Clarity on PLM

A quick peek into some more research on … standardizing CAD solutions, starting with a strategy to determine if you should standardize in the first place. Tech-Clarity Issue in Focus: CAD Standardization Strategies discusses considerations for operating in a multi-CAD environment versus standardizing on a single solution. My recent post Consolidating CAD – Strategic Advantages at Reduced Cost may have put the cart before the horse because it discussed the benefits of homogenizing CAD solutions across the enterprise before posing a simple question: “Should you consolidate?” Or another, critically important question: “Can you consolidate?” The paper is intended to help companies develop a “CAD Standardization Strategy” based on a thorough understanding of the business drivers, constraints, and tradeoffs impacting their decision. The previous paper can then provide more detail on the benefits of standardizing (including a financial model).

The Research Findings

The first part of the paper focuses on business drivers impacting the CAD strategy. The paper offers a list of business drivers that impact CAD decisions. These factors include impacts on:

• Direct cost
• Internal Efficiency
• Supply Chain Efficiency
• Customer Requirements
• Corporate Flexibility

 A large portion of the report is composed of a table of business drivers that can serve as a starting point for a company to evaluate the drivers to their own business. The next part of the report is about making tradeoffs. Few companies will have come up with a clear answer for standardization or for maintaining a multi-CAD environment. In fact, some companies may choose multi-CAD, as you will see from this discussion thread on Oleg’s Beyond PLM post CAD Strategies: Diversified or Unified?. The tradeoffs include:

• Savings from consolidation versus the cost of change
• Internal efficiency versus supply chain efficiency
• Internal and supply chain efficiency versus customer requirements 

There is another table that details some of these tradeoffs, although there may be additional tradeoffs for any particularly company scenario. Please see the paper for more detail and to read the recommendations.

Implications for Manufacturers

I hope this report servers as a starting point to an informed decision on CAD deployment. Every business is different in some way, so the tables may not be comprehensive for your particular company or supply chain. The most important thing to keep in mind, of course, is  to develop the CAD strategy based on the business strategy.

So that was a quick peek into some recent research on developing a CAD standardization strategy, I hope you found it interesting. Does the research reflect your experiences? Do you see it differently? Let us know what it looks like from your perspective. Please feel free to review more free research and white papers about PLM and other enterprise software for manufacturers from Tech-Clarity.

A quick peek into some research on … the benefits and savings available from consolidating onto a common CAD package in your business. Tech-Clarity Insight: Consolidating CAD – Benefits of a Unified CAD Strategy explores the strategic and operational benefits of leveraging a single package. As the research concludes, “… not all businesses have the opportunity to unify their CAD solutions … but there are multiple advantages for those that can.”

The Research Findings

The paper addresses benefits including enabling strategic initiatives and simple cost reduction. Strategically, a single tool can help support business strategies like a “design anywhere – build anywhere” approach. The report also explain how utilizing a single tool can help promote design reuse and simplify collaboration. Of course the biggest benefit may come from the ability to enable a more strategic, integrated PLM environment. These solutions typically involve a suite of pre-integrated solutions that are tailor-made for each other. 

The report also details the very tangible reductions in total cost of ownership for the CAD solution. By evaluating a multitude of cost drivers, the report suggests a framework and a sample set of calculations to quantify the cost savings available from consolidation. Some of the cost drivers are obvious, while others may be more subtle. For example:

• Removal of redundant CAD licenses (ok, no surprise yet)
• Reduce cost of upgrading software tools (maybe less obvious?)
• Eliminate need to develop training for redundant solution (maybe you wouldn’t have thought of this?)

See the report for a more complete listing and an educated (and conservative) example of the cost savings available. While the strategic benefits are compelling, many companies today may consider this strategy simply to achieve leaner IT overhead for their engineering software.

Implications for Manufacturers

What does this mean for manufacturers? I discussed that question with Paul Hoch, Team Leader of Product Engineering Services for lighting solutions manufacturer Zumtobel AG. He echoed a number of the benefits in the report, including cost savings and explaining that they “don’t get the full benefit from <their> 3D CAD models” without PLM. But the most strategic benefit Paul discussed was corporate flexibility, which is critical as companies try to survive in difficult, global markets.

“Our common tool is the basic infrastructure that allows us to make quick decisions on product and plant locations, it provides management with the flexibility and agility they need.“

I am not sure I can add anything more to the power of that statement, other than to suggest again that many companies may pursue consolidation for much more tactical reasons.

So that was a quick peek into some recent research on consolidating CAD, I hope you found it interesting. Does the research reflect your experiences? Do you see it differently? Let us know what it looks like from your perspective.

Please feel free to review more free research and white papers about PLM and other enterprise software for manufacturers from Tech-Clarity.

A quick peek into some research on … managing complexity across the product lifecycle from the Tech-Clarity research report The Five Dimensions of Product Complexity. The report highlights the trend toward increased product complexity over the past ten years, and how it has made developing profitable products more difficult. The report details the five dimensions, and then discusses how Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) software helps manage the complexity on an enterprise scale, helping manufacturers achieve greater efficiency and better products.

The Research Findings

The report points out three main aspects of the complexity problem. The first is obvious from the title, products have become more complex. Smarter product, miniaturization, and other advancements in engineering and product design have allowed companies to make more complex – and more capable – products. The second is the greater complexity of the supply and design chains that has resulted from globalization. The last part of the problem isn’t about complexity, it is the fact that as complexity has made engineers’ and product developers’ jobs more difficult – expectations for rapid development of high-quality, innovative products has increased. It is a perfect storm for engineers. The job is hard, but they must deliver better results.

The report discusses five different types of complexity, highlighting interviews with Honeywell and Mercury Marine:

• Mechanical Complexity
• Mechatronics
• Global Markets
• Global Design and Manufacturing
• Lifecycle Profitability

Implications for Manufacturers

Increased product complexity probably comes as no surprise to product developers and engineers that are dealing with the complexity every day. The report goes beyond identifying the problem, and provides insight into how PLM software can help manufacturers deal with the perfect storm of increased complexity and higher expectations. As Rick Kennedy, Senior Technical Manager of Electrical Systems Engineering for Honeywell explains, “PLM offers really big gains in managing design complexity from systems design all the way through the product lifecycle.” Please see the report for more discussion from Rick as well as great insight from Fred Bellio of Mercury Marine.

So that was a quick peek into some recent research on the use of PLM to manage product complexity, I hope you found it interesting. Does the research reflect your experiences? Do you see it differently? Let us know what it looks like from your perspective. Please feel free to review more free research and white papers about PLM and other enterprise software for manufacturers from Tech-Clarity.

I had the chance to talk with … SAP and their customer Colgate in June, and learned that they have been hard at work improving the way manufacturers innovate. I was attending an SAP customer event on PLM to get updated on the progress of SAP’s PLM efforts. SAP continued to showcase their new PLM interfaces (now including Recipe Management for the process industries). But the thing that caught my attention most was a presentation on a newly co-developed solution for product innovation codenamed “Edison.” While this isn’t a formal SAP product as of yet, it shows some real promise on how companies can use social computing to drive innovation.

Note: Hopefully this wasn’t the only thing I learned in June, but things have certainly busy and I am behind in sharing!

What they are Doing

The solution, presented jointly by SAP and Colgate, is labeled as an “idea management” solution. To me that description falls a bit short of what they have developed. The solution handles a broad range of the innovation process, including:

• Idea Solicitation – to help target innovation as opposed to an all purpose suggestion box
• Idea Submission – to capture ideas from participants, including any supporting media they choose to submit
• Review and Processing – to help companies find the ideas they want to focus on, including search, filtering, sorting, tagging, and commenting
• Evaluation – allowing companies to score innovation and promote the good ones
• Execution – although this was a little less clear to me, this is the idea that the promoted ideas would flow into SAP’s PPM solution to turn into product development projects

The first thing that stood out to me as evidence that this was based on practical experience was that they didn’t assume that getting more ideas was better. I run into vendors all the time who like to talk about helping their manufacturing customers get more ideas. All of my research and interviews end up with the same conclusion from manufacturers: “I don’t need more ideas, I need help sorting through all of the junk to find the good ones!” Manufacturers want better ideas, and they want a way to make sense of the volumes of input they get. Kudos to Colgate and SAP for getting this right, which I have to imagine came from Colgate’s real-world experience in innovation.

Another thing I was impressed with was the objectives of the project. They set out to build something “simple, usable, flexible, and extendable.” As well thought out as the solution seems, it doesn’t appear that they over-designed it. The solution does not look or feel like SAP, but instead is a light, web-based experience. While this might not be appropriate for the highly transactional world of traditional SAP solutions, it is ideal for this application where broad use by untrained participants is a key to success. After all, you don’t want all of your innovation coming from a few trained insiders!

One final point that Colgate made which I think is important to consider, is that the solution is not only valuable in the front end of innovation but throughout the new product development process. In fact, early use of the tool at Colgate has helped solve supply chain issues like cost reduction.

Implications for Manufacturers

The use of social computing techniques to drive innovation is beginning to take shape. SAP is clearly interested in providing this capability, as are standalone innovation management solutions such as Brightidea, Imaginatik, Ideajam, and others.  Some upcoming research I will publish soon with Kalypso shows that many manufacturers are getting started in the use of social media in innovation, and those that did are going to increase usage next year. Times are changing, and it will be interesting to see who can best take advantage of this new opportunity.

So that is what I heard from SAP and Colgate, I hope you found it interesting. Who knew? I didn’t, if you did let us know about it. Who else should I be paying attention to in this space?

I  had the chance to talk with … the Siemens PLM team earlier this week at their PLM Connection user’s conference. There are more announcements than I can cover here in one post, so I will concentrate on one major announcement – HD-PLM (High Definition PLM). Siemens is making a significant investment in modernizing the PLM experience with HD PLM. How will it help manufacturers get more from their PLM investment? And from a users’ perspective, can it give the PLM experience a boost to help this valuable corporate tool become a little more fun to work with?

The Announcement

To start, HD-PLM is more than just user experience. It is a new technology framework designed to unify the PLM experience across all of Siemens PLM’s products. In fact, it is planned to be the common client for all solutions. The interface is ( dare I say) cool, and looks like something anyone would be happy to work with. Think Web 2.0 meets PLM. Some examples:

• Highly graphical interface and navigation paradigm – let’s face it, this is how engineers and product developer think
• Cover flow – think iTunes-like interface to browse products)
• Role-based workspace
• Knowledge drill-down – think embedded visual reporting and business intelligence (BI)
• Proactive alerts

Bust Siemens is not just focusing on user experience. “High Definition” means more than what you see. They are are also investing heavily in a more rich definition (and validation) of products, particularly around systems engineering and mechatronics. Siemens will be making a lot more of the vast information in their systems available in an easily accessible, visual way. This is no small project for Siemens, and will provide significant value to Siemens PLM customers.

Implications for Manufacturers

What does this mean to manufacturers? To keep this short and simple:

• PLM will get more fun (and cool)
• Siemens PLM customers can feel comfortable that Siemens is still investing significantly in the future, and will enjoy the benefits of that investment over time as the new technology is released in upgrades of the products they already own
• Non-Siemens customers will have another reason to look at Siemens PLM products

So that’s what I hear from Siemens PLM, I hope you found it useful. What do you think? What else should I have asked them? I expect to hear a lot more about this in the future, I look forward to sharing it here.

I had the chance to talk with … PTC and their customers at last week’s PTCuser user conference. PTC has been busy, making a number of significant announcements. I will clearly not do justice to such a big event in one short blog, but I hope to hit the highlights for you and share my thoughts on the implications.

Note: Just to be clear, this is the last PTCuser because the conference is changing and will be renamed PlanetPTC.

What I Learned

PTC is still serious about mechanical CAD. They believe that there is still innovation happening in that space, and that it will be an interesting market in the future. Good news for mechanical engineers and those that are fans of PTC CAD solutions including Pro/Engineer and CoCreate. They announced Project Lightening which is a multi-year strategy to reinvent mechanical CAD, but promised deliverables in the near term. Not much information here yet, but from conversations with PTC product managers this is a big focus area. Expect some significant focus on making MCAD much easier to use.

PTC is pushing the PLM boundaries. PTC furthered InSight product analytics by announcing product cost analytics and expanded Arbortext into service documentation and instructions. By going into areas like product analytics (particularly in areas like cost), PTC continues to push the envelope. PTC has a broad vision for PLM, and has already stretched the scope of PLM to include product documentation and engineering calculations in the past, and they don’t appear to be done yet.

PTC is making good on their Social Product Development initiative. The new SocialLink product is a great example of this. They added a new product, but also demonstrated how these new social computing capabilities will work across the entire PTC product portfolio. That is the right way to do it (in my opinion). The capabilities are generalized and part of the infrastructure (in large part thanks to Microsoft), but the application of the capabilities is happening in the solutions themselves. This allows product managers from each product line to decide how their users can benefit. Expect more here over time.

PTC has refocused on a Small to Midsize Business (SMB) PDM system – ProductPoint is no longer trying to be both a simpler PDM offering for the SMB and PTC’s answer to Social Product Development. With the introduction of SocialLink and other social computing capabilities, ProductPoint is now free to be a SharePoint-based PDM system. Good news for the SMB who doesn’t need (or can’t attain) a full PLM system.

PTC enters PPM market – PTC is launching a product portfolio management solution based on Microsoft technology. The early indications are that PTC’s solution is more focused on project roll ups and programs than decision support in product portfolios and R&D investment. Stay tuned for more on this in the future as I learn more.

PlanetPTC replaces PTCuser – PTC users have asked PTC to take a broader role and responsibility in the user event. PlanetPTC also includes a community site and virtual events like webcasts, showing that PTC really believes in the power of social media.

So that’s what I hear from PTC, I am sure I missed something. I hope you found it useful. What do you think? What else should I have asked them? What else would you like them to do?

What I learned this week … is that product cost is not getting the attention it deserves in PLM. I was presenting on the future of PLM in a PLM-focused event last week in Helsinki. My topic was the future of PLM, and I based my discussion on the four dimensions of PLM expansion (recently updated past post). I got a great question from one of the participants. He wanted to know “why I hadn’t included cost in the future of PLM?“ My response? Good question!

Product Cost in PLM

Product Cost Management (PCM) in PLM is something that I used to bring up on a regular basis. Design for cost is an important initiatives. Particularly as companies are trying to remain lean in uncertain economic times, controlling cost is critical. Even in good times, designing products with optimal cost structures is hugely important to driving high profit margins. So why has this dropped off of my radar? Is the problem being addressed? Is the problem solved? No.

The problem still lingers, but I haven’t seen as many companies willing to try to address it. Perhaps this complicates the roles of ERP and PLM, and companies don’t want to deal with a hard decision on which system supports which part of the process. ERP and PLM both have the potential to help, and should be a part of the solution. But neither ERP nor PLM are ready to take on the PCM challenge fully.

• ERP
  • Has historic costs
  • Understands multi-currency, locations, volumes, other sourcing factors
  • Generally handles cost for the execution of procurement and manufacturing
• PLM
  • Has new parts
  • Understands product content early when costs are locked into designs
  • Generally handles product development decisions in the innovation lifecycle

So each system has some thing to offer. So why instead of addressing this properly with the right combination of ERP and PLM, do companies continue to use masses of disconnected spreadsheets to solve the problem? At least I can hope that they are managing the spreadsheets in PLM so it is readily available and can be reused. But that is only a partial solution. We need a better answer.

Challenges

ERP and PLM both bring value as seen above, but both fall short. Here are some of the issues:

• New purchased parts - ERP is not involved in the early parts of design, and doesn’t help with estimating costs of new parts. PLM (for the most part) doesn’t have a rich enough model for sourcing. I have seen “cost” as a single field too many times, without any concept that the cost will change based on volumes, locations, currencies, etc.
• Newly engineered parts – For brand new parts, there is not historic data to work from. Costs need to be developed based on product characteristics like materials and manufacturing complexity. Comparisons can help, but ERP typically doesn’t know enough to determine which parts are similar in their construction

Who will step up?

Are vendors ready for this? Agile has had a cost model for some time. Siemens partnered with ATK. Dassault Systemes invested in this area. PTC just announced that their InSight product analytics product will address cost. So there is hope. There are also specialty vendors like Akoya and aPriori that help engineers estimate cost based on product attributes. Why haven’t SAP PLM and Oracle (with Agile and ERP) done something about it?

More importantly, are manufacturers ready? Adidas CIO mentioned Design for Cost at a PLM user conference (PTCuser) yesterday. But I don’t hear it often enough. I haven’t seen the momentum that something as important to profitability as cost deserves.

Implications for Manufacturers

If manufacturers aren’t willing to integrate cost into their design processes (and PLM), they will be stuck with spreadsheets. And actually, the question was broader. The question also addressed other financials in addition to cost. For example, is PLM addressing product pricing? Product forecasting? While I think that it makes sense for PLM to address this, I have seen little activity in this area to this point. What a shame. What a great opportunity for someone to step up.

So that is my rant for today, I hope you found it interesting. Why did this fall off of my radar? Did it fall off of yours? Have you done something to address this? If you did let us know about it!

A quick peek into some research on … on social computing for product development. Why does Facebook miss the mark? Can it be fixed? I have been talking for some time about the potential value of social computing in PLM and have mentioned before why Facebook will fail. I am preparing for a presentation next week, and decided to pull my thoughts together. So here they are, I look forward to your feedback.

The Research Findings

There are two parts to the findings. The first is a list of concerns that I have heard, here is a short list:

• What relevance do status comments and photos have to do with serious engineering?
• How will we protect intellectual property?
• What does Facebook know about business processes or how to manage them?
• What does Facebook know about engineering data? CAD files? Projects? Engineering in general?
• Why would I trust my business performance to a technology platform like Facebook that doesn’t appear stable or perform well (sorry Facebook, that is just my practical experience not a sound technical analysis)?
• How do I have time to pay attention to this in addition to everything I already do?
• How do we address security concerns?

OK, part two. Can it be fixed? Yes, but I doubt they will do it. There are two reasons:

• They are not focused on this and don’t have domain expertise
• They don’t have the ability to connect to the underlying context, the product data

But let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water. Let’s see what Facebook can teach us about PLM. Here are my thoughts (and if you happen to be in Helsinki next week stop by to see this live):

Implications for Manufacturers

Don’t look to tools like Facebook to help you with social computing in PLM. But don’t discount the concepts. Learn from them. They are compelling. And manufacturers are getting started. In fact, I look forward to sharing research that I am doing with Kalypso that gives some great insight on what companies have been doing.

So that was a quick peek into some recent research on Facebook failing in PLM, I hope you found it interesting. Yes, I know they didn’t design to tool for product development, so I am really not picking on them. Does the research reflect your experiences? Do you see it differently? Let us know what it looks like from your perspective.

Please feel free to review more free research and white papers about PLM and other enterprise software for manufacturers from Tech-Clarity.

What I learned this week … came from PLM Processes: Flowchart vs. Rule-based? from Oleg in PLM Twine. He discusses rule-based business processes for PLM, which immediately set off red flags in my head based on past experience. Oleg made me think about two different experiences I have in the same context, and it made me shudder. Why? I have seen rules go wrong too many times. And I have seen workflow processes go wrong just a many times.

Workflow Warnings

As Oleg knows, I am bit of a process weenie. Years at Andersen Consulting (the part that is now Accenture) will do that to you. I am 100% in favor of defining processes as a part of implementing business change and supporting technology. But here are some tidbits that I think are worth sharing:

• Define All Processes - Technology implementations should be process driven. Unless you define how the technology helps the business, you won’t get the most out of it.  
• Automate Some of Them - Not all processes should be workflows. While workflow is a great tool to automate and enforce processes, don’t overdo it. I have seen people implement workflow for workflow’s sake. It should be used as needed to improve efficiency and process adoption, but don’t workflow everything.
• Don’t Sweat the Exceptions – There are times where humans need to step in to make decisions and alter workflows. Don’t try to handle every exception condition. If you can identify them and send an alert, great. But most importantly make sure you have flexibility to alter a workflow based on business needs. This is where I see rules-based processes go wrong. Companies try to make rules cover too much, get too complex, and end up being hard to maintain, outdated, and eventually ignored.

The combination of workflow and rules can be very powerful, but can also lead to a resource sinkhole of if not approached cautiously. This is true for the process / rule authors and those that execute them alike.

Implications for Manufacturers

Define your processes. Use workflow where it makes sense. Keep it simple. Don’t try to do too much. Don’t forget that in many scenarios people make better decisions in context than any pre-determined set of rules can handle – don’t tie their hands. If you have standard operating procedures that you need to follow, you may need to document process exceptions. But don’t entirely lock them down in the system. Exceptions will happen, and if the system doesn’t accommodate the real world it will just happen outside of the system in an unmanaged way.

So those are my quick reactions to Oleg’s post, I hope you found it interesting. His post is worth reading if you haven’t already. But I get scared when I see the opportunity for things to go astray. And workflow and rules are a great candidate for bad things to happen. And this is from a self-admitted process weenie!

A quick peek into some research on … efficiently mitigating manufacturing risk from Tech-Clarity’s new report Quality Risk Management in Life Sciences: Preventing Failures, Protecting Patient Health. The study reviews two manufacturers’ experiences using Quality Risk Management (QRM) to proactively reduce risk. The report highlights the importance of managing quality in the product lifecycle, and explains how QRM software can be used to efficiently manage risk.

The Research Findings

The manufacturers interviewed, Moll Industries and F. Hoffmann-La Roche, expressed the importance of proactively identifying and mitigating risks in manufacturing. Both companies emphasized the importance of reducing risk from a patient health and safety perspective, but also from a business perspective.

Key findings from the report include:

• Share Quality Knowledge - Many companies have the information they need to predict and prevent errors from occurring. They typically capture this information poorly, though, or manage the information in documents that are inconsistent and spread across the organization. This makes the information difficult to find and almost impossible to reuse. So manufacturers are doomed to repeat the same mistakes without learning from them. Not only is this ineffective, it is also inefficient because FMEA (Failure Modes and Effects Analysis) and CAPA (Corrective Action and Preventative Action) processes and documents are recreated from scratch and not based on corporate knowledge.
• Closing the Loop on Quality - Just as I wrote recently about Closing the Loop on Product Innovation, there is a lot of important knowledge in Manufacturing and other departments that can be leveraged upstream. For quality information, this information can be shared with Engineering / R&D to design errors out of the process and also to Quality to develop control plans to build quality into the manufacturing process.

These two findings both point to a key theme – quality lifecycle management (QLM). Quality is one of the more pressing product lifecycle issues, and one that should be addressed in any PLM Strategy. QRM software helps to automate quality management processes such as FMEA and CAPA, and also provide the knowledge management (KM) capabilities required to share information and close the loop on quality. The report provides much more insight from each of the manufacturers, both of which are highly knowledgeable and experienced in QRM.

Implications for Manufacturers

Quality management can’t be a “check off the boxes” process. Manufacturers need to focus beyond compliance and take a business risk mitigation approach to quality. As I said in Expanding PLM’s Purview – Quality and Risk Management, “Quality is an important aspect of any product, and key to the profitability of a product across its lifecycle.” For medical device manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies, and other life sciences businesses – the stakes are even higher. Lives are at stake, and corporate executives can be prosecuted criminally and put in jail. What more motivation does a manufacturer need (short of a nice letter from the FDA)?

I will leave the final word to Wallace Torres of Roche:

“Many companies are not in the hot spot right now and will do the minimum, and they will never profit from the process. They will wait until the moment of a major regulatory observation, and this might be too late.”

So that was a quick peek into some recent research on managing risk, I hope you found it interesting. Does the research reflect your experiences? Do you see it differently? Let us know what it looks like from your perspective.

Please feel free to review more free research and white papers about quality management, PLM, and other enterprise software for manufacturers from Tech-Clarity.