Case Study: Digitalization helps Procter & Gamble’s production lines become easier, faster, cost-effective.

Globalization and digital transformation generally present great challenges to industrial companies. Component manufacturers are forced to meet the increasing demands of the manufacturing industry, to which Procter & Gamble also belongs.

P&G engineers and designers require a large variety of digital product data of standard and purchased parts from various component manufacturers to operate their production lines. Procter & Gamble had an internal parts library with limited search functions. When engineers and developers at P&G needed a purchased part not found in the internal library, they searched the Internet manually for the relevant product information of the respective manufacturer. "The time-consuming search for components led our company to a large number of newly created components as well as to duplicates," said Sascha Hartung, Commercial Parts Lead Designer at Procter & Gamble. "Moreover, we were manually transferring component information into our systems."

The solution to this was to make all product data in all CAD formats digitally available at every company location worldwide. This data was huge as the P&G community includes operations in approximately 70 countries worldwide. But, the process was needed as it would increase the reuse of components and reduce the new creation of components and costs.

The partnered with Cadenas’ Strategic Parts Management PARTsolutions in 2015 to implement the required strategy in the designing and engineering of production lines. Digital manufacturer catalogs from PARTsolutions were integrated directly into the design and engineering of P&G production lines. With the software solution now in place, they could access millions of standard and purchased parts from more than 700 manufacturer product catalogs and the software solution also offered intelligent search methods and end-of-life information of components. This provided support to the engineers and developers in their daily work at P&G. CADENAS parts management is connected to the PLM system Teamcenter of Siemens PLM and the CAD systems Solid Edge, SOLIDWORKS and NX used in the P&G group.

Hartung said, “We were able to improve our data quality significantly by receiving the verified product data, CAD models and the metadata directly from the manufacturer.”

Using software solutions drastically reduces administrative costs for new plant units. In the past, the P&G administrator, for example, had to manually remodel the 3D CAD models of the required new purchased parts according to manufacturer specifications. In addition, all metadata in the particular CAD system as well as the PLM system Teamcenter had to be updated manually, which took about one hour per component. Now, the administrator needs considerably less time since the native 3D CAD models and metadata of the manufacturer are automatically transferred to both the CAD system as well as the PLM system. Consequently, engineers and project leaders obtain the desired digital parts information much quicker.

The more digital product catalogs and their intelligent product details are available, engineering and designing production lines gets easier, faster and more cost-effective.