The applications of the Power-D Engineering series are the result of ongoing research aimed at providing machine and system manufacturers with suitable instruments for dealing with a market situation where customers are increasingly more discerning when it comes to:

• quality: means being able to offer a product that is qualitatively and economically competitive with a before and after-sales service.
  Technological innovation is only possible in high-quality conditions.
• variety: means being able to offer all the products requested by customers in order to discourage the competition from making imitations.
• rapidity: this means fast design and development and being quick to introduce new products on the market with focus placed above all on reducing development times.
  
  The current plant engineering competitive context requires increasingly more precise answers and faster paces; plants must be conceived, built and released to customers in half the time it once took.

The goal to be pursued is a change in method of approach to orders and projects (a slim and fast approach with times cut in half) so as to be more reactive and careful, at the same time, to the single details of the supply, to the technical standards and to the quality standards.

The solution we propose stems from the need on the part of companies to manage the "corporate memory" considered as both product information and information on the experience.
In this context, we must take into consideration the possibility of recycling and replicating the product information and the information on the experience during the company’s natural evolution process.

Our intervention guidelines are the following:

• to reduce the Project Development time:
  to be more competitive, a strategy must be adopted that makes it possible to reduce the development times and costs of each single project.
   1) adoption of "Concurrent Enginnering" methods (parallelizing activities and decisions).
  2) tendency to multidisciplinarity and problem solving.
  3) cost and time cutting due to unexpected changes.
  
• recycling and re-using corporate Knowledge and Experience:
  implementing the management of "knowledge" and "expertise" for better communication and understanding between people.
  1) creating a corporate innovation capacity.
  2) methodology for generating ideas (creating a slim and reactive organisation that privileges intelligence and idea creativity).
• personalizing the Plants and Machines and making them more flexible:
  the plants must be able to produce according to the specific market demands of the moment, with greater flexibility, precision, reproducibility and speed of adaptation.
  1) ability to adapt to utmost personalisation of the individual products.
  2) ability to make exclusive and specific products for individual customers.
  3) ability to reduce stocks and make quick delivery.
  
• performance of a faster and more precise BEFORE and AFTER-sales service:
  adoption of a customer-service mental attitude for the entire life cycle of the asset, from conception to replacement,
  1) involving the customer and fostering its participation.
  2) readiness to present novel solutions.
  3) quick claim answering, integration with other services, respect of agreements,
      willingness to make changes and formulation of personalised solutions.

Possible customer objectives and results:

• More detailed and precise sales offers which, due to planned project recycling and experiences, will be executed in less time.
• Being certain of beginning the executive project only after defining and specifying all the elements associated with the entire life cycle of the product and only after customer approval.
• Speeding up the document OUTPUT phase (EC supply manual) with production of accompanying documents including in the presence of assets strongly tailored to the customer.
• Possibility of ordering materials and component parts in a precise way even before detailed planning.
• Possibility of issuing specific detailed documentation for installation, startup, testing and running by operators.
• Greater productivity due to the greater reliability of the data and a reduction of misunderstanding problems among the operators taking part in the single project.
• Reduction in project development times due to the planning procedure implemented in parallel between the specific fields of competence.
• Easy re-use in new projects oof complete information relating to already-completed projects, without losing experience and quality.
• Ongoing interaction with partners and sub-contractors to realise the structure and the characteristics of the asset to be produced.
• Chronological and orderly management of events triggered by project development and the interaction between all the entities involved in planning, to promptly notify any additional modifications and/or nonconformities found so as to put into place the necessary remedies while work is in progress.
• Possibility of turning the experience and knowledge acquired into re-usable models.
• Possibility of issuing the customer, after product testing, with an instrument for the management of all maintenance and upgrading jobs to be performed during the life cycle of the asset. The manufacturer will thus be regularly updated as regards the weak points of the installed products and on the possible innovations to be made, thus in fact producing innovation before the competition.
• Possibility of extending the range of services offered, until a "Global Service" is achieved, as a consequence of the control of the product life cycle.
• Preservation and upgrading of corporate culture thanks to interactive sharing processes and to total corporate autonomy as regards the knowledge of data normally possessed by individual operators.