Clarity on PLM

Join me this week or a quick peek into some of my research in one (or more) of several PLM-related webcasts this week. I will be joined by some great speakers that will share their views as well. I am not sure why this week is so densely packed with web presentations, but it should give everyone an opportunity to tune in and get a perspective on a few different interesting topics! We have product innovation, product development, product documentation, engineering, and more. Last week a podcast on the business value of PLM, now a handful of webcasts – Mom I have gone multimedia!

The Topics

• Tuesday (2:00 PM, Eastern US) – The Five Dimensions of Product Complexity – Jim Brown of Tech-Clarity will present with Matt Greene of Siemens PLM on the trend towards increased product complexity, how it has made developing profitable products more difficult, and how Product Lifecycle Management solutions can help.
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• Wednesday (11:00 AM, Eastern US) – Transforming PLM for the Economic Recovery - Jim Brown will present with Chip Perry of Kalypso on this Aras ACE Innovation Series webcast on how to leverage PLM to take advantage of the upturn in the manufacturing industries, including innovation to increase revenue, decrease product cost, and reduce product development cost.
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• Thursday (2:00 PM, Eastern US) – Streamlining Product Documentation and Raising the Bar with 3D Communication - Jim Brown will present with Garth Coleman of Dassault Systemes on this IndustryWeek webinar on how to use 3D product communications to improve efficiency, time to market, quality, cost, and customer experience.
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So that is a quick peek into some recent research I will be presenting, I hope you find it interesting and helps bring the research to life for you. Please feel free to look for more PLM-related webcasts (upcoming and archived) from Tech-Clarity.

I had the chance to talk with … Kalypso‘s managing partner Bill Poston and new Kalypso partner Andreas Lindenthal about the recent merger of their companies. PLM implementation experts are in high demand, with most many “big name” consulting firms carrying small teams. In this case, two smaller specialists in product innovation and PLM are coming together to make an even stronger team.

What do they Do?

Kalypso is an innovation consulting firm. They help companies set the right strategies, develop the right business processes, and implement the right software to improve their product innovation performance. Kalypso specialized in a number of aspects of innovation including:

• Business & Innovation Strategy
• Front End of Innovation
• Portfolio & Pipeline Management (PPM)
• Development & NPI (new product introduction)
• Value Management
• PLM Technology
• Leadership & Learning
• Intellectual Property Management

Metafore is an very experienced PLM implementation consulting firm. Both firms have rich backgrounds in management consulting, systems integration, and PLM.

Benefits of the Merger

What is the value of the combined team? As I mentioned earlier, PLM consultants are in high demand. More importantly, it is often difficult to find good business consulting in this area. The largest consulting firms typically provide a large breadth of services (strategy, process definition, implementation, development) but lack depth in PLM resources. The smaller firms often have very deep PLM systems skills (although frequently in a single vendor’s system) but lack a breadth of consulting services. Kalypso offered both depth and breadth, even before the acquisition. So although Kalypso is a “smaller” consulting firm, they already had one of the largest independent PLM teams in the industry. The addition of Metafore extends that advantage.

But the new, combined entity is not just a bigger version of Kalypso. Instead, Metafore adds deeper skills in Siemens PLM solutions (namely Teamcenter) as well as more experience with smaller vendors including Aras, Arena Solutions, and Omnify Software. This complements Kalypso’s traditional strength in Oracle (Agile), Dassault Systemes (Enovia / MatrixOne) and PTC (Windchill). The merger also gives Kalypso more programming power, including access to offshore developers.

Who do they Work With?

Kalypso works with manufacturers of all industries, and has done some interesting innovation work in the service industries as well. The first time I met Kalypso in fact, was due to their unique expertise in PLM for CPG (consumer packaged goods) and the food industry. The addition of Metafore’s team provides Kalypso with more breadth in industries such as automotive, A&D, and industrial manufacturing.

Implications for Manufacturers

For existing Kalypso or Metafore clients, the merger will mean access to extended resources and a more capable partner. For those looking for product innovation or PLM expertise, the combined offering provides a compelling alternative to the big consultants that may not have the deep skills you need, or the small firs that may not have the breadth of services (or the top-tier talent) that Kalypso offers.

So that’s what I hear from the expanded Kalypso team, I hope you found it useful. What do you think? What else should I have asked them?

Note: In the interest of full disclosure, I am a paid member of Kalypso’s Board of Advisors. I don’t feel that I would have written the article in any different way if that weren’t the case, but I felt that disclosing this information was the proper thing to do.

A quick peek into some research (and some “mythbusting”) on a post by Christopher Null on Yahoo News titled “Facebook and business don’t necessarily mix.” Great, catchy headline. But does it really reflect the underlying research from MIT? I don’t think so. I will also share some comments posted on the PDMA blog from a study by Kalypso that don’t sync up with the commentary. And, I will provide an opportunity for you to speak your mind by participating in a current research study on social media and product innovation.

Commentary and Reactions

I don’t know the author of the post, but when I read it something didn’t sit right with me. For the most part, maybe it was that the title of the post didn’t match the underlying premise. To be fair, I know that some editorial gets “help” with their titles to grab attention (which this one certainly did, at least to me). But here are my thoughts (and feel free to “bust” them yourself, I realize I don’t own all the right answers).

Facebook and Business Don’t Necessarily Mix (Busted) – OK, I know I am picking on the title. But let’s own up to two realities:

1. You don’t have a choice. People on social networks are going to talk about your products. Whether you initiate the conversations or someone else does (customers or competitors), it is going to happen. As the post in PDMA ”Do you use social media in innovation?” points out, Social media on your terms is a much better idea than letting others take control of it for you. You MUST get ahead of this.

2. This isn’t what the MIT research says. The post Mr. Null references, “Pitch may fail on Facebook – Study: Social media don’t always create good buzz“, is much more aptly titled. What is says is that buzz can be positive or negative, and that it can actually hurt sales. According to the Boston Herald blog, the research (which I haven’t read, and is not published yet as far as I know) quotes the author as saying that “found that online buzz only helps when new products are at least half as good as consumers expected.” Now that is interesting! The author, P.J. Lamberson, an MIT Sloan School of Management visiting assistant professor, is said to use math to study large networks.

“Conventional Wisdom” (Plausible) – Mr. Null starts his article with “conventional wisdom now holds that if you want to have a successful product launch, you need to exploit Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace to get the word out about your product.” Is this really conventional wisdom? Are most companies using social media today? My experience says no, but I could be wrong. I will admit, my focus is more on social computing for product innovation, product development, and engineering (PLM) and not product launch. But my experience says that companies are experimenting with the use of social media, but it is far from standard operating procedure. The only evidence I have is from some preliminary results from the study being run by Kalypso (Disclosure: I am helping them run the study) that indicates that the use of social networking and social computing in product launches is still not fully developed. In fact, only about 1/2 of companies are using social media for product launch. Further, companies that are using social media are only using it on a small percentage of their initiatives. In other words, we are very early in the use of social media, and it is far from conventional wisdom. On the other hand, the preliminary results show that about 90% of companies that are using social media for innovation are planning to increase usage next year, with none indicating they were reducing it.  Why is this Plausible and not Busted? The research is not done – please participate in the survey and I will share results back with you via the blog.

Bottom Line (Busted) – After being generous with the last mark, I was fully planning to Confirm the post’s bottom line. Then I read it again to copy it here, and I disagree. “The bottom line is simple: Viral marketing, in which a conversation about a product is actively encouraged, can turn good or bad in ways that traditional marketing and advertising typically cannot. Unless a business pays careful attention to the tone of that conversation, the company could find itself shelling out millions on a viral ad campaign, only to have the unwanted effect of decreasing sales instead of increasing them.” I copied the whole comment over, because I agree with the first part. Yes, viral marketing can turn bad. But then it says business need to pay attention to the tone of the conversation. The underlying study (from what I can see) doesn’t say that. It says that your products have to meet expectations. In other words, it’s saying you can’t just manage the tone because it is out of your control.

Implications for Manufacturers
So what should manufacturers do? Learn from the study. What I hear is don’t over-hype your products, and don’t try to push a bad product through social media. It seems to me the harder you push how great a product is, the more likely you are to get dissenting view from customers. The study doesn’t say your product has to be good, it just has to meet expectations at least half-way.

Continue to experiment and learn. Social media is changing the way we interact with products. Be a part of the change and experiment. The last bit or preliminary data I will share from the Kalypso study is that those that are doing it are seeing business benefits (revenue, time to market, reduced cost). This is real, get on it.

So that was a quick peek into some recent research on social networking and business, 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 free research and white papers about product innovation and product development from Tech-Clarity.

I had the chance to talk with … Razorleaf during a research project earlier this year. Razorleaf helps manufacturers leverage PLM, Design Automation, and other enterprise technologies to improve product development and engineering processes. During the conversation, it was clear that they really understand how enterprise technology can be applied in an engineering environment. They are ready to step in and deliver the enterprise services required to implement PLM. But how much of the “PLM” ecosystem is really ready and capable to implement PLM? In my experience, too few.

What Razorleaf Does

Talking to the people at Razorleaf, I recognized the approach and skillset they use to implement engineering solutions. Yes, they know the products. But they also know how to help companies transform their processes, change their business, align their organization, and all of the other lessons learned from implementing systems like ERP and supply chain management. I recognize these in part from my research, and in part from spending a number of years with Andersen Consulting (now Accenture) implementing enterprise applications. These solutions require more thoughtful implementations than engineering tools, because improving the productivity of an individual is not enough. They have to improve the way the overall business works together. Not an easy task, but that is where the value comes in. This is what Razorleaf does.

How Razorleaf Fits in the PLM Ecosystem

Why did it strike me that they had this knowledge? Because too few resellers in the engineering software market have these skills. What comforted me, though, was that it is exactly those resellers that call on Razorleaf to help their clients. The good news is that the resellers know – or maybe it is their manufacturing customers – that there is more to a PLM implementation. This is likely the reason that other companies such as Kalypso (an innovation consultant with strong enterprise and PLM skills) is on the scene at so many PLM implementations. I find frequently that companies like these are pulled into implementations early on to help augment the skills of the software resellers (and even the vendors themselves).  It also helps explain the importance of a resseler like NovaQuest (a Dassault Systemes reseller with significant PLM experience)

Impliciations for Manufacturers

Why is this important to the manufacturing community?  If you are implementing PLM, make sure that those doing the implementation understand the different between implementing software tools (CAD, CAM, CAE, etc.) and enterprise applications like PLM. It can be the difference between a technically successful implementation that provides little or no business value (what I like to call a failure) and improving your business performance through the use of PLM technology.

So that’s what I hear from Razorleaf (with some additional perspective thrown in, I think it might be as much “What I Learned” as “One-to-One this time). I hope you found it useful. What do you think? What else should I have asked them?

What I learned this week … came from Bill Poston at Kalypso in his reply to a Business Week article titled “Innovation Interrupted – The Failed Promise of Innovation in the U.S.”

BusinessWeek June Cover

Bill’s commentary really got me thinking about a really fundamental question. Do companies have too few product innovation ideas, or are we just not good at turning those ideas into profitable products? It also made me ask a separate question, “is this really a U.S. -centric issue or is this a global issue?”

Overview

The original article, written by economist Michael Mandel, appeared in BusinessWeek in June. In the article, Michael makes some strong assertions that  the U.S. has not been as innovative over the last decade as it has been in the past, and goes further to point to this lack of innovation is a contributor to the current U.S. financial trouble. He points out a number of areas that held promise in the late 1990′s that failed to live up to market expectations, including:

• Biotech
• Alternative energy
• MEMS (microelectromechanical systems)

Michael explains that “the commercial impact of most of those breakthroughs fell far short of expectations,” and points out the information technology (IT) market as the shining star of innovation over the last decade. What Bill picked up on was what I believe is the story within the story. In Bill’s words, “the problem is more often in the basic fundamentals of new product development and commercialization.” Mr. Mandel supports this as well by saying “Many of the technological high hope of 1998, it turns out, were simply delayed” and “if the current rate of commercialization picks up” the U.S. Economy may recover more quickly. Bill comes down clearly on his viewpoint, saying that “We do not believe that we lack the ability to deliver innovation nor that success is necessarily dependent on brilliant insights or strategies” but that companies “need to focus on the fundamentals and make better business decisions.”

My Perspective

Is this an innovation problem, or a product pipeline problem? Or am I just splitting hairs, and the definition of “innovation” should end with “to make a profit?” I think if I looked through my archives I would find that I define profitability as a core part of my definition of innovation. To me, this story (and Bill’s response) is what I hear from manufacturers everywhere I turn:

• We have enough ideas, we just don’t know how to sort through them to find the valuable ones
• We don’t have a process to effectively take innovation and turn it into profitable, commercial products

Digging deeper, we would probably hear:

• We have too much junk in our portfolio / product pipeline
• Our product pipeline is overloaded
• We can’t move new product development projects through the pipeline fast enough
• We don’t kill projects soon enough

What does all of this mean? Like Bill says, most companies are missing the fundamentals. There are very good, proven best practices that a lot of manufacturers have not adopted. Many companies face the same problems. They are solvable. A process for innovation is important, but a process to commercialize that innovation is a fundamental requirement for a commercial business.

Implications for Manufacturers?

The implications? I will keep this brief. Focus on innovation, but don’t just focus on coming up with great ideas. Focus on new product development and (like the tagline of my old company Sequencia) turning product innovation into profits! Sounds simple, but there is a lot of work to do and it is time to get started.

So that is what I learned this week, I hope you found it interesting. Let me know what you think.