By Hallie Forcinio
Managing Automation
October, 2005

Business is booming at OpVista Inc. (Irvine, CA), a manufacturer of optical data transport systems. Although most welcome, the rising sales put extreme pressure on some systems and personnel at the venture-capital-funded company founded in 2000. Specifically, until about a year ago, OpVista was finding itself increasingly beset by a large number of engineering change notifications. Fortunately, a PLM deployment has helped the company automate what had been a largely manual and increasingly time-consuming set of processes, helping OpVista cut product development times, reduce engineering change cycle times and respond more quickly to customer orders.

Variations Mean Complexity
An emerging leader in the optical networking industry, OpVista's optical transport systems deliver scalable and reconfigurable wave division multiplexing to organizations in the cable and telecommunications industries. OpVista's approach provides previously unattainable levels of density and distance, as well as cost-effective reconfigurability, without the operational inefficiencies of earlier platforms.

While the highly-configurable OpVista systems are able to send huge amounts of information over long distances, they can also be challenging to manufacture. Key to the systems are complex printed circuit boards that are made in multitudes of variations to support different frequency ranges. With so many potential variations, bills of material (BOMs) used to make the systems can be long and engineering change notices (ECNs) are issued frequently and can be quite complex.

Abandoning Manual Data Transfers
Until recently, OpVista's biggest challenge was that this BOM and ECN data had to be manually transferred between the company's engineering design systems - OrCAD from Cadence Design Systems Inc. (San Jose, CA) and SolidWorks from SolidWorks Corp. (Concord, MA) - and its enterprise resource planning (ERP) system from Expandable Software Inc. (Santa Clara, CA), where all manufacturing, planning and logistics information resides. Engineering personnel wrote each ECN by hand, noted the changes, obtained approvals from members of the company's internal Change Control Board and created a final BOM, checking carefully to make sure all the changes were made and the list was correct and complete.

The manual process involved typing and cutting and pasting to transfer information from the company's design systems into its ERP. It also involved creating a complex hierarchy of folders and shared areas to provide access to the various design-related documents. Inevitably, manual data entry generated some errors. If documentation errors caused assemblies to be built with incorrect parts, costs mounted as time was spent to troubleshoot and fix the system and correct the BOM for future use. As the volume of orders grew, the manual process was so laborious and time consuming that it sometimes caused delays in filling custom orders.

"We needed a solution that would automate this process," says Marc Matejka, director of Quality at OpVista and at one time the sole person responsible for document control. To continue to do ECNs by hand would have required "a whole team of people," he explains. "Our catalog is 30 pages in infinite permutations. It was just a matter of time before we needed to implement a PLM system," he adds. "Unless their product is extremely simple and never changes, every manufacturer eventually needs this type of tool."

A product lifecycle management (PLM) suite from Omnify Software (Wilmington, MA), now in operation since October 2002, integrates OpVista's OrCAD printed circuit board and SolidWorks mechanical engineering systems with the company's ERP system and automatically updates its information. An integral Web viewer gives a contract manufacturing partner visibility into the ECN process.

Before deploying Omnify to all 60 employees at the company, Matejka considered solutions from Agile Software Corp. (San Jose, CA) and Arena Solutions Inc. (Menlo Park, CA). The Omnify PLM was selected because it allowed OpVista to keep information local rather than on a remote server, as the Arena solution did, and it could be up and running quickly. It also met budget goals with an attractive combination of a five-figure installation charge and economical renewal fees.

The only potential negative was that the Omnify PLM system didn't have an off-the-shelf interface that would work with OpVista's Expandable ERP system; however, Omnify was willing to build one. "It was important that they took ownership of the interface," explains Matejka, who notes the interface between systems often is a no man's land with vendors on either side pointing fingers at each other instead of problem solving.

Omnify's PLM suite consists of several tools: part data management, document management, BOM management, workflow management and change management. The scalable, intuitive system permits data to move between OpVista's engineering design solutions and the ERP system in both directions. Design and vendor information is pushed from the PLM system; costing, lead times and other data is collected from the ERP.

In action, the Omnify PLM connects to existing systems at OpVista in various ways: It uses the Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) standard to link to the OrCAD printed circuit board design solution, a plug-in to pull information from SolidWorks, and the newly-built ERP interface, which takes advantage of a change information reading module resident in the Expandable ERP. For the latter, "The Omnify PLM just produces the correct data set for the ERP module to handle," notes Chuck Cimalore, chief technology officer at Omnify.

The Omnify PLM system also accepts data from the ERP system so engineers can pull information about inventory, costs and lead times from the ERP and make better decisions during the design phase.

Integration Makes Things Easier
The integration between OpVista's ERP and engineering environments allows the company's mechanical engineers to import BOMs directly into Omnify from a SolidWorks design. Electrical engineers can select parts directly from Omnify to use in their OrCAD schematics, and they can easily transfer their BOMs into Omnify as well. Any changes made in Omnify automatically update the ERP system. Now all product development teams, both internal and external, have access to the same data in a single, secure location. This expedites part numbering and standardizes the library of part information, which previously resided on various desktops and sometimes caused confusion because part names were not consistent.

What started out as a small engineering tool now touches virtually everyone in the organization. OpVista's hardware group uses the PLM system for printed circuit board design; manufacturing uses it to build product; engineering uses it to manage designs and design changes; planning relies on information it provides to the manufacturing resource planning module of the ERP system; the production floor and contract manufacturer use the Web viewer to pull up drawings, specs and BOMs; and executives use it to approve changes.

The licensed product offers a floating, or concurrent, license optionwhereby anyone with authorization can logon if there's a spot available at that moment and gain access to whatever information they're permitted to see. "OpVista controls what a user can see and do inside the system," explains Cimalore. As a result, partners, customers and contract manufacturers can be linked directly into the central database, but confidential information is protected.

Although OpVista hasn't calculated the return on its Omnify investment, the PLM system, now in use for about a year, has met OpVista's original goals and generated other soft benefits. It has improved data integrity, reduced errors related to manual data entry, shortened product development time, cut ECN inefficiencies and cycle times, decreased time-to-profit due to quicker response to custom orders, reduced the amount of paper moving around the company by routing ECNs to the members of the Change Control Board via e-mail, helped provide the documentation needed for ISO certification, and made it possible to continue handling document control with one person despite a dramatic increase in product sales and related design documentation.

Positive Changes
ECNs now can be prepared with the push of a button, and reviews proceed more quickly, too, because information is arranged in a consistent format and notification is electronic. Plus, it's no longer necessary to verify changes were made correctly, as was necessary with the manual system.

Implementation of the Omnify PLM proceeded smoothly and required only a couple of months, Matejka reports. In fact, implementation would have been completed even more quickly if it hadn't been necessary to create the interface to the Expandable ERP. "It always takes time to troubleshoot a new interface," explains Matejka.

The Omnify PLM has become so pervasive in the OpVista organization that Matejka doesn't foresee any major changes in its usage. "Not having it right now would be hard to imagine," says Matejka.

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