Clarity on PLM

A quick peek into some research on … the use of business intelligence in PLM provides insight on taking advantage of the tremendous amount of product data  accumulating in today’s PLM systems. The research discusses how the maturation of manufacturers’ PLM implementations has created a tremendous volume of untapped information that can be leveraged to improve product innovation, product development, and engineering performance. As it has in previous enterprise applications (ERP, CRM, SCM, others), the time has come for manufacturers to tap into their growing information goldmines through the use of business intelligence (BI) tools.

The Research Findings

The research points out two parallel trends in PLM implementations today:

• Manufacturers have moved forward along the PLM implementation maturity curve – meaning they now have stable implementations and clean data
• PLM has evolved and expanded to incorporate more valuable, business-focused data in addition to technical information – meaning the data to be mined covers a broader spectrum of the product lifecycle, including cost, projects, sourcing, service, and more in addition to purely technical engineering data

The result of these two trends is that there is now a lot more usable business data in PLM. The report points out a number of areas of value that can be mined from the data, including savings on new product development timelines, closing the loop from service to engineering, improving product quality, analyzing sourcing, and reducing cost. In short, it shows that value can be extracted by improving pretty much any part of the product innovation, product development, and engineering processes. Please read the report for more details and examples.

Implications for Manufacturers

The message for manufacturers is that “there is gold in them hills” …. errrrrr, in those databases. The research also points out some special considerations for business intelligence in a PLM environment. For most manufacturers, applying a BI tool is not the difficult part. In fact, they probably have (at least) one tool available in their IT toolkit. But before diving in from a technical perspective, manufacturers need to be very careful to consider security, IP protection, and regulatory requirements that surround this very sensitive data. Manufacturers should also look for ways to leverage PLM vendor offerings or partnerships that give them a ready-made view into the PLM data and security model, to avoid spending time recreating the wheel and potentially making mistakes that provide misleading “facts” that people will trust. As the report says, “Developing an effective BI in PLM strategy also requires knowledge of the engineering and product development domains and the specific software applications being mined.”

So that was a quick peek into some recent research on the maturation of PLM implementations and the opportunity it provides for data mining in PLM, 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…is that it is really fun to pick on Facebook because it doesn’t have the capabilities to support product innovation, product development, and engineering. Of course, it was never intended to and that is probably not a market that they are really very interested in. But it is fun, and also helps to bring home some of the requirements that are important for social computing in PLM. This post started as a reply to Stan’s comment on my not building an airplane on Facebook post, and I realized after about 17 pages of comments that maybe I had better turn it into a blog post. Thank you Stan for bringing up a lot of very good questions.

Some Good Questions

Stan brought up a lot of good questions. Some I have thoughts for, others are just good questions that will require the thoughtful development of a solution – one that works in the real, complicated world of product innovation, product development, and engineering (and yes, just to take one more shot at it, that is not Facebook). I have pulled out what I consider some core questions from the comment and offered my thoughts below (hopefully well paraphrased):

How do we have Time to Pay Attention to This (in addition to everything else)?

People will make time for what is valuable. If people can get the information they need faster through social computing capabilities, then it will pay for itself. If we can eliminate 90% of status e-mails (and their redundant replies) then we will save time overall. Or, if we gain access to technical, market, or customer insight that we didn’t have access to before, the value will come in more profitable products. Social computing should be replacing innefficient communications and processes with more efficient and/or more effective ones. If not, it is just a sinkhole for time. As much fun as it might be to share Dilbert cartoons with coworkers, social computing in PLM must focus on enhancing communication and collaboration in a business context.

What Good is Sharing Status Updates (like Facebook)?

I believe status, even like Twitter or Facebook, can offer business value. But it has to be status in a business context - not a social context. For example, there is little business value in me knowing that you are visiting your son for the holidays. But if we are coworkers and I know you are visiting one of our key suppliers next week, I might be able to leverage your visit to accomplish some of my goals with that company as well. Or if we are on a project together and you say “I am redesigning the left widget today,” I might really like to know that because I am working on the right widget, and we may be making incompatible decisions. Considering the distance between team members these days (globalization, outsourcing, etc.) I probably won’t hear about this at the water cooler or over the cube wall, but maybe on a “social” network we are both on for our project. This is where a company today could use an internal tool like Yammer or maybe even SharePoint.

What Good is Sharing Photos (like Facebook)?

I think the commenter may have been baiting me with this one. Sharing product information visually can go a long way. Whether it’s a 3D representation of my widget (with rotation, sectioning, measurement, explosion, etc.) or something simple like sharing a photo of some sketched artwork for the packaging, the old adage that “a picture is worth a thousdand words” rings very true in product development – particularly product development across language and cultural boundaries. Even Facebook photos (or Twitpics) could help here.

What about Security and Protecting IP?

Now, we start getting to some hard questions. If we believe that some of the things above are useful, we probably also believe that we only want to share the information with the right people. On Facebook, it might just be our competitors as easily as it is our coworkers. Or on Twitter, we are just posting into the public timeline (viewable by all, unless you protect your updates which makes it much less useful overall). Today’s social networkings are just not built to handle the kind of robust data access needs that you would find in a product development/engineering environment. What about auditability? Revision control? Regulations like ITAR? Nope, not yet – and probably not ever for a “social” social computing tool as opposed to a “business-oriented” social computing tool, or even a “PLM-oriented” social computing tool (through development or extension of an existing platform).

So that is what I learned this week, I hope you found it interesting. Thanks to Stan for his thought-provoking questions, and thanks to Facebook for being such an easy target. I doubt their product managers are reading this, but if you are please know that I realize you never intended to support these kinds of requirements. Well, except for stability, and I know you will get that right eventually. Let me know what you think.