Get Savvy about PLM

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 thier 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:

should be viewed as positive evidence that PLM is coming into the forefront of corporate understanding. They conclude that 60% of the respondants 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 respondants 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.

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 controled - 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