Get Savvy about PLM

November 18, 2009

Fundamentals of PLM Seminar Video

Filed under: Uncategorized — Laila Hirr @ 5:51 pm

I was recently asked to speak at Portland State University for the School of Engineering Technology Management’s Graduate Seminar.  What was unexpected was that they filmed the session to post on their site which is viewed internationally by the PICMET community.  PICMET stands for Portland Information Center on Managing Engineering and Technology (an annual conference attended by academia and industry from around the world).  www.picmet.org

 

The seminar series is found at http://www.etm.pdx.edu/new/seminars.aspx

The recording of my seminar is listed at http://online.etm.pdx.edu/video2/eclass/seminar/10-29-09/part1_files/fdeflt.htm

 Enjoy,

Laila

April 22, 2009

Successful Implementations – Invest in Phase 1 – Establish the Business Case for PLM

Filed under: Cost and Benefits, Lessons Learned, Mythbusting, Success or Failure: Lessons Learned — Laila Hirr @ 2:46 pm

A reader recently asked me to share perspectives on successful PLM deployments – what are the common themes across successful implementations.

The thought that comes to mind first and foremost is the upfront planning.  By planning I don’t mean the development of a project schedule or of the system requirements - it’s the investment in taking the time to really make sure the business justification is well understood.

There is a process I have used repeatedly that involves managing expectations very carefully before engaging the software vendor.  Too often it seems that the PLM decision is reactive – as sold by the software vendor, not based upon a clear set of business drivers.

To be successful with the process steps executive level endorsement is critical as it has a lot in common with a business process assessment in that it probes the entire organization, however, the assessment is focused upon the product record, not operations or production.  The challenge for many however having someone who knows  PLM well enough to be able to see the opportunities is often not a skill set contained within your company.  The cost of having consulting done for this stage is often well worth the initial investment when taking into account the overall investment you may end up making in the implementation.

The single most significant thing to be done is to look at the PLM project with the same kind of rigor as a product development project.  Too often IT projects (coming from a non revenue perspective) fail to use simple PMO types of processes.  It all starts with the business case phase.

phasedprojectplans

But on the successful implementations – the business case stage would include the following activities:

  1. Take your organization chart and mark every department that handles product related information, identify key external partners that are also interacting with your product records (note – do not count your financial transactions here – just focus on the product information).
  2. Evaluate each department around it’s  handling of product information or the product record look for manual transactions, duplicated entries, printouts, markups, shadow databases, network storage of product information.  Include examining what IT infrastructure components are involved.
  3. Dollarize the impact of the “non-value” added activities associated with these product record related transactions – the caution is that executives will readily let you turn this into a blame game rather than a financial business case – so be careful how this is framed (Read the Dollarization Discipline for more on this).
  4. As in product development project management practices – develop a high level specification (similar to a Market Requirements Document) that ties business objectives to the functionality requirements – this is NOT where to say it must run on xyz database, or have n tier architecture.  This is a market level specification for executive consumption.
  5. Obtain executive buy-in for the next stage – do not go too deep into specification definition until this phase is approved.

January 7, 2009

Today’s economy and the enterprise: Now or Never

Filed under: Cost and Benefits, Enabling Technology — Laila Hirr @ 11:57 am

I watched Charlie Rose last night as he met with Leo Apothekar, co-CEO of SAP AG, and Andrew Mcaffee of Harvard Business School as they discussed the state of affairs with the economy and IT. Mr. Apothekar at the end of the discussion stated that in today’s economy there are two behaviors in IT: Now or Never. That companies recognize that either they must invest now in the process factories (his description of the enterprise applications) for efficiencies or they risk not surviving.

Some of the key points they discussed that I found very pertinent are that:

1) the Lack of Integrations of systems has been an Achilles heel to the IT industry. This was most clearly brought out in the examination of the intelligence community after 9/11 and in today’s banking situation. Too many systems and too isolated systems have led to breakdowns in critical functions. The good news is that more and more of the enterprise applications have been making the access to the data structures simpler and thus easier to build integrations.

2) the need for flexibility to foster use. As Andrew Mcaffee stated it was once thought that to get a good outcome you had to tightly control the process, yet wiki and open source show us that the organic controls are working.

3) the connectivity inside, outside and across boundaries is through process. Leo Apothekar gave a very visual description of this environment. To add to his words I’d suggest you take a look at code swarm Code Swarm videos give a very good sense of the complexities and interactions of product development (for code) – after watching it – just imagine the interactions that include electrical and mechanical design, not just software – and you begin to get a sense of how crucial access, vaulting, and change management are across both the internal and external enterprise.

4) the emergence of “cloud” computing for the enterprise. The use of the internet or the “space out there” as the environment for the enterprise operations.

In their discussion they covered other topics such as the challenges of employee retention and the viability of open source for the enterprise. I’m pleased that Charlie Rose programming posts the replays on their website, since he is on so very late at night.

November 26, 2008

18.5% improvement in profit margins with PLM? Sign me up!

Filed under: Cost and Benefits, PLM — Laila Hirr @ 4:50 pm

PTC sent my husband the following Aberdeen report today

    The Best Kept Secret of Top SMB Product Developers?

published in July 2008, that confirmed what I see every day in the SMB market and in the SMB perception of PLM. What was interesting was that they concluded that SMB Executives are still struggling with perceptions.

SMB executives under estimate the level of effort associated with implementation yet they largely overestimate the overall cost of PLM. Aberdeen has a very good chart in the report showing the difference between reality and perception.

The best in class SMB’s see a 26.5% improvement in profit margins after deploying PLM showing that definitive ROI is available. To be that successful, the execution of planned implementation, out of the box systems, and conscious adaptation of business practices all being spearheaded with executive buy-in is critical. But even the “average” SMB implementation of PLM is yielding an 18.5% improvement in their profit margins.

What is heartening to me is that Aberdeen confirmed that the PACE framework that I’ve adhered to for years, is the primary means for a successful PLM implementation, namely
- Executive goal setting/workshop
- Requirements gathered from across the enterprise (not just engineering)
- Prioritize PLM plan to address top pain points
- Executives remain involved throughout process
- Address business process mapping prior to implementation
- Measure/track estimated deployment costs to actuals
- Establish success criteria prior to implementation

Thank you Aberdeen for providing one of the best business based perspectives on PLM I’ve seen in a long time.

July 30, 2008

IT invests in Collaboration Tools – so where is PLM?

Filed under: Cost and Benefits, Mythbusting — Laila Hirr @ 5:36 pm

I was reading this weeks issue of Information Week – following an article on one of my favorite topics – IT spending (in an uncertain economy)…and was heartened to see several key comments. See

In the article from July 28th, 2008 – Stare down the bear it is stated that companies are viewing the present uncertainties with a view to “leap ahead of weakened competitors” and are “plowing ahead on collaboration technologies” while conserving in the tactical areas.

This should hearten those of us who work extensively in PLM – yet it doesn’t. The frustration is that too many executives view PLM as an “engineering system” not as an enterprise necessity. While many PLM systems get implemented within engineering departments it’s typical to find that in short order, the rapid access to product information, the supply chain enabling, the multi-site collaboration capabilities – more employees within a company will be accessing the PLM environment than any other enterprise application.

Many of the PLM systems enable design reviews, assembly instructions, site specific component designations, hazard tracking, safety notices, policies, and processes all to be maintained across the business. Any business that has multiple facilities and produces products, should not forget that PLM is a highly critical collaboration solution (some even include conferencing systems embedded within them).

If your business is looking for efficiencies and reduction of costs associated with communications and collaboration – hopefully you are looking at your information flow in that context as well and examining what can be done to eliminate the overheads associated with transfer, loss, duplication of product information. After all – your business is based upon your products, right?

July 11, 2008

The importance of a long term roadmap for PLM

Filed under: Cost and Benefits, PLM, System Selection — Laila Hirr @ 10:28 am

One of the big project level benefits of a PLM implementation is that most PLM solutions can be rolled out to the users in stages. New PLM processes and workflows and modules can be incrementally added after the foundation is laid – this is GREAT and it is TERRIBLE.

It is great that PLM can have core functionality within weeks or months of starting a deployment – systems like Arena Solutions or Teamcenter Express that target the small businesses can be rolled out literally in 1-2 weeks if your business can accept out of the box workflows for change management. For the mid-sized businesses systems such as Agile and Windchill can typically be deployed within 3 to 4 months with core functionality in place. What adds time to these types of deployments is typically dealing with preparing the training program and process documentation associated with implementing these solutions. With the larger enterprises implementing Windchill, Teamcenter or Enovia the enterprise complexities come into play earlier and take longer to deploy at 6-9 months, but even the large enterprises tend to only see a small piece of the PLM vision and only obtain limited benefit due to stopping at change management.

What is terrible is how many PLM systems get implemented without an enterprise roadmap that takes the implementation beyond the foundational deployment. Change management is put in place without enabling the part classification (to enable reductions of duplicated parts). BOMs are built without enabling Multisite or BOM variants (tracking the site specific build data or the engineering vs. manufacturing BOM). Manufacturer and Supplier data is managed with the product information, yet the external partners are still sent CD’s or paper and kept outside the loop on major changes that impact their contribution to the finished product.

Why is this? It is the curse of the initial success of a PLM deployment. When an ERP system is rolled out for the first time (after 2-3 years preparation) it gets turned on with 90% of the functionality in place and then is very cautiously modified mostly for tuning purposed. PLM on the other hand can be rolled out successfully with only 40-50% of the business functionality implemented and considered successful at which point the senior management often thinks the project is done – losing the vision for the other 50-60% of business benefits that have yet to be obtained.

It is this tendency that makes the initial long term roadmap so critical. Without defining what the long term business objectives are that the PLM deployment is to address the execution typically halts after the “engineering” system is in place yet the enterprise enabling capabilities have not even been tapped into. The selection of the system is often targeted at a short term objective, then the longer term benefits may be hindered or require a second PLM system to obtain the next tier of benefit. (See Gartner’s Predicts 2008: Manufacturing IT Becomes More Than Business IT, December 2007)

No company would deploy ERP without a 5 year plan. Yet PLM, which impacts 30-40% more end users than ERP, typically is deployed without a similar long term plan. Then the users and the management end up stymied about why the benefits expected from PLM have yet to be achieved. (See Aberdeen’s July 2007 report – Profiting from PLM: Strategy and Delivery of the PLM Program)

What is your PLM roadmap?
Have you tied the PLM implementation to true business benefit or are you just implementing a data vault?
Do you have a phased plan that identifies the business value obtained from each and every phase?

What many companies will find is that for true understanding of what is possible and what to do to build that roadmap – it takes experts in PLM and in your industry issues to help you build that vision. To expect the IT or Engineering department to vision cast is often not possible – as internal resources often do not have the subject matter or process expertise to cast the PLM initiative into a plan that ties the implementation to direct business strategy.

December 1, 2007

PLM challenges according to Dr. Grieves

Filed under: Enabling Technology, Mythbusting, PLM — Laila Hirr @ 7:16 pm

I attended an incredible meeting of some of the top minds in PLM at Purdue University’s PLM Center of Excellence last week and while there was far too much discussion to cover in detail, I found Dr. Grieve’s closing comments to be worth noting. With his permission, I am including just a few highlights – very paraphrased as he is an orator worth taking note of and I just can’t take notes that fast…

Some of the key points he raised were:

  • The need to understand that PLM involves a paradigm shift – from atoms to bits – as our technology allows for more and more simulation of the real world – we can do more “virtually” to pre-build our designs and even our manufacturing plants – without physical prototypes – a savings of time, material, energy and more.
  • People issues with PLM are bigger than the technical issues – to extract value from PLM means educating people about the possibilities that the PLM tool training alone does not provide (investing in the subject matter training is as important as the software training and perhaps more so).
  • The absence of PLM related metrics is concerning but we should not allow the absence of metrics to paralyze us.
  • The CXO’s who are investing in PLM KNOW it is NOT optional and they KNOW that business survival depends upon their execution of PLM.
  • Multicultural teams and virtual teams pose new challenges to business. Isolated groups of people are not equal to globalized teams where literally everyone is working on the same development work around the world. Dealing with the time zones for globalized team communication is a problem we haven’t even begun to address.
  • The vendors have been focused on PROCESS – yet innovation does not conform to processes. By definition process stifles innovation. PLM needs to enable PRACTICE – the creative side of product development. Innovation does not come from workflows and process maps.

I enjoyed meeting the folks at Purdue and the participants of their PLM Advisory Board. Keep your eyes open for good things in PLM from Purdue.

Copyright 2007, LHirr, All rights reserved.

November 19, 2007

Apologies for the long pause

Filed under: Uncategorized — Laila Hirr @ 2:45 pm

Many apologies to the readers of PLM Savvy for such a lengthy silence. I have been at various customer sites providing deployment and consulting services for the past few months. I’ll be starting to get more updates going again – I have many more case studies to share with you as I am also launching into new levels of PLM consulting and services.

Stay tuned…

July 21, 2007

The problem with PLM Polls

Filed under: Mythbusting, PLM — Laila Hirr @ 12:30 pm

Yesterday I got my weekly email from CIMDATA with their PLM Industry Summary – I regularly peruse it for updated information and particularly tend to find their weekly polls informative. This week’s poll however concerned me and it surprised me when I read the analysis.

This week’s article is not yet posted on their website – however it should be located at http://www.cimdata.com/newsletter/archive.html in the next few days.

The bottom line was that CIMDATA concluded that the following:
CIMDATA Poll 07202007

should be viewed as positive evidence that PLM is coming into the forefront of corporate understanding. They conclude that 60% of the respondents place PLM in the “strategic” bucket. I disagree with the analysis. CIMDATA polls are fed by consumers of CIMDATA’s weekly updates on PLM – therefore their predominant respondents ARE knowledgeable regarding PLM regardless of what department is responding. What the poll does NOT do is have evidence that companies that are not engaged in leverage PLM actually would answer the question the same way. My concern about the poll results and the analysis is that it could lead people to be complacent regarding the need to educate senior management regarding the business impact and benefits of PLM.

So many companies I see still regard PLM as not well understood, as an engineering issue, or lacking value – not because of the consumers but because of the need to show clear evidentiary proof that PLM is a financially necessary business investment for the executive buyers. As I have mentioned before – too often I see the PLM decision being driven by the CAD decision, and when that happens the PLM system will rarely shine as a productivity and process enabler.

So be careful what you read into poll results such as these.

Copyright 2007, LHirr, All Rights Reserved.

July 2, 2007

Waste in the information stream

Filed under: Information Change Management, Mythbusting, PLM — Laila Hirr @ 2:47 pm

I was reading a book authored by my friend Steve Bell today. In his book

    Lean Enterprise Systems

he raised an issue that resonates with me. He cited a study in the International Journal of Logistics from which he concludes “in many organizations 99% of the information processing activity is wasteful…” as a result of the “improper use of IT.” His comments resonated with me due to the fact that PLM systems can be viewed as product information “meta” data vaults or “file” vaults or a combination thereof.

The question of what information belongs where plagues corporations and the enterprise systems that they use. Which system is the master and what system is the master of what data. Some simple rules to live by are related to how the “change” of that information impacts the resulting product. Some examples are:

Changing warehouse and bin locations - does not change the actual product so should not be controlled with PLM workflows

Changing suppliers – “may” change the output product depending upon whether the supplier is a distributor of standard stock items or whether the supplier is actually a contract manufacturer who uses production methods that rely on a “recipe” to produce the output – so the vendor must be qualified and the recipe would need validating.

Changing coatings – qualifies as a form, fit, function change and must be treated as revision controlled – yet may be managed at a metadata level not in vaulted files, thus is a change control issue for PLM workflows.

Changing lifecycle status – crosses a boundary zone – defines purchasing decisions, yet some companies will treat this as revision controlled (board changes from prototype revision to production revision. But it changes the design change rules followed by a company.

Changing buyer designations – again this is procurement information that is not to be controlled by the PLM system – yet impacts product change decision processes in terms of when changes occur – who should be reviewing the changes.

So the challenge is to define what data is “owned” by which systems, and what data is “consumed” by which systems. The resulting systems integration requirements can be very significant – and need to be thought out very carefully. And perhaps even ask the question is it integration that is truly needed or is it that the data is needed to be merged for specific repeatable processes – but let each system own its own data and use the right tools to access and view the right data. The tools exist…

Copyright 2007 – LHirr, All rights reserved

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