Did you mean ALM or ALM or ALM ?

The problem with a TLA is that there is a limited number of combinations that make sense. And even once you have found the right meaning for a TLA, like PLM you discover so many different interpretations.

For PLM I wrote about this in my post PLM misconceptions –: PLM = PLM ?
I can imagine an (un)certain person, who wants to learn about PLM, might get confused (and should be – if you take it too serious).

At the end your company’s goal should be how to drive innovation, increase profitability and competiveness and not about how it is labeled.

As a frequent reader of my blog, you might have noticed I wrote sometimes about ALM and here a similar confusion might exist as there are three ALMs that might be considered in the context I am blogging.

Therefore this post to clarify which ALM I am dedicated to.
So first I start with the other ALMs:

ALM = Application Lifecycle Management

This is an upcoming discipline in the scope of PLM due to the fact that more and more in the product development world embedded software becomes a part of the product. And like in PLM where we want to manage the product data through its lifecycle, ALM should become a logical part of a modern PLM implementation. Currently most of the ALM applications in this context are isolated systems dealing only with the software lifecycle, see this Wiki Page

ALM = Asset Lifecycle Management (operational)

In 2009 I started to focus on (my type of) ALM, called Asset Lifecycle Management, and I discovered the same confusion as when you talk about a BOM. What BOM really means is only clear when you understand the context. Engineers will usually think of an Engineering BOM, representing product as specified by engineering (managed by PDM). Usually the rest of the organization will imagine the Manufacturing BOM, representing the product the way it will be produced (managed mostly in ERP).

The same is valid for ALM. The majority of people in a production facility, plant or managed infrastructure will consider ALM as the way to optimize the lifecycle of assets. This means optimizing the execution of the plant, when to service or replace an asset ? What types of MRO activities to perform. Sounds a lot like ERP and as it has direct measurable impact on finance, it is the area that gets most of the attention by the management.

ALM = Asset Lifecycle Management (information management)

Here we talk about the information management of assets. When you maintain your assets only in a MRO system, it is similar like in a manufacturing company when only using an ERP system. You have the data for operations, but you do not have the process in place to manage the change and quality of data. In the manufacturing world this is done in PDM and PLM system and I believe owners/operators of plant can learn from that.

I wrote a few posts about this topic, see Asset Lifecycle Management using a PLM system, PLM CM and ALM – not sexy or using a PLM system for Asset Lifecycle Management requires a vision  and I am not going to rewrite them in this post. So get familiar with my thoughts if you read the first time about ALM  in my blog.

What I wanted to share is that thanks to modern PLM systems,  IT infrastructure/technologies and SBA it becomes achievable for owner/operators to implement an Asset Lifecycle Management vision for their asset information and I am happy to confirm that in my prospect and customer base, I see companies investing and building this ALM vision.

And why do they do this:

• Reduce maintenance time (incidental and planned) by days or weeks due to the fact that people have been working with the right and complete data. Depending on the type of operations, one week less maintenance can bring millions (power generation, high demand/high cost chemicals and more)

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• Reduce the failure costs dramatically. As maintenance is often a multi-disciplinary activity errors due to miscommunication are considered as normal in this industry (10 % up and even more).  It is exactly this multi-disciplinary coordination that PLM systems can bring to this world. And the more you can do in a virtual world the more you can assure you do the right thing during real maintenance activities. Here industries similar as for the previous bullet, but also industries where high-costly materials and resources are used, the impact on reducing failure costs is high.

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• Improve the quality of data. Often the MRO system contains a lot of operational parameters that were entered there at a certain time by a certain person with certain skills – the fact that although I used the word certain three times, the result is uncertainty as there is no separate tracing and validation of the parameters per discipline and an uncertain person looking at the data might not discover there is an error, till it goes wrong. Here industries where a human error can be dramatic benefit the most from it (nuclear, complex chemical processes)

Conclusion: The PLM system based ALM implementations are more and more becoming reality next to the ALM operational world.  After spending more then three years focused on this area, I believe we can see and learn from the first results.

Are you interested in more details or do you want to share your experience ? Please let me know and I will be happy to extend the discussion

Note: On purpose I used as much TLA’s to assure it looks like an specialist blog, but you can always follow the hyperlink to the wiki explanation, when the TLA occurs the first time.

JOS