PMI: a PLM Approach for the Management of Geometrical and Dimensional Controls in Modern Industries

Design and verification represent the beginning and the end of product manufacturing: they respectively define the product characteristics and confirm their actual compliance. Design and verification communicate by means of tolerance callouts applied to product geometry. These have been traditionally transmitted through technical drawings. Their reading and interpretation is the starting point for manufacturing and metrology. However, this practice leads to poor communication, non-valueadded operations with a high risk of errors and information loss, as well as poor correlation between design, manufacturing and verification phases. Product Manufacturing Information (PMI) solves these problems by facilitating a comprehensive 3D annotation environment that allows the association of component’s geometrical tolerance directly to the 3D model. In this paper, the use of PMI is investigated and analyzed through a case study that highlights the main advantages, user’s efforts, and improvement margins.