1 IMPROVING PRODUCT PERFORMANCE THROUGH MANUFACTURING KNOWLEDGE REUSE IN PLM Esmond N. Urwin Loughborough University Wolfson School of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering Loughborough, Leicestershire, LE11 3TU, UK e.n.urwin@lboro.ac.uk Bob Young Loughborough University Wolfson School of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering Loughborough, Leicestershire, LE11 3TU, UK r.i.young@lboro.ac.uk Liam Frazer Rolls-Royce PLC Derby, Derbyshire, DE24 8BJ, UK David hunt Rolls-Royce PLC Derby, Derbyshire, DE24 8BJ, UK KEYWORDS Part Family, Knowledge Modelling, Knowledge Reuse. ABSTRACT Successfully fulfilling customers’ needs with world class products whilst remaining competitive and profitable are a major driver for the aerospace industry. The 21 st Century is placing ever increasing pressure upon manufacturers to deliver high complexity, technologically enabled products to instantaneously fulfill a desired purpose at the point of use. To meet such stringent criteria, companies must find ways to continuously improve, reduce waste and accelerate the product development process whilst innovating. This paper presents a multiple case study approach of turbine blade manufacturing part families which has been used to further develop a manufacturing knowledge reuse method that is being developed in partnership with a high tech aerospace company for application within a PLM environment. This method is currently being explored within the company so as to accelerate the design-make process to enable earlier availability of, and easier access to, manufacturing knowledge, thus bringing about better product performance. The contents of the paper presents a methodical approach to the study of a number of products in an effort to ascertain how the complex interrelationships between design knowledge and manufacturing knowledge change across part families and, consequently, how they affect a developed feature knowledge relationship structure (FKRS) that maps design, manufacture and inspection viewpoints of product knowledge. Utilizing the FKRS, a pragmatic way has been developed in which people- to-people knowledge can be captured and shared to facilitate a reduction in the associated lead-time for information and knowledge retrieval and reuse. For this to be more widely applicable to different types of turbine blade it is necessary to widen the scope of the research. Four case studies are presented showing the aspects that constitute a part family and how knowledge varies across the products being studied. The FKRS is applied to the captured manufacturing knowledge in an effort to prove that it can represent and model multi-context knowledge across part families. The results have shown that the approach provides a basis for the representation of complex relationship viewpoints for product features and is valid for a number of manufacturing part families. INTRODUCTION Fulfilling customer needs is a key goal in business. Efficient, effective and reliable products are the cornerstone of success and growth. Customers and end users are becoming increasingly demanding in their quest for value for money, be that from a service or a product [1]. Moreover the financial climate is placing serious constraints upon the outlook for high technology aerospace companies. Suppliers and manufacturers are having to meet ever more stringent regulatory, environmental and performance requirements whilst being placed under greater market pressures [2,3]. Companies therefore continue to innovate and evolve business processes, modus operandi and products in an effort to remain competitive and profitable. An approach from which leverage can be gained is the capture and reuse of manufacturing knowledge to feedback into the design function. This can aid the acceleration of the design- make process and allow design engineers to produce designs that better fit a company’s current manufacturing capabilities and thus aim to develop more robust product designs. The objectives being reduce product variation during the manufacturing process, reduce waste, reduce development time and provide designers with manufacturing information and knowledge at an earlier stage within product development process, enabling engineers to make more informed decisions. Improving knowledge reuse in design and manufacturing activities is an area that has received some attention but remains a very difficult aspect to address [4]. This is due to a number of factors; the overall scope of knowledge management