How our Clients Benefit from USE* Design for Service

USE* exists to deliver savings that far exceed the costs of our services. Because of this, transparency that shows how we work and its benefits is a key aspect of our working philosophy.

Nick Cook, USE* Technical and Operations Director

Digital serviceability support from USE* Automotive promotes and enculturates a design for serviceability mindset into product development activities. Serviceability and warranty impact are assessed on vehicle designs from concept through to engineering completion using CAD data, and the reliance on physical prototypes to support collaborative engineering is eliminated. USE* classify these services as SERP (Service Evaluation and Repair Process), reflecting both the competent expertise that we provide to support this function and our out of the box process toolset that we can deploy and adapt to any of our customers’ product development PLM systems.

We believe that the results from our efforts speak for themselves in terms of the value and professionalism that we deliver.

The Challenge

From the early deployment of SERP services at on of our prestigious automotive OEM clients in 2006, the engineering community recognised the need for specialist serviceability and service strategy expertise to support the design process. However, they were sceptical about the costs that requested changes frequently implied for manufacturing execution or in terms of piece cost for the parts concerned.

In addition, because SERP support was sourced as a purchased service, USE* (then UK Service Evolution) were mindful of the need to demonstrate the value for money delivered by our services.

The Solution

Securing buy-in for the methods that USE* deploy for composing a business case to support a proposed design change was the first priority. In essence, any proposed change to a vehicle’s design must be justified in terms of the overall benefit to our customer’s business. For benefits that will be delivered in the product’s aftermarket cycle (as opposed to the product development and product build lifecycles), this means establishing the potential warranty costs that a given set of design configurations may incur, and the understanding potential costs or cost benefits for Cost of Ownership implied.

In 2006 our method for estimated these costs or cost benefits focused mainly on labour times (where today our processes consider a wide array of aftermarket costs, including piece cost and retail price related costs).

Using DBA synthetic algorithms (similar to MTM, MODAPTS or MEKBY) to predict labour times for a service method derived from the 3D CAD environment, labour times for different design alternatives could be compared to extant warranty repair frequencies. The impact of planned production volumes, improved system durability, and vehicle variants were also considered in this assessment. The result was an approximated warranty cost for the design as is, and the resulting warranty cost (and saving) that the proposed design alternative would deliver. This cost could then be considered against incremental costs for other activities.

The key action here was to conduct a study working with our client to validate our method of calculating labour times based only on the digital CAD data and without reference to a physical vehicle. We identified over 700 procedures on one of our clients’ products, calculated the times digitally, and then verified the times on the physical vehicle. In this exercise the highest deviation between digital and physical times was 7%, and the average deviation was less than 1%.

Benefits

On this basis it was clear that the USE* labour times were more than credible: they were dependable. And the result from this was a series of business cases generated when needed, supporting a given design alternative on the basis of future warranty expenditure avoided.

Estimated warranty avoidance totals also served as a cost justification for the ongoing utilisation of our specialist expertise by Client management. However, in addition to this, USE* methods require that we carefully monitor our work, and that we presented transparent accounts of it to our customers and worked with them to utilise this data to their benefit.

every action was tracked in terms of the time it took our team to do it. This meant that we could identify time-consuming elements of our work and streamline these tasks by making methods improvements (most of which were delivered working in conjunction with the client’s PLM and CADPDM methods community)
understanding how much time was required for each task allowed us to quantify our work in alignment with required deliverables (which are in turn dependent upon vehicle programme development scheduling and scale). This meant USE* specialist resource levels could then be adjusted to suit the predicted workload, once again optimising resources and costs for our client.

Our team were another key aspect of winning confidence with the client’s Engineering and Service communities. USE* commitment to our personnel in terms of both support and training means that we provide a team uniquely qualified and motivated to deliver the required benefits to our clients, and our services at Client have been no exception. Our SERP expertise at USE* Automotive represents a robust blend of practical service technician experience, CAD and PLM know-how, project management skills, and a comprehensive array of flexible processes designed to be integrated directly into our customers’ PLM toolsets. The combined benefit of all this, in addition to a staggering value proposition (see below), left our customers in no doubt that working with USE* means working with a winning proposition.

Our Achievements

A survey of our work at with just one of our clients in 2008 provides insight with respect to our achievements.

Based on the client site, from January to December 2008, our team of SERP engineers attended over 130 package meetings and over 100 digital serviceability meetings to represent service concerns and monitor developing vehicle designs.

During this time our team also delivered 981 serviceability studies, 101 assessments to consider the application of existing service tools to new vehicle designs, and over 1,500 service related package checks and feasibility assessments in total.

In terms of avoided warranty costs, considering only design alternatives pursued on a formal basis (whose predicted warranty cost benefits were therefore tracked), our team recorded US$19 millions’-worth of projected warranty avoidance from issues closed in this period, and another US$4 millions’-worth of projected warranty avoidance from issues raised in 2008 and still work in progress in December of that year. This US$23 million total represented a very significant return in comparison with the costs of our services in this period.

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