I can pick the facility that I want it to go to, add a job name, a product name, tell the integration to save an image.

And here I have my three setups. And I can add a setup time to each one directly in the integration. I can pick a machine that I want it to be done on-- and we'll say we'll do these on a Haas. And I press OK. And Fusion collects all of the information from this part, compiles my setup sheets, compiles my tool lists, and exports it directly to Fusion Production.

AUDIENCE: CNC code?

PRESENTER: CNC code we do not do today, but we're exploring that.

AUDIENCE: What about the [? cycle time ?] [? breach ?] on the [INAUDIBLE].

PRESENTER: In the future, yes. So currently, the way that PowerMill integration works, we pull the execution time. But Fusion doesn't do that today.

So here it's opened up a tab. And this is the part that I had in CAM. I have each one of my setups. It knows the estimated time that I added, it knows the machine that I assigned it to. And if I open my setup sheet, here I have my tool list and all of the other information that I would need to run this job.

AUDIENCE: For the operator we use a [INAUDIBLE]. And then how will you confirm it's done through the system? [INAUDIBLE]

PRESENTER: It's all digital. You can print a QR code if you want it to travel with the block. But it's meant to be all through--

AUDIENCE: So you just access the system.

PRESENTER: Correct. We have an operator role and we have a manager role. Operator role can view the schedule and any work instructions, can go through and execute jobs. The job will hit an approval stage that needs a manager to come through and say, yes, everything has been done, this job is good to ship.

So I hope that this was informative, showing the workflows from Autodesk CAM into Fusion Production and adding some color to the idea of what data at the center looks like and some of the investments that Autodesk is making in manufacturing and in this type of workflow. And I'm happy to answer any questions that anyone has.

AUDIENCE: The type of customers we're targeting are usually having [INAUDIBLE] packages in the [? machine. ?] So the fact that we are supporting our own solution to having this system and gaining [INAUDIBLE]. Is there a way to view integrated [INAUDIBLE] or does it use half of the data-- you don't have half of the data. [INAUDIBLE]

PRESENTER: Yeah. So we want to capture all of the data that we possibly can. We're not building this to lock out any other CAM system. We're building the integrations to the products that we own today. But on the Forge platform all of the APIs for Fusion Production are open. So either us, or the other CAM packages, or a third-party developer could build a similar integration for SolidWorks or a different package to import that data into Fusion Production.

AUDIENCE: You are not [INAUDIBLE] customers. So it has to be done by the [INAUDIBLE]. So if a customer is using the [INAUDIBLE]. Or is it possible to have both [INAUDIBLE]?

PRESENTER: I think there's value that you can get before you integrate other CAM packages. But someone could also integrate the CAM packages to pull the data into a centralized location. The customer could also build that integration if they had the technical skill to do it.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] .

PRESENTER: Factory design?

AUDIENCE: Yeah.

PRESENTER: We're evaluating it.

AUDIENCE: How about work flows where you have most of your workers signing out. But then you have a [INAUDIBLE] operation or something that that's going [INAUDIBLE].

PRESENTER: So right now you can make a workstation that says, hey, external vendor, and say that the job is going there. Something that we're going to look really hard at in the next six months is the idea of if you send it to a third party, is there a way to use a shared view technology that they get the digital work instruction with all of the relevant information and can enter their own data. Because if you're sending it to a vendor, wouldn't it be great if they could tell you what they're doing on your product. I think that that's a strong value story that once you go digital you can start building those kinds of workflows that are just not feasible using paper.

Other questions? Great. Thanks, everyone.

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