How PD-Trak Helps Manufacturing Managers

Many companies struggle with inefficient transfer of new products from development to production. PD-Trak guides teams to embrace essential best practices that strongly affect this transition including early involvement of Manufacturing, focus on Design for Manufacturing principles and support from Design Engineers during the transition to production. Manufacturing may have their own set of projects to manage e.g. process development or quality control at different stages of production. It’s important to keep on top of these as well, that’s why several companies look at the types of inspections in quality control and select which ones would be beneficial for the development and manufacturing of their product. Process templates can be created in PD-Trak to manage these types of projects in addition to the product development projects, allowing shared resources to be managed effectively.

Project Portfolio Planning tools can be used for Manufacturing projects such as equipment evaluation and installation projects, capital improvement projects, facilities projects, and process improvement projects can be managed as part of a separate project portfolio with PD-Trak. This allows Manufacturing to establish priorities for projects, build business cases for capital requests, track CAPEX expenditure, and plan and manage resources to support these projects.

Project Process Definition tools in PD-Trak allow different types of project processes to be defined whether for a product development project or a capital improvement project, etc. Our best practices-based templates cover a range of project types to facilitate rapid definition of a common process. Our new product development template is based on a concurrent engineering or integrated product development approach with early Manufacturing involvement.

Work Tracking is supported for product development projects as well as other types of manufacturing projects. This enables all project personnel to keep up to date on the status of activities and clearly understand their assignments and list of activities.

Design for Manufacturability (DFM) tools are part of the PD-Trak system. These include a set of DFM guidelines for assembly, PCB’s, and key fabrication processes. There is also a DFM evaluation methodology to assess a new design for its manufacturability. In addition, we have extensive consulting experience with DFM and Design to Cost and can provide training in both of these areas. To help assist this process, using the best and proper machinery for these uses from such companies as tsinfa will be highly beneficial for manufacturing and the related industries that deal down the line.