If you think you have the need for PLM, as everyone around you has PLM and you are sure you need it also, how do you select a PLM system?
If you are not familiar with PLM, PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) stands for a vision and a combination of best practices, industry dependent, that allow you as a company to be more innovative, faster too market, more customer centric and also with a higher quality and efficiency. The result: you are doing better as the competition – more margin, market share etc, etc
Next the implementation of this vision can be done by implementing pieces of the PLM vision on top of the existing systems already in your company. Extending the capabilities of your CAD system with some macros ; programming some capabilities around SharePoint to make information available and combined with Excel macros and an import in our ERP system, you believe you are doing PLM as you implemented parts of the PLM vision, mainly the efficiency part.
And then we get stuck, we would like to be more customer centric. Which macro to write for that? Or we want to connect our 3D designs to be used in a virtual prototype environment so we do not have to make the first real prototype to understand where to improve. Here the local reseller or IT-provider mentions it goes beyond his expertise (if he is fair).
For the full PLM vision, we see that the major PLM vendors have an integrated story, where all best practices and capabilities are connected and available on demand. Of course there is a discussion between themselves who has the best vision, the best integration between all these modules and who is the most efficient, but this is normal in a competitive world. You will find out the details during your selection process, but let’s agree you want all these benefits now or in the future, so the first conclusion is, you need to implement a PLM system in your company, and not small pieces of PLM capabilities in different systems and infrastructure.
And now comes the do not do this part, which I encountered in the past two months several times and from which I thought this approach was already considered by people, knowledgeable in this are as leading to failure.
The content below might lead to dissatisfaction in the near or longer future and the writer warns you NOT to use the methodology below
The company starts collecting requirements from all departments to assure they can implement the new vision. And as collecting requirements is a lot of work, they hire an external consulting company to do this work. The consultant(s) go and talk with all the different departments and at the end they collected a list of 100+ requirements, which after discussing them with the management are completed with another 50 requirements to assure the company is not going to select the wrong PLM system.
Then the company sends this book to all the known PLM vendors, telling them to respond within a timely matter (two – four ) weeks. And questions will be answered only through a very formal process via the consultancy company.
This type of questions you will find (and they are real):
- There should be a control for the renaming of CAD-parts and links
- It should be possible to search from the top to the bottom in the structure with all documents
- It should be possible to work with the following formats (3 common and 15 rare formats mentioned)
- It should be able to drag and drop information from one structure to the other
- The system should protect the users to make an error
- The system should run integrated with our ERP system (xyz mentioned)
- The system should be able to identify and manage project risk to support product and process changes throughout the product lifecycle
And one of my favorites:
- The system shall be able to create, update, maintain and process main and typical sorts and types of documents and their source data. Both “tabular” data (lists/datasheets) and graphic (diagrams, etc.) data, as well as text data (technical reports, etc.) are understood in this requirement. However see also requirement 18 and requirement 54. The scope and types of documents should be possible to be modified in an easy way for various projects and various stages of development documentation for those projects
And the management added:
- The implementer should come with a detailed implementation plan and budget
- The implementer should guarantee the budget stays with xxx range
- The implementer should provide 3 references of similar companies and tools.
The RFP document is usually a 20 to 50 page document – the amount of pages seems to have a correlation with the amount of money spent to consultancy. The total assembly costs for this document: 400 to 1000 man-hours (do your math for the initial costs)
Then the RFP document is sent to 5 or more potential suppliers, who need to answer for each requirement in detail if:
- It is standard in the system
- It can be done through configuring the system, explain.
- It can be done through customization, please specify
- It is not supported
Each vendor spends at least 500 man-hours to answer all these questions as much as possible with yes, it is standard. An although not understanding the requirements at all at some points, they only give positive answers, trying to stay away from the “It is not supported answer”.
So after at least 2500 (5 times 500) man-hours the company assisted by the consultant(s) think the know who to invite for the next stage of the PLM selection.
Did they make the right choice?
My statement is perhaps yes. So far they have wasted 3000 man-hours or more in the world just to be busy and come to a result which an experienced independent PLM consultant could do in a few days:
If you are this type of company – look at these vendors: company A, company B and perhaps company C for your PLM solution as you are in this industry, this IT-platform and this maturity – let’s discuss with them what we want to achieve
Next the real PLM selection process starts, here the investment and research should begin – and I would do this different. In my next post I will explain my approach.
Do you agree and would you do it different?
I am looking forward to your feedback.
In my previous post (PLM for the mid-market – your opinion) I started a very small questionnaire – if you did not have the time (takes less than 5 minutes) or encouragement (please, please) to answer the 4 anonymous questions, please go there. End of October I promised to publish the results in this blog.
Direct link to the questionnaire: http://www.enquetemaken.be/toonenquete.php?id=48804
Jos Voskuil's Weblog 
4 comments
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October 18, 2010 at 1:02 am
Jovan
This is becoming so common now… this becomes as ugly as the great days of ERP implementation in the early 2000…
In my ideal world I believe that “the customer” is the worst judge of its own pains. For the sale of time they gather list of inputs from the field compiles into a document that they call requirements.
I like an approach where you uncover unknown pains. You know, the root one. The one that is easy to fix but that will have +20% ROI.
In one of my former company they decided to implement a PLM… huge resistance to the change. People fighting over processes. They ended with such document and asked the PLM vendor to implement “THAT THING” (this is how I came to call it). After months of trying to help people to use “THAT THING”, i came to the realization that the biggest issue that the company had was to find drawings. It would take a purchaser 20 mins to find ONE drawing. It was never mentioned in “THAT THING”. nobody raised it even though everybody had the best idea for the ECR validation process.
We took 5 trainnees to scan all drawings in 3 months. Loaded them. It took purchasers 2 seconds to locate the information they needed.
Talking with customers at every level. Be here to to get licences bought but to help the customer to realize that with little they can do great and that they can grow from there.
Thanks Yannis for sharing your experience. Again we see here a customer who believes PLM (THAT THING) is a product, not a change in the way of working
Best regards
Jos
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October 18, 2010 at 10:46 am
yoann maingon
Hi jos,
Great article. It’s really nice to have someone focusing on the smb market. Before i started working in plm, my very first job was a process engineer position in an electronic company (was C-mac frequency products and got bought by Rakon). And as a process engineer you have no software solution made for you except Ms Excel or Ms Access. You are the link between production (big ERP users) and R&D (big CAD and PDM users). I even had to develop a php intranet on my own to manage our subcontrators processes in morocco. With that being said, my point is that I think because the plm industry is too much working toward big companies they don’t provide the correct tools for smbs. Smbs are still using Excel, I think before thinking about big PLM solution, we should think about, what is the next step after Excel? how do I make spreasheets connected? How do i link a word doc to a line in Excel making sure the link remains ok and handles versioning?
I filled your survey, and i really think that the solution will come from a new solution with an editor creating a software and the adequat business model specifically for smbs.(and i’m sure bigger companies will benefit from it)
best regards,
Yoann
ps: i tried to send it from the Ipad and from chrome but apparently didn’t work. I hope i’m not spamming you!
Thank Yoann for your contribution – you were right initial WordPress reported it as spam – but here you are
Best regards
Jos
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October 19, 2010 at 4:19 pm
Jonathan Scott
Jos, I have participated in too many of these PLM selection projects to count. I agree with your comments about what NOT to do in selecting PLM. Perhaps this demonstrates my bias as a PLM consultant, but I believe knowing what to implement (from a PLM software) and how to implement it is more important than which software you choose (assuming you have narrowed the field of PLM software packages to the top 2-3 for your industry). Only experience (not software features) can predict how well certain PLM capabilities will benefit a specific business process.
I’d like to underscore your initial point though, because I think it is not well understood either. Many SMB companies are frustrated by PLM because they have squeezed every ounce of efficiency out of their CAD and Excel-based processes. When it is time to re-imagine their business using some dedicated PLM tools, they ignore how much time they really put into their own custom tools/processes and want the switch to PLM to be quick and simple. Deploying a PLM tool is a culture-changing event (or should be). Unfortunately, many businesses deploy a PDM tool (in only those ways that don’t challenge their current practices) and then lament the fact that PLM didn’t bring them the promised benefits (note my use of PDM and PLM in the previous sentence – it is purposeful).
I suggest another possible framework for evaluating systems that can help with PLM (because it allows for comparison of software packages not traditionally known as PLM). I think companies should consider the “logic engines” provided by software packages and identify which are most important to them to help identify good options. For instance, many PDM systems have “logic engines” for document lifecycle, workflow, BOM maturity, vaulting, etc. You can see my series of posts on this topic here: http://www.razorleaf.com/2009/05/recognizing-engines-product-data-management/
Jonathan hi, Thanks for your point of view and I believe we are aligned understanding the value of experience instead of dumb checklists. Your approach of ‘engines’ is very much in line with the CIMdata defintion of which functionality a PLM system should have. Interesting discussion that pops up all the time, should all these ‘engines’ come from a single provider or should you be able to select them independently ? Here I am building my opinion at this moment as it is an interesting discussion on its own. A discussion I will start soon after the results of the quick poll I did in my previous post
Best regards
Jos
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October 20, 2010 at 9:41 am
Graham McCall
I prefer the ‘suck it and see’ approach spearheaded by PLM vendors like Aras (www.aras.com). Download the software for free, spend a fraction of the money you would have spents doing a big fat PLM selection on getting some help from people like us (www.aessis.com) in setting up something like Aras. Then if you like the software (and you probably will) then keep it and congratulate yourself on having saved your company a vast amount of time & money. And if you don’t, then follow the other lemings and go buy a big expensive system that was designed many years ago, is bloated, inflexible, hard to implement & expensive to upgrade etc etc..
Graham hi, thanks for your response and I tend to dissagree with your statements – a good discussion is required.
First I do not believe in, install a free solution, spend some time and you are up and running. It implies you have made your choice already, because if it works you stay with the software. If it fails you will never do PLM as you believe it does not work for you.
I agree we do not need a big fat PLM selection, and I liked the short checklist on your website – i hope prospects do not copy it and extend it again to a book.
Secondly there are various approaches to implement PLM and I believe in the learning approach. This means implementing PLM piece by piece, keeping the main vision accurate and in sight. By this approach and pushing the users towards small digestable changes you avoid heavily customizations. As a customer you also have to realize that the target of many PLM implementers is to make money too, so they sell services and do not say No to complex customizations – it is a job guarantee independent from the PLM Vendor . I am planning to come back in details on this in one of my upcoming posts.
Best regards
Jos
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