Get Savvy about PLM

May 17, 2010

Quality Management Systems (QMS), Document Management (DMS) or PLM? What are the differences?

Filed under: Mythbusting,PLM,System Selection — Laila Hirr @ 1:55 am

Copyright 2007, LRHirr

Definition of QMS/DMS/PLM

This topic has been sitting in my notes as a to-do for a very long time.  From a very high level perspective, terms like knowledge management, document management, quality management and product management just create confusion for folks – are they all referring to the same thing?

Quality Management Systems (QMS) are considered to be focused upon a company’s quality records, often including the ability to manage basic workflows around corrective actions/preventative actions (CAPA), statistical process controls, non-conformance reports.  Most QMS systems are industry focused and are often tied to the medical device industry and the pharmacology industry.  QMS systems may or may not have document management system (DMS) level capabilities.

DMS systems are focused upon managing documents electronically.  The systems are typically structuring to support “file folder” based information and have workflows to support revision history and change processes around those electronic files.  DMS systems typically cannot support product structures and the more complex relationships of tying documents to a bill of materials. Some document management systems will “build” a compiled content site for large scale web environments that are sensitive to rollouts of new art, press releases, special offers and such.

Product Lifecycle Management(PLM) systems  may or may not have QMS level templates, however they support a broad range of workflows, are highly adaptive and handle the change management of documents, folder based file management and the product structure related file management.  PLM systems often include capabilities to manage CAD data, Bills of Material, program management, requirements management, view and markup capabilities, and supplier access to key product related data.  PLM will not “build” a content site.

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 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.

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

June 20, 2007

Should your CAD system result in a default selection of PLM?

Filed under: Mythbusting,Organization,PLM,System Selection — Laila Hirr @ 9:33 am

All PLM systems are not created equal. When we work with our customers to select a PLM system we evaluate the entire business situation not just the engineering department. Too often PLM is viewed as an engineering system only and yet in every case we’ve seen it put in place successfully, PLM rapidly outgrows the engineering department and becomes an enterprise wide, process changing, paradigm shifting, productivity enhancing system. Manufacturing users of PLM often exceed the engineering users, and Field Service also rapidly jumps on board to get proper information on the products they service.

The irony is that all too often, PLM selections are made in the shadow of a CAD selection, being viewed only as a means to handle CAD vaulting. This is a waste and will result in less than optimal use of the PLM system. In addition, it means that the system selection for PLM is driven by CAD and not by a systematic business benefits, enterprise wide justification, and then executives perceive that they have a “qualified” system and ignore the fact that key process needs are not met by the system.

In my opinion – these types of selections are as poorly advised as selecting your PLM solution based upon your ERP system. In both cases the PLM solution has not been selected to meet your full business needs but has been selected as a “default” decision.

Copyright 2007 – All rights reserved LHirr

June 7, 2007

Impacts of the mergers and acquisitions of PLM vendors

Filed under: PLM,System Selection — Laila Hirr @ 5:13 pm

Okay – I’ve been biting my tongue long enough regarding the shifting sands of the PLM space. The past year has seen massive movement among the players and the question is not really how do these deals impact shareholders but how does it affect the longer term delivery by the vendors to the customers.

Here are my personal views of the changes…

Agile-Oracle
I have been up close and personal with Agile customers for years. I service systems that range from Agile 6 to Agile 9 and see the same trends over and over again – users tend to use Agile well – out of the box functionality is great BUT Agile has had ongoing issues regardless of version with system stability and with the responsiveness of the support desk. Every version of Agile has had some sort of workaround for stability that involves “restarting services” 3-5 times per week to keep the systems stable – that has always concerned me. In addition, Agile helpdesk has been notorious for assigning issues to “marketing” or “engineering” which customer after customer has described as a “black hole” from which the issue never gets resolved. The overall product is good – but for these components (stability and support) to remain issues for 6+ years as the most common complaint I encounter is surprising. So my biggest question on behalf of the customers would be – will Oracle do better? I would expect so. Oracle actually can make the connectivity between Agile and Oracle databases work – but will MS SQL be abandoned yet again? I also can’t imagine that Oracle helpdesk can be worse than Agile’s was – so I hold hope but it will take time for everything to shake out.

Siemens – UGS
UGS has been on the auction block many many times over the last 5 years – First the SDRC and UGS pull into EDS, then EDS spin off back to UGS (held by investment companies) and now being bought by Siemens. Like Agile – I’ve been up close and personal there too – but I see a big difference. UGS has maintained a rock solid product consolidation roadmap through all the changes. Any one who talks to the management at Seimens/UGS will be getting a consistent message that has fundamentally not changed for the past 5 years – a commitment to making the customers succeed and to bringing about the synergy and merging of products. The main problem has been the distractions of change – no matter what – that much change means that cultures have to blend, work things out, settle – and it can’t help but slow things down. It is commendable that the roadmap has been carefully adhered to and that the customers have as a result remained highly loyal.

Dessault – MatrixOne – Connesio – … and what else
MatrixOne had all but disappeared from the PLM market space here in the Pacific Northwest. I maintain relationships with many of the vendors and their folks had vanished – next thing I knew Dessault had picked them up and also not long after picked up Connesio. That was on top of the already mixed up combination of Enovia, SmarTeam and PDMWorks. I honestly haven’t figured out the strategy. Now PDMWorks “Enterprise” is a repacked renamed form of Connesio. The analysts are confused, the customers are confused – which system will become the mainstay? How is scalability intended to be addressed? What is the flavor today? Dessault maintains presence through it’s offering of Solidworks to the mid-market and leverages that presence to catch the unwary and most needy businesses into PLM solutions that are still partially complete.

What of the others…PTC, Arena, SAP – these haven’t had the acquisitions to deal with so I’ll talk about them next time.

Copyright 2007, All rights reserved – LHirr

January 18, 2007

Should your PLM system live on Oracle or MS SQL?

Filed under: Enabling Technology,PLM,System Selection — Laila Hirr @ 9:54 pm

I was preparing to set up the basic framework of a commercial PLM system at a customer site recently and ended up finding a engineering vs IT debate in progress. Engineering wanted the most pre-built quick to deploy system the selected vendor could provide so readily signed a PO with the vendor for a solution that required the use of MS SQL 2005. When I arrived to do the readiness check, I found that IT was adamantly opposed to MS SQL and would prefer the route of implementing the next tier PLM system (requiring more configuration work) in order to remain with their database environment – Oracle. Thus the age old debate renewed itself. Personally I don’t have a preferance – there are business decisions that warrant the use of either system. It was getting past the hyperbole that I realized was really the issue as this topic does come up often.

So first what are the top tier PLM Vendor trends with supporting the two environments.

Agile – Supported Oracle and MS SQL when they first launched, withdrew support for MS SQL 5 years later, and recently renewed support, September 2006(see http://www.agile.com/pressreleases/index.asp?view=566
Dessault – Supports MS SQL as of November 2005 (see http://www.3ds-microsoft.com/news/2005%2011%2007.pdf)
PTC – Hot off the press – announcing MS SQL support as of Jan. 17, 2007 (see http://www.tenlinks.com/NEWS/PR/PTC/011707_microsoft.htm)
UGS – Has supported MS SQL since October 2004 (see http://www.ugs.com/about_us/press/press.shtml?id=3856)

Why is it that these companies are willing to invest in the architectual changes required to add the support for MS SQL. Obviously this was not a decision to be taken lightly. The NUMBER ONE reason is that the buyers of PLM systems today are in the “mid-market” and the majority of mid-market companies struggle with Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). While many may argue that Oracle is very cost effective, it tends to be the long term costs of skilled Oracle DBA’s that drive the TCO up.

Yet the bias I hear “against” the use of MS SQL – is often based in the historical distrust of Microsoft and concerns about security holes – so I found the linked report by David Lichtfield, fascinating in that it really addresses the question of the security holes “myth”

As I said – I don’t really care which database server I setup customers PLM systems on. The ones I’ve deployed that use both – don’t seem much different from the adminstration of the PLM applications in and of themselves. The vast majority of the time the configuration does not involve even interacting with the database at the database server level after the initial database creation. So if the install scripts work, and the customer wants one over the other – I’ll make sure I understand the reasons, advise them on any issues and move on.

Copyright 2007, LR Hirr, All Rights Reserved

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