Product Designer for Controlling Engineering Processes 

Purpose

Employees from marketing and sales develop new product ideas. This first phase of product development, the design phase, determines to a great extent the costs for the product.

Project managers, developers, designers, and engineers have to process a massive flood of information every day. In this phase, they describe the many requirements of the new product predominantly in documents of various formats (such as market analyses, requirements descriptions, specifications, and calculations).

The product designer offers the optimum support for integrated the wide range of product information and product data in the engineering processes:

·         Developers structure the wide range of requirements and product information  As a result of the first phase of a new development, they create engineering structures, which describe all the requirements and goals for a product class.

·         Based on this engineering structure, detail engineering gives rise to first the product structure, then its various product variants.

The variable states of a product are mapped by assigning different values to the characteristics of a product class. The different states of a product are modeled as several variants. In the product structure, a component node (node type structure node) is created, and for each variable state a component variant is maintained.

·        In the continuing engineering process, the product model becomes more and more detailed. Development engineers look for possible solutions. For example, they use new customer requirements for existing products to look for new solutions, but the results of new research also require changes or innovations.

The process finding a solution is supported by the concept group. You can record different implementation options for a component variant in concepts and test them in a targeted review process.

·        If a concept proves to be feasible, you can copy the concept data to the component variant. A simulation function for data transfer allows careful checking of the changed product structure.

·        At an advanced stage of development, you must make the product structure available to operative processes (such as work scheduling). In an extraction step, the data required is selected from the complex iPPE model and converted to a material BOM.

Integration

Components

Before you can use the product designer to control engineering processes, you must use the following application components:

·        Integrated Product and Process Engineering (iPPE) (LO-MD-PPE)
In the iPPE workbench, you maintain the engineering and product structures.

You can find additional information in the SAP Library in the Integrated Product and Process Engineering (CA-PPE) component.

·        Document management (CA-DMS)
In document management, you maintain the engineering documents.
See Document Management

·        Classification (CA-CL)
Using classification functions, you create, for example, the product class or product class hierarchies (class type 300 Configurable Objects). See Classification (CA-CL)

You can only use the full functionality of these components if you also implement components engineering change management (LO-ECH) and variant configuration (LO-VC).

Customizing

You make the system settings in Customizing, under Basic Data ® Product and Process Engineering.

Features

Maintenance of Engineering and Product Structures

You collect and structure product information and product data in the iPPE workbench. Choose the following path: Logistics ® Central Functions ® Engineering ® Product and Process Engineering ® Product Designer.

The product designer reads iPPE objects that are defined for the following iPPE application object types:

iPPE Application Object Type	iPPE Objects (Examples)
Product structure (CMP)	Access variant (S_CMPHD) Component variant (S_CMPST) Assembly header (S_VASHD) Color variant (S_CMPVC)
Early engineering (GEN)	Engineering nodes created as copies of the following object types: ·        Access to engineering structure (S_GENHD) ·        Engineering node (S_GEN)
Concept (CON)	Concept (S_CONST)

Editing Processes in Early Engineering

The following overview shows the functions that support development processes in the early engineering phase:

Function	Use
Processing of Requirement Structures	A wide range of requirements and goals for the new product or product to be changed are structured and linked together. Integration in the engineering processes speeds up the development process.
Processing of Concepts	Different concepts for implementation options are checked and copied to the product structure as appropriate.
Processing of Product Structure on the Web User Interface	Project team members without knowledge of R/3 or without a SAP GUI (graphical user interface) can add product information, evaluate it, and execute engineering processes.
Conversion of iPPE Product Structures to Material BOMs	Selected product data is converted to material BOMs. Subsequent processing in the engineering workbench allows convenient maintenance of process data.