DS PLM SUCCESS STORY - Panasonic Home Appliances

• Functional Applications - Product Lifecycle Management Systems (PLM)
• Functional Applications - Product Data Management Systems

• Electronics
• Consumer Goods

• Product Research & Development
• Discrete Manufacturing

• Manufacturing System Automation

• Software Design & Engineering Services
• System Integration

Panasonic Home Appliances, a specialist in household appliances, faced a challenge of reducing product development lead time dramatically. The company needed to transition from 2D drawings to 3D design to meet the increasing demand for induction heated (IH) ranges and other IH-at-able cooking appliances. The spike in demand for IH ranges beginning around 2000 and new competitors quickly hitting the market, Panasonic knew it needed to adopt Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) technology quickly. With its customers demanding greater product variation, Panasonic understood that to remain competitive it must demonstrate consistent improvement in the functionality and quality of its products. Panasonic also knew that it must reduce costs and shorten development lead-time.

Panasonic Home Appliances is a business unit of Panasonic that specializes in household appliances, including refrigerators, washing machines, and rice cookers. The Kitchen Appliance Business Unit (BU) manufactures and sells induction heated (IH) ranges and other IH-at-able cooking appliances. IH electrically-powered ranges have increased in popularity due to their clean and eco-friendly nature. With a spike in demand for IH ranges beginning around 2000 and new competitors quickly hitting the market, Panasonic knew it needed to adopt Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) technology quickly. With its customers demanding greater product variation, Panasonic understood that to remain competitive it must demonstrate consistent improvement in the functionality and quality of its products.

Panasonic chose CATIA from Dassault Systèmes to create a collaborative environment among its design, manufacturing, and partner companies to promote concurrent engineering. The design team adopted 3D tools in 2000 to increase design quality and to reduce lead times through more effective collaboration on design data among internal departments, such as design, mechanical design, circuit design, and prototyping. By exchanging CATIA data between Panasonic’s design and mechanical design departments, time loss on data conversion was eliminated, hands-off effort was greatly reduced, and the reliability of the design data was increased. Concurrent design approaches are improving design quality and reducing reworks. 3D design data generated with CATIA also is being transmitted to Panasonic’s molding machines to which manufacture prototypes. This has enabled Panasonic to halve manufacturing lead time when compared to conventional NC tool machining, to eliminate manual re-works, and to improve prototype accuracy and reliability.

• By realizing concurrent engineering with CATIA, Panasonic has strengthened product variations, increased competitiveness and protected its over 50% market share.
• Engineering and assembly departments are now able to view data, in 3D, during the design process, to provide feedback on manufacturing and die requirements and to evaluate ease of assembly.
• Panasonic also uses CATIA Analysis for early design verification of factors such as product strength. By correlating simulation results with test results from actual product equipment, stress threshold values can be set and brought into line with design specifications.

• For resin components, lead times were reduced by 90% by implementing 3D design and introducing a molding machine.
• For sheet metal components, time spent creating exploded drawings was eliminated with the implementation of CATIA Sheet Metal.
• Die creation time has also been reduced by 40% by using 3D data and stress testing results can now be confirmed at the time of die creation.