Clarity on PLM

A quick peek into some research on enabling service organizations with the right product information from Tech-Clarity Insight: Better Service from Better Product Information: Evolving to Visual, Product-Centric Service Communication. Service has become a higher strategy priority for manufacturers focused on keeping customers satisfied and taking advantage of higher profit margins in the service lifecycle. Providing technicians and customers with the right product and service information, particularly in a visual formats including 3D and animations, has become more important – and more attainable – over the last few years. The report highlights interviews with General Atomics, Nikon, and Whirlpool to understand the issue and how manufacturers take advantage of PLM tools to enable better service.

Backdrop: Strategic Importance of Service on the Rise

Ten years ago service was an afterthought for most manufacturers. In fact, most companies would call it a necessary evil. But even in the early 2000′s, The Service Lifecycle Management Approach: Strong Customer Relationships Result in Profit in the Service Industry indicated a shift toward a more strategic view. As one of the participants in that research explained, manufacturers were starting to realize that “Customer satisfaction is extremely important to building long term relationships. It is also good business, because it leads to greater profitability through customer retention and repeat business.” In other words, good service is just good business.

Service may be good business, but it is also a big challenge. This is even more true in today’s global marketplace where service techs may be located anywhere in the world and speak any number of languages. Product complexity has also risen, as explained by Nikon in the report and evidenced by Tech-Clarity’s The Five Dimensions of Product Complexity. Products are now more complex due to new materials, miniaturization, smarter product capabilities, and other trends. Without the right information at hand – or perhaps worse having the bad information – service techs are likely to waste time, incur higher service cost, and end up disappointing customers with machine downtime. See the report for more, but for now let’s talk about how to address the challenges and achieve better service.

The Research Findings

Customers want their equipment serviced quickly and accurately. To do this in a complex service environment, techs need to be enabled with the right product information and service instructions. They need to be able to access and use that information quickly, and it should be the most up to date information possible. As Debra West-Maciaszek for Nikon explains in the report, “Looking for information doesn’t help the field service engineer, and the customer is in their face saying ‘fix my machine’.” The report highlights a number of key factors that can help manufactures develop better, more timely service information at lower cost:

• Use visual illustrations to improve communication and cut through language barriers
• Leverage existing assets (including CAD) to develop illustrations faster and more accurately
• Move to 3D to provide a more realist representation of products
• Incorporate animation to demonstrate service procedures clearly
• Provide rich product data behind the graphics to give service techs the details they need to do their jobs
• Take a product-centric approach to service information and illustrations, including specific documentation for different configurations
• Manage service documentation and illustration change holistically with product change

One of the key points is that visual communications offers tremendous advantages. First and foremost, it just fits the world we live in. I like to ask people to try to write text instructions for tying a shoe. It takes a lot of steps, and is very difficult to comprehend without pictures (do I hear some of you reciting “the bunny goes into the bunny hole” as you think about it? Even in native language text-based instructions miss the mark, and with variable language and reading skills in the global workforce the problem only gets worse. Graphical communication for products is the way to go. This is valuable for service and beyond, see Showing Off Your Products – 3D Technical Product Communications for more.

Another aspect of the findings is that there is a great opportunity to leverage PLM for service information. PLM has the right product-centric approach and houses the CAD and product specification assets that companies need to develop effective service communication. It also offers the opportunity to include service information as part of the product lifecycle, incorporating graphics and instructions into the umbrella of change management and allowing information to be tailored to specific product configurations. As the report concludes, “It is a natural extension for PLM to manage product-centric service information in the service lifecycle such as illustrations and documentation.”

Implications for Manufacturers

So what can manufacturers do with the information in this report? First, they can review (or develop) their service information strategy to ensure that it is providing the most up to date, graphical, tailored service information it can. Evaluate what technicians need to get their jobs done, and look for ways to leverage existing CAD and PLM assets to deliver it. The service lifecycle is getting a lot of attention in corporate strategies, and PLM solutions are now extending their capabilities further into the lifecycle. The time has come to see how PLM can improve service performance and profitability.

So that was a quick peek into some recent research on providing service technicians and customers with better product and service information, 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 business value of transforming product documentation to rich, interactive communication. The report, Tech-Clarity Insight – The Business of 3D Technical Communications: Evolving Strategies to Document Products, explains how companies are changing their views on technical documentation to a more strategic approach, including the use of 3D to go beyond flat, static documents to incorporate richer, interactive, more realistic representation of products.

The Research Findings

At first glance, product documentation may not seem like a valuable topic, let alone a sexy one. After all, how much fun can you have with a user manual? It’s true that many companies look at product documentation as a necessary evil. Even for companies that take that view, the report provides insight on how to increase the quality and decrease the cost of product documentation. But there is more strategic, business-level value available than just saving money (not that anyone should turn savings down given today’s tight product margins). Even those that take a tactical, operational view of documentation should recognize that delaying product documentation processes can result in delaying time to market – which in turn has a big impact on market share and profitability. And for international companies, they can also save significantly on translation because they can rely more on images and significantly reduce text.

Better processes can help operationally. But the report goes further than that. The report shares the experiences of three manufacturers:

• NACCO Material Handling Group, a division of NACCO Industries that designs, engineers, and manufactures material handling equipment
• S&C Electric Company, a global provider of equipment and services for electric power systems
• AS&E, a producer of state-of-the-art x-ray detection solutions

These companies explain how they have transformed their views from product documentation to technical product communications. They have found ways to leverage their existing 3D CAD assets to gain some significant business advantages, including:

• Higher engineering efficiency by allowing documentation specialists more freedom to create images from 3D models
• Improved effectiveness of documentation & communication by including 3D, animation, and interactivity
• Better collaboration with downstream functions (that don’t have CAD) to improve product designs and product quality
• Reduced potential for errors in manufacturing and enabling a “deign anywhere – build anywhere” strategy
• Improved service performance leading to improved customer experience and uptime

Implications for Manufacturers

Many manufacturers have moved to 3D CAD solutions, and reaped significant rewards in design quality. Manufacturers with 3D CAD in place have an opportunity to extend the value of their CAD assets by reusing them for product documentation. At a minimum, it will create efficiency and save some time and money. As Bill Abely of AS&E is quoted in the report:

“The day before the first printing of our manuals a tech pub writer overheard a conversation about a change that he wasn’t aware of. The change affected 50 images! Including the change would normally take about ten days – instead it was ready by the next afternoon.”

How long would that take your company? Used effectively, 3D technical communication can also provide some significant benefits by improving the performance of those that need to know the most about products – including Manufacturing, Service, Customers, and even Marketing. The result can be better quality products, reduced cost, and a better customer experience. From my perspective, it looks like it is time to rethink product documentation.

So that was a quick peek into some recent research on the business of documenting products, 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.

What I learned this week … came from a Crowdsourced Manufacturing? blog entry by Wayne Hodgkins. I haven’t read his Off Course-On Target blog before, but I liked what he had to say.  He made me really start to look at 3D Printing as a viable manufacturing options as opposed to a prototyping / design validation tool. This post is interesting, but I also took a quick look at his posts on printing in stainless steel and a very cool contraption that includes an onion, a laser scanner, and a 3D printer. Click through his site to David Bowen’s and see a video of that machine in action, it is a piece of art.

My Preconceptions about 3D Printing

OK, here is where I open myself up to criticism. I have always considered 3D Printing a tremendously valuable tool for developing rapid, inexpensive prototypes. To me, a digital 3D model is a great way to visualize a design, but it is (in the end) still presented on a 2D screen. As much work has been done in adding life-like reality to digital models, there is still something very significant about holding something in your hands. My impression of the 3D printing technologies was a way to quickly make a model of a part to help validate the design of the real part.

What I Have Learned

3D printing is not an area I have spent much time researching, so I may just be behind the curve. But what I am starting to get a glimpse into is the world where 3D printing means serious manufacturing. The post about printing with stainless steel, for example, talks about printing molds for real parts. But then goes further to explain how stainless parts can be printed by a company called Shapeways. I love the term used in one of the blogs, DIY Manufacturing (DIY for “do it yourself”). Clearly this is not going to replace manufacturing as we know it any time soon, but these technologies will certainly have a place and will make an impact.

Implications for Manufacturers

I want to revise something I said above. I now see 3D Printing as a viable manufacturing options in addition to being a prototyping / design validation tool. Both are very valuable and can change the interaction between design and manufacturing. By lowering the barriers between the digital model and the physical part (whether prototype or real) the potential for rapid innovation and design iteration explodes. It also opens up great possibilities to allow parts to be designed in one location and “printed” in another. We have gone from drawings and physical prototypes to digital prototypes. Now, I am starting to imagine a collaboration where one engineer effectively “e-mails” a part to a supplier, or “faxes” a part to another engineer by laser scanning a physical part or prototype and sending the model to be printed. One step further, why can’t I order a 3D model from anywhere in the world and just go to my local printer (unless I have one in my garage) to pick up the part? Who knows, maybe this is already happening somewhere.

So this is clearly an area I need to learn more about, I hope you found it interesting. Who knew? I didn’t, if you did let me know about it.

What I learned this week … came from watching the Did You Know 3.0 Video and asking myself what it means to the world of manufacturing and product lifecycle management (PLM). The answer? Quite a lot. If you haven’t seen the video, it is worth 5 minutes of your time to give you an entertaining and informative look into the times we live in. The part that really caught me was that we live in “exponential times.” Things are changing rapidly in our personal and professional lives, and manufacturers need to consider the ways the world is changing in order to be relevant with the right products (and the right processes) to capitalize on the future.

Note: Thanks to Randall Newton at CADCAMNet for posting the link. I have seen this before, but his post was what made me really think about it.

Did You Know?

The video, if you haven’t seen it before, tries to put the world in perspective through facts and pictograms. I have seen these before, and they are always thought-provoking.  According to the source, this was put together by Karl Fisch and modified by Scott McLeod. Some of the key takeaways for me are:

• MySpace has 200 million subscribers, if it were a country it would be 5th largest in the world
• A week’s worth of the New York Times holds as much information as an average person would come across in a lifetime in the 18th century
• The amount of technical information doubles every two years
• The number of text messages sent/received in a day exceeds the population of the planet
• The time it took for a product/technology to reach a market audience of 50 million:
  • Radio – 38 years
  • Television – 13 years
  • iPod – 3 years
  • FaceBook – 2 years

Further, there are some fascinating facts about the increased capabilities of computing technologies.

What Does it All Mean (for Manufacturing and PLM)?

The video ends with a question – “What Does it All Mean?” – without providing an answer. The answer, of course, depends on who you are and how the changes impact your world.  When I watched this, I tried to take the perspective of what impacts this will have on product innovation, product development, engineering, and manufacturing. Further, I tried to consider how this will impact the software solutions that help support product lifecycle management. There are challenges and opportunities on the way. Here are my thoughts:

• Social networking is exploding – this offers a tremendous benefit for manufacturers that want to use social computing in PLM to improve collaboration and dramatically change the way they interact with their markets and customers.
• Knowledge is exploding – manufacturers have a tremendous challenge to manage their own information and intellectual property, let alone be able to access and leverage the information available across the globe. Search, Knowledge Management (KM), and Business Intelligence (BI) will become bigger requirements inside PLM and to drive product innovation by tapping into global knowledge sources. Social computing will also play a role here, as manufacturers try to discover the people with the right knowledge in addition to knowledge.
• Time to market is evaporating – the time lag between a technical advance and the commercialization is disappearing. This makes new product development (NPD) critical, but also further supports the need to rapidly discover and take advantage of knowledge anywhere in the world. It also means that manufacturers will have to get their products right the first time, or someone else will take the market away from them.
• Computing power is exploding – the exponential growth of computing power will play a large role in what PLM vendors are able to do with their software, opening up new opportunities including continued expansion of 3D, animation, and simulation in the way we interact with products.

So that is some insight on the times we live in and my thoughts on the implications for manufacturing and PLM, I hope you found it interesting. Who knew? I didn’t. And I am sure I missed something, feel free to add. And for those that watched the video, please pass along any ideas on how to get that music out of my head!

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

I had a chance to talk with…the Dassault Systemes team about their recent V6 product release.  They reinforced their key messages during the conversation: SOA based on a single data model, powered by ENOVIA, leveraging 3D as a media.  They also continue to speak of PLM 2.0, referring to the maturation of PLM from an engineering workgroup application to a value chain wide new product development and launch platform. I agree with this assertion – PLM has evolved in recent years to include the front end of innovation, product portfolio management, and direct materials sourcing. I always believed these were aspects of the PLM footprint, but organizations still approached each aspect of the product lifecycle in a siloed fashion.  Now with this release, these tenets are accessible to the small to mid-sized businesses (SMB) as well.

What does V6 Offer?

The key focus of the V6R2010 (V6) announcement is SMB (V6 PLM Express), the current incarnation of the SMARTEAM/CATIA bundled offering. Much like Siemens PLM and PTC, Dassault saw great success in the mid-market in 2008 so hope to build on that momentum with this release.  Basically, the goal is to open up the V6 platform – and “key PLM 2.0 values” – to the mid-market.  So what are these values?  There are the six points they espouse:

• Global collaborative innovation
• 3D lifelike experience across the value chain
• One platform enabling the federation of knowledge
• Online creation and collaboration – product authoring and collaboration over the web
• Ready to use PLM processes, by role and industry
• Lower cost of ownership and operations support

Much like other PLM vendors (e.g. Oracle), Dassault has focused their current release on enhancing the user experience.  V6 provides design (CATIA LiveShape), collaboration (3DVia composer pro), and simulation (SIMULIA DesignSight) to non-technical users, and offers role-based consumption of product information. The company has also further developed their systems engineering capability, by enabling building of component libraries to enhance reuse, and enhancing modeling capabilities.  There are five role-specific interfaces within v6: shape design, mechanical engineering, equipment engineering, machine engineering, and project team members (i.e. non-engineers).  Appropriate capabilities are presented in the user interface depending on role: industrial designers may have access to modeling and basic simulation, mechanical engineers have access to detailed design functions, and manufacturing process planning, and other members of the product launch team could have collaboration, sourcing and review capabilities.  New product development information (whether from other CAD tools, or enterprise applications) is presented through 3DLive, Dassault‘s web collaboration application.

How Does V6 fit into the PLM Ecosystem?

The six values Dassault speaks of are pretty much the same messages all large PLM providers have with their most recent product releases, although Dassault does place more emphasis on leveraging 3D across PLM processes and roles.  The challenge with this is convincing manufacturers who just want to arm their engineers with PDM and CAD that there is indeed value in sharing 3D visuals with marketing, field service, and suppliers (as Dassault says, “3D for all”, or in Autodesk‘s words, “democratizing 3D”).  I absolutely think there is value in this, whether for a large or small company. Marketing would be able to create more compelling promotions, leading to increased revenue. Field service would be able to respond to product quality issues more effectively, leading to happier, more loyal customers. Suppliers would be able to collaborate on new product designs and provide the most effective parts or materials.

What Else Does V6 Offer?

Two other key areas which Dassault has made a conscious effort to address are making the transition of V4 and V5 customers to V6 easier (with multiple “transition scenarios” from version co-existence to complete migration), and ensuring V6 is open so existing investments in tools and other enterprise applications can be leveraged, and data can be federated across the value chain. These two points alone will be key to accelerating acceptance of V6.

So that’s what I hear from Dassault. What do you think?