The product verification centre at Shady Grove, launched in the spring of 2012, announces its presence subtly: a two-storey building, it sits quietly on the edge of the testing ground of Manitowoc’s vast mobile-crane-focussed manufacturing facility. However, it holds a unique set of testing equipment, and, the company believes, represents a step change in the way crane companies test their products.
Verification and validation
Director of global quality Jim MacIntyre lead the project to develop the product verification centre. MacIntyre joined Manitowoc ten years ago, with a background in agricultural and construction equipment manufacturing.
The centre encapsulates a different vision to the normal test centre. MacIntyre explains: "There’s a big difference between verification and validation. Validation means you do everything at the end, to make sure the product meets your requirements. With verification, you make sure that you know how to build a product right, and in validation, you’re just making sure you built it right. If you can verify a product you can typically get it built faster and better, and know what you’re doing. When you start thinking about doing things right, it gives you the ability to react with speed, it gives you agility in the marketplace, it also gives you the key tools you need in order to make changes to your product and the opportunity to make your product better.
"Testing with customer partners is a validation technique. It’s part of how you test the voice of the customer. It’s certainly a good tool, it’s part of our marketing and how we drive our changes. We also like to take that information we’ve learned, a few ideas, a few concepts, and have a chance to evaluate them right away. That’s never very easy to do if you have to build a product. But if you can look at components or subsystems, it gives you the opportunity to evaluate quicker."
Verification in action
Being able to perform verification testing relies on a complex toolkit of testing devices, and a specialised team of engineers. Many of these test engineers aren’t from a crane design background: walking around the centre feels qualitatively different, more like a university engineering lab than a typical crane testing centre.
Product verification centre director Alan Calta says, "Our mission is to verify the designs earlier in the product development cycle. Historically we had to wait until the prototype crane shows up, after it is completely built, before we start testing it. We can verify designs early in the cycle, not wait for the prototype to show up.
"The outcome is earlier delivery, because we can do all that testing up front. In a new product development cycle, the testing part is a big chunk of that time.
"There’s a reduction in that time. Warranty costs will go down and quality will go up. We’ll learn more about, and be able to work more closely with, our suppliers; we learn more about their capabilities, and we will be able to develop some standards on these components and subsystems."
The product verification centre tests components and subsystems from both Manitowoc’s internal suppliers and third parties. Key to being able to do this is developing verification standards.
Calta says, "We have three engineers dedicated just to developing these verification standards. A verification standard is not a design standard, it does not tell a supplier how to design something,
it tells them how that component or subsystem should perform: this pump shall deliver so many gallons per minute under these environmental conditions, at these temperatures, things like that.
"There’s some room for interpretation, like many standards. Our purchasing people will hand the product supplier this product verification standard (PVS). They’ll read it, and say one of three things: yes we meet it; no we don’t; or, we don’t know. What we’re going to do is work with them to help them understand their components, and if they don’t meet it, maybe with some of our facility’s equipment here, we can collaborate with them, help them to get the part qualified."
Testing against product verification standards relies on a a range of highly specialised equipment. The centre is constructed like a hybrid of an air traffic control tower, an engineering department laboratory, and a vehicle test bay.
At the front of the building, on the second floor, engineers supervising outside tests of prototype cranes look out over the proving ground. Each test pad has its own shed, holding tools for the engineers outside, and monitoring equipment sending data back to the control room.
Downstairs, a series of rooms are dedicated to specialised testing of components: when Cranes Today visited, a team of engineers were performing cyclical testing on an electronic pivot, used to carry signal cables and power up through a crane’s slewing ring.
Behind this series of rooms, is the main testing bay. One of the biggest systems is the structural test grid, used to test large components. Calta says, "The test grid goes six feet into the ground. Underneath are a series of structural steel I-beams and rebar. We can attach components to the test grid, and then using a power system, software interface, and vary sophisticated actuators and simulators, for example, take the outriggers and carrier as one component, turn it upside down, mount it on the floor, and use these actuators to push down on the outriggers to simulate what it is seeing in the field. And you can do that thousands of times, hence what may take you months to do the old fashioned way, you can do in weeks."
Across the room is a smaller, but central piece of equipment. The HALT, or high accelerated life-cycle testing, chamber allows Manitowoc to simulate years of work. Calta says, "It can go from -100°C-+200°C, in four minutes. You take electrical or electronic components, and the manufacturer or supplier tells you what their life rating is: ’10 years under these conditions’ or, with a switch, ‘good for 500,000 under certain conditions’.
"We put these components in there, and using this change of temperature, as well as a shaker table, which can develop up to 100Gs of force, you can simulate ten years in the field in two or three weeks. We’ll create a verification standard based on that. You can put anything in there, as simple as the headlight switch, or windshield wiper motor, or something as sophisticated as entire circuit board."
Delivery without defects
The benefit of having this equipment, along with the humidity chambers, corrosion testing, hydaulic test benches and other testing equipment at the site, is faster delivery, and less costs for Manitowoc and its customers.
Hedging carefully, MacIntyre lays out these benefits: "You’re probably looking at defect rates that are less than half what was out there before. It affects the delivery of parts, it affects production schedules, it affects when you can launch new products. You can take the steps we have as an organisation, to get to the the next level.
"You can do all the validation testing you want, but typically, you’re fixing defects. That’s great, you’re catching those defects, but how do you really get rid of them? That’s where you have to get into a verification process. A verification process attacks where those defects occur."
The end result is new cranes, faster, meeting changing market demands, with less defects, leading to a true crane launch success.
