An advanced engineering program requires the efforts of many professionals. Although no single contribution is ever responsible for a program's success, a project cannot hope to be successful unless it is managed well, unless all the personnel and resources involved are coordinated and directed toward a common goal.

In any organization, having people play their roles and take defined responsibilities plays a critical part in ensuring success. For example, it is very important that a functional manager take responsibility for running the organization and controlling the utilization of the resources.

This chapter focuses on the processes of program management. Reflecting on the program management workplan template, these pages discuss the major responsibilities that the program and functional directors have throughout the program. Also included is information on the interrelationship of roles.

The objective of this chapter is to outline the approach to managing a project. We stress that planning and control is an important component of any program management technique, but we will also look at specific leadership issues facing the program and functional directors, the importance of creating executive commitment to your program, and the interrelationships of key roles.

WHAT IS PROGRAM/PROJECT MANAGEMENT?

The complexity of program/project management makes it difficult to describe in a few words. Basically, however, it can be defined as planning, organizing, directing, and controlling resources to meet a specific business goal.

One of the most challenging aspects of an advanced product engineering program, especially from the program manager's perspective, is managing change. Although most changes are ultimately for the good of the program, some may seem frivolous, while othersmaycause delays that raise questions as to just howmuch they actually benefit the program.

A clear plan for managing change on any program will make managing it significantly easier. This chapter suggests an approach to engineering change management, in addition to providing insight into the concept of change as it pertains to integrated product development. One of the hottest topics in engineering management is product data management or PDM. PDM is a software application used to help manage the engineering process and related data. We will cover the key concepts of PDM and the relationship to process management in this chapter.

WHAT IS ENGINEERING CHANGE?

Engineering change is the addition to, deletion from, or modification of a product during its design, development, or manufacture. It is a normal occurrence during the progress of a program, most often caused by an evolving business environment or an advance in product technology. Regardless of the reason behind it, a change can have a serious impact on a program's scope, cost, or schedule.

Changes are not synonymous with problems. A change is an alteration to the specification or design of a product, whereas a problem is a variance between the expected result and the observed result.

Answer each question to the best of your knowledge. You have the option to answer “Not Applicable” to any of the questions, but do so only if the question does not apply to your program, not because you cannot answer it. If you do not have sufficient information, you may overlook a significant risk and run into unpleasant surprises later in the product development effort. Some questions, of course, cannot be answered at the beginning of the program, for example, questions about the use of new CAE technology such as computational fluid dynamics software. In such cases, reassess the risk when the facts are known.

A.1 PURPOSE OF THE EVALUATION TOOL

This section contains an IPD Maturity Self-Evaluation Tool for assessing the status of integrated product development best practices on a program, as well as the overall maturity in IPD within a business. The results an be used to provide feedback to program managers, integration team members, integrated product team members, functional managers, and other site IPD stakeholders for process improvement activities. The survey can also help to identify new best practices in IPD by sharing lessons learned.

A.2 SCOPE OF THE EVALUATION TOOL

The evaluation tool/survey appears in Table A-1. It is structured in the form of statements of reality rather than questions of perception. It is also important to note that duplication between the sources has been eliminated, resulting in a single set of statements. Therefore, to receive an accurate assessment, a response to all the statements, regardless of their origin, is necessary. Additionally, at the end of the statements the assessor is given the opportunity to express subjective opinions, comments, and suggestions about the implementation and effectiveness of IPD in an essay-type format.

The user may choose to use this tool as a checklist to determine what IPD techniques are or need to be implemented; as a survey, responding to the statements in a “yes/no” fashion; or as a maturity indicator, where a specific response to each statement contributes to an overall measure of maturity.

In an engineering product development program, risk is the likelihood that the new product will not meet the customer's needs, be completed on time, or be completed within budget. This chapter focuses on these risks. It presents an overview of the risk assessment procedure and discusses the risk assessment questionnaire. Then it takes a detailed look at some risk factors common to engineering development programs and offers some strategies for managing them. The risk assessment questionnaire, summary sheet, and risk management strategy tables can be found in Appendix E.

PERFORMING A RISK ASSESSMENT

Advanced product development engineering programs are among the most complex activities conducted by mankind. They often involve millions of dollars of investment and thousands of hours of work by highly educated people. Risk is therefore high. Shareholders are willing to accept the risks involved in such an effort providing the potential returns are high. Yet even under the guidance of an experienced director, a program may fail because of inherent risks. By actively assessing a program's risks, however, you can reduce the likelihood of failure.

Risk assessment is a systematic method of identifying a program's risks and then determining appropriate strategies for managing them. It is also a mechanism for communicating the program risks to the customer/partner and to corporate executives. It sets the stage forworking with the customer/partner to reach agreement on risks that are acceptable and in line with the organization's tolerance.

As the frontiers of technology advance and the work of engineers takes on an increasingly important role in our economy, companies with effective product development and engineering processes will be poised to create value for their shareholders. Those without the will to improve engineering and product development processes will be destined to lag behind.

Our university engineering programs focus on graduating technically sound engineers. Students study the disciplines of structural design or fluid mechanics. However, in both North America and Europe, little attention is paid to teaching the practice of engineering management. Engineering programs typically contain a fourth-year course on engineering economics, where students are taught the mechanics of discounted cash flows and budgets. The courses do not deal with the challenges of managing complex engineering-driven companies. With this gap in the training of engineers, it should come as no surprise when a graduate engineer practices engineering for two or three years and then leaves the profession to take an MBA. Many of these bright young engineers cut all ties to engineering. However, MBA programs are not designed to create engineering managers. The best of them teach the integration of management disciplines to teach general management; however, the worst provide the engineer with little more than a few specialized tools to apply in the area of marketing or finance. Generally speaking, the practice of engineering management is not taught in our universities.

Theoretically, steady-state flow is fully established in a given domain Ω when, for any spacial point in Ω, all the mechanical and physical variables that are necessary to describe the problem are independent of time t. Of course, the position of a material point is not constant, but follows a fixed trajectory as shown in Fig. 9.1.

From the practical point of view, the steady-state idealization is always an approximation, as a true stationary flow would require an infinite time to be established. However, in industrial processes such as rolling, extrusion, drawing, and so on, the steady-state assumption is a rather accurate approximation as soon as the length of the deforming zone is less than half of the rigid parts lying before or after this zone. At this stage the end effects, that is, the discrepancies from the stationary shape that occur at the beginning and at the end of the process, have a vanishingly small influence on the flow. In the sheet-rolling process, the length of the deformed zone is of the order of a few centimeters, and the length of the rolled sheet is several hundred meters. Conversely, during the extrusion process, the length of the billet is only of the order of ten times the diameter so that the steady-state part of the process is more approximate, and represents a smaller percentage of the whole process.

The finite-element method is a powerful tool to stimulate the creativity of engineers, scientists, and applied mathematicians. Therefore it is not surprising that many elements have been presented in the literature and are available for a range of applications.

A finite element is defined not only by a geometric subdomain, or even the explicit mathematical expression of the shape functions. A finite element also includes the specification of whether it is an isoparametric element (as we shall essentially consider here) and the definition of the space integration formulas. In a broader sense we can also consider that the space discretization procedure for each variable, the time integration procedure when required, and the mathematical formulation of the physical problem also contribute to the FE definition.

Evaluation of the behavior of an element type will depend on the kind of problem that is considered, the required accuracy, and the time and effort allocated toward code development. In the realm of metal forming, the subject of this book, the choice of element formulation depends primarily on the following considerations.

1. Mode of deformation: the chosen element must approximate real material stiffness in all modes of deformation important to the physical problem being simulated. An element can be too stiff in some modes, producing “locking” for example, particularly when incompressibility constraints are considered; or it can be too compliant, producing “hourglass” and other spurious low-energy deformation modes.

This book assumes a background in the fundamentals of solid mechanics and the mechanical behavior of materials, including elasticity, plasticity, and friction. A previous book by the same authors covers these topics in detail, including derivation or explanation of the most important concepts. It is beyond the scope of the current book to reproduce all of this important information.

In this chapter, the essential equations from this background are reproduced. This serves two purposes: to introduce the notation that will be used throughout the remaining chapters, and to list the principal background equations in one place. Frequent reference to the equations presented in this chapter will be made. However, it should be kept in mind that the full context for these equations is found in Fundamentals of Metal Forming.

Notation

There are many alternate forms of notation used in solid mechanics and finite-element modeling. In some cases, it is clearer to use a form that has become a de facto standard in the area, even though such usage might not be rigorous. In other cases, there is no consensus on notation, so it is less confusing to be consistent with other equations.

The finite-element formulation of a given physical problem depends primarily on the nature of the problem and, to some extent, on several numerical choices the scientist decides to make. In this chapter we shall review five different topics, linked to plastic forming, which have a prominent influence on the way the problem will be solved.

First, the explicit and implicit formulations originally corresponded to different problems, distinguished by the deformation rate level, but they are now used for a much larger range of processes.

Second, historically the first attempts to model metal-forming processes by the finite-element method were based on the flow formulation, or the rigid-plastic material model, in which elastic deformation is neglected. Despite an additional cost and a more complex treatment, the elastoplastic approach is more and more often applied to forming problems in engineering.

Third, the Eulerian formulation, when applicable, is very efficient to treat steady-state processes, whereas the updated Lagrangian formulation is the most popular method for the other cases involving large strain.

Fourth, the displacement or velocity approaches were mostly used in the past for practical applications, as they are more economical. However, mixed methods provide an additional flexibility for the finite-element problem formulations, which can result in more satisfactory solutions, both from the mathematical and from the numerical point of view.

Fifth, the problem of time integration of constitutive equations has received considerable attention during the past 20 years, and some progress is still necessary to achieve complete accuracy for any real process.

Metal Forming Analysis has two purposes: (a) to acquaint the advanced graduate student with numerical principles and procedures used in the modern analysis of industrial forming operations, and (b) to provide reference material for those performing such an analysis in industrial settings, government laboratories, and academia. In both cases, an understanding of the most important methods and their respective characteristics is the goal.

The first seven chapters focus on principles and procedures, which are derived and presented in an intuitive, informal manner. Exercises appear throughout these chapters, proposing and then solving illuminating problems related to the subject. Extensive problems are provided in three categories at the end of each chapter: proficiency, depth, and numerical, to solidify the information presented.

The last five chapters focus on applications of the numerical analysis to specific forming operations in order to illustrate the lessons learned from these simulations. Most of these results are drawn from the authors' research in this area, using programs developed over many years at their laboratories. Exercises are presented where appropriate and practical, and a limited number of problems are provided at the end of some chapters.

It should be noted that this advanced text and reference volume does not provide a detailed treatment of the underlying physical equations or principles necessary to understand metal deformation itself. This material is limited to Chapter 1, which is a very brief review of the physical descriptions and equations.

There are many books devoted to a general introduction to the finite-element method. It is impossible to list all of them here, but those referenced in the footnotes appear in increasing order of difficulty. Interested readers could select one or two for study, depending on their backgrounds. In this chapter a very simple introduction is given, mainly in view of applications to the numerical modeling of metal-forming processes.

A first introduction is given in Section 2.1, with a comparison with another popular numerical method: the finite-difference method. The selected thermal problem allows a complete “hand calculation” by the two methods, and a comparison of the results with an analytical solution. The aim of this first overview is to summarize very briefly the main aspects (and vocabulary) of the method. It shows that a quasi-intuitive approach is conceivable and could help to demythologize the finite-element method.

A more systematic approach follows in Sections 2.2 to 2.5, in order to separate as clearly as possible the steps that lead to the rational development of the method. In most occasions the basic concepts are first explained in detail by using one-dimensional examples, and the generalization is only mentioned, as more detail will be given in Chapters 3 and 4 for two- and three-dimensional approaches.

The basic idea is to follow four steps:

1. Establish the physical equations of the model (see Chapter 1, or an earlier work on this subject).