When managers, engineers, and materials experts from leading international manufacturing organizations meet at the Materials Strategy Forum in Detroit this month, they will be pondering what clothes washers have in common with aerospace engines, why heating and cooling units are like medical devices, and the similarity between automobiles and power tools.

The answer is actually simple. Like all other manufactured goods and appliances, these products are made from materials. And the engineering, economic, and environmental behavior of those materials has a profound impact on product performance and on the profitability, customer satisfaction, and liability exposure of the manufacturer. The Detroit meeting is the third in a series discussing strategies to maximize return and minimize risk in the use of materials — particularly where, as in the examples above, a product employs many different grades and types of material.

The Materials Strategy Forum is a collaborative project coordinated by Granta Design, a materials software company founded by two Cambridge University professors in the mid-1990s. Forum attendees are dealing with a wide range of business drivers and externalities.

Volatile costs are one example, as demonstrated by the recent surge in the price of nickel, which affects the cost of stainless steel. The global “design anywhere, make anywhere” manufacturing concept is another example. How does one guarantee that a material sourced in one company matches a specification defined elsewhere?

In addition, an emerging wave of environmental, health, and safety regulations further complicates materials choices. Granta’s Arthur Fairfull, director of the Materials Strategy Forum, explains what links such problems for Forum members: “A common thread that unites diverse industries and applications is information about materials, and its role in the definition and implementation of materials strategies.”

Cost concerns

The most obvious illustration of the importance of materials information is in addressing issues of cost. Manufacturing organizations are already acutely aware that materials and their processing constitute a large portion of their budgets. They have probably spent a lot of time choosing the materials that they use to maximize margins. But this year’s best choice may fall victim to next year’s unforeseen circumstance.

For example, this year, the unforeseen circumstance was a three-fold rise in nickel prices, adding a hefty premium to the price of some everyday raw materials. The two most common stainless steels, grades 304 and 316, contain 8 percent and 12 percent nickel respectively. There are two ways to sidestep this problem. Reduce cost by substituting with a cheaper alternative. They can exist and, following the appropriate research, substitution is often achievable. Or, as a more sustainable long-term strategy, avoid cost by systematic design of next generation products around the most cost-effective alternatives. Although companies strive for this, it is an opportunity too often missed or delayed in favor of more pressing matters.

Cost avoidance and cost reduction in today’s fast-moving markets require manufacturers to be nimble. The right information on materials properties and processing, and the right analysis tools, are essential. But expert tools that help specialists to make the right choices can’t solve the problem alone. To really minimize cost, expert insights must be implemented consistently by engineers and designers across the enterprise.

Such a strategic cost program has been the focus of Granta’s work with a major component and appliance manufacturer. The project provides tools to analyze key materials selection challenges in the business, identifying a set of “preferred materials.” It also helps to define company-specific rules for materials selection in particular product applications.

A simple web browser-based interface then enables any engineer in the company to apply these rules — first by reference to the company’s preferred materials and then, if necessary, to a wider set. The result is consistent implementation of design decisions that are optimized to the company’s goals and, by reducing the number of materials used, economies in purchasing. And, when an event such as the nickel price spike strikes, it is much easier to roll out a modified strategy across the business.

Innovative approaches
The approach has required two technological innovations. Fairfull explains: “The first is in how we treat cost. Choosing materials on cost-per-pound, or cost-per-kilogram rarely makes sense in design. If it did, everything would be made of concrete. Instead, the designer needs to compare on the basis of cost-per-unit of function, where the function is determined by a combination of properties such as stiffness, strength, fatigue resistance, or thermal insulation. Building on research from Cambridge University, we’ve developed software tools that make it easy to perform such analysis.”

The second innovation is the development of a means to deploy across the company the ability to make decisions based on such specialist calculations. Granta’s Enterprise Materials Optimizer is a web browser-based tool that, drawing on a central database of corporate materials information, leads designers and engineers through a simple process to answer questions such as “what is the lowest cost preferred material that meets the design requirements?”

Data sources
Of course, accurate and current data is a pre-requisite for such a strategic approach to decision-making. Materials data can come from external references or from internal sources, such as testing, purchasing, or quality assurance. With external references, the challenge is in pulling together diverse information. Missing data can invalidate analyses, since one missing number may lead to a valid candidate material being ignored.

“One solution is to use generic materials databases, where models are applied to estimate missing data,” says Fairfull. “Granta’s MaterialUniverse data module, for example, contains engineering property data and pricing information for most available engineering materials. It includes a price model that takes readily available commodity prices, estimates prices where they are not known, and aims to capture the right pricing trends between materials. We find that such models, if regularly updated, are sufficient to support many real business decisions, or at least to enable initial screening prior to more detailed analysis. We can typically provide a company a database covering 80 percent of its generic materials off-the-shelf. That leaves 20 percent to be compiled using company-specific expertise.”

Getting company-specific, and making sure to leverage a company’s proprietary materials knowledge, demands good use of data from internal sources. Here the challenge can be stated with deceptive simplicity — get all materials data under control in a single system and make it easy to access and use. But the reality for most manufacturing organizations is that this data is scattered far and wide in incompatible, even concealed, databases, spreadsheets, and hard-copy filing systems. And it is often specialist engineering data that generic information systems, designed to support the supply chain or design process, cannot handle.

For such situations, help is at hand, due to an initiative in the aerospace industry. Driven by particularly stringent needs for data accuracy and pedigree, a Consortium of companies including NASA, Rolls-Royce, Honeywell, and GE – Aviation, has defined a best-practice approach to materials data management and, crucially, guided development of software to enable this approach. This system, GRANTA MI, is applicable in any engineering sector and can be used to underpin materials strategy software solutions.

Beyond cost
By combining materials reference information, materials data management, and tools to define and implement materials strategies, a broad range of important applications can be tackled. Tools that allow a design engineer to analyze cost-per-unit of function can be easily adapted, given the right data, to notions of cost beyond the dollar price. Substituting the price of a material in dollars with some measure of its environmental cost — the energy required to produce it, or the carbon footprint of a ton of material — creates a powerful eco-design tool. Granta has developed a database of such eco-properties.

Another major eco-challenge for business is responding to the growing list of environmental regulations, alongside similar regulations relating to health and safety. Manufacturers that operate in Europe and the U.S. are coming to grips with the bewildering array of acronyms, such as RoHS, WEEE, EuP, and REACH, that summarize this legislation. In all of these cases, a first requirement is to know what materials are in one’s products, and what their properties are. Manufacturers will then need to match this information to data on restricted materials or properties, and have a systematic strategy to substitute materials as a result. Again, integrated materials data management and analysis tools help.

The other great trend driving today’s economy is globalization. Imagine a situation where one switches to a new component supplier in China. The supplier naturally uses local steel. The composition of the steel is almost, but not quite, identical to that used by the previous supplier. Its tensile strength is within specification, but it goes unnoticed that its fatigue behavior is subtly different, and the component fails before its design life. This is a classic materials information case study. Specialized, subtle, materials data was either not available where it was needed, or the original specification was not fully captured. Different standards and units in different countries exacerbate such problems. Such challenges demand a systematic, strategic approach to materials information and the information technology to support it.

Practical solutions
These are the topics under discussion at the Forum in Detroit this month. But what’s more important is to convert talk into action. Materials Strategy Forum members such as Emerson Electric, Moen, DePuy, and Ethicon Endo-Surgery are among companies providing advice on the further development of this new generation of software tools. Unless cost, environmental issues, and globalization suddenly lose their status as burning issues for manufacturers, the use of materials strategy software looks set to grow.