PLM holiday thoughts

July and August are the months that privileged people go on holiday. Depending on where you live and work it can be a long weekend or a long month. I plan to give my PLM twisted brain a break for two weeks. I am not sure if it will happen as Greek beaches always have inspired for philosophers. What do you think about “PLM on the beach”?

There are two topics that keep me intrigued at this moment, and I hope to experience more about them the rest of the year.

Moving to Model-Based processes

I believe we all get immune for the term “Digital Transformation” (11.400.000 hits on Google today). I have talked about digital transformation in the context many times too. Change is happening. The classic ways of working were based on documents, a container of information, captured on paper (very classical) or captured in a file (still current).

As every stakeholder in a company (marketing, engineering, manufacturing, supplier, services, customers, and management) required a different set of information, many pieces of information all referring to the same product, have been parsed and modified into other documents.  It is costly and expensive to get a complete view of what is happening in the business. Meanwhile, all these information transformations (with Excel as the king) are creating an overhead for information management, both on IT-level and even more for non-value added resources who are manipulating information for the next silo/discipline.

What we have learned from innovative companies is that a data-driven approach, where more granular information is stored uniquely as data objects instead of document containers bring huge benefits. Information objects can be shared where relevant along the product lifecycle and without the overhead of people creating and converting documents, the stakeholders become empowered as they can retrieve all information objects they desire (if allowed). We call this the digital thread.

The way to provide a digital thread for manufacturing companies is to change the way they organize the product development and delivery processes. A model-based approach is required. I wrote about in a post: Digital PLM requires a Model-Based Enterprise a year ago. The term “Model-Based” also has many variations (67.800.00 hits on Google today). Some might consider the 3D MCAD Model at the center of information both for engineering and manufacturing.A good overview in the video below

Others might think about a behavior/simulation model of the product for simulating and delivering a digital twin often referred in the context of model-based design (MBD).

And ultimately a model-based approach integrated with systems engineering into Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) allowing all stakeholders to collaborate in a data-driven manner around complex products based.

You can learn a lot about that during the upcoming PDT Europe conference on 18-19th October in Gothenburg. Concepts and experiences will be shared, and my contribution to the conference will be all about the challenges and lessons learned from the transformation process companies are embarking on becoming model-based.

PLM and ALM

A second topic that becomes more and more relevant for companies is how to combine the domains of product development and application software empowering these products. The challenge here is that we have no mature concepts yet for both domains. It reminds me of the early PDM implementations where companies implemented their PDM system for MCAD software and documents. All the electrical stuff was done disconnected in separate systems and somewhere in the product lifecycle information from MCAD and ECAD was merged in the bill of materials and documents. Mainly manually with a decent overhead for people consolidating the data.  Modern PLM systems have found best practices to manage a combination of mechanical and electronic components through an EBOM even connecting embedded software as an item in the BOM.

Now more and more the behavior and experience of products are driven by software. Sensors and connectivity of data are driving new capabilities and business models to the market. Customers are getting better connected, however also the companies delivering these solutions can act much faster now based on trends or issues experienced from the field.

The challenge, however, is that the data coming from the systems and the software defining the behavior of the products most of the time is managed in a separate environment, the ALM environment. In the ALM environment delivery of new solutions can be extremely fast and agile, creating a disconnect between the traditional product delivery processes and the software delivery processes.

Companies are learning now how to manage the dependencies between these two domains, as consistency of requirements and features of the products is required. Due to the fast pace of software changes, it is almost impossible to connect everything to the PLM product definition. PLM Vendors are working on concepts to connect PLM and ALM through different approaches. Other companies might believe that their software process is crucial and that the mechanical product becomes a commodity. Could you build a product innovation platform starting from the software platform which some of the old industry giants believe?

PLM combined with ALM concepts are the ones to follow, and I am looking forward to meeting the first company that has implemented a consistent flow between the world of hardware and software. So far there are many slide solutions, the reality and legacy at this moment are still inhibitors for the next step.

Conclusion

There is still a lot to discover and execute in the domain of PLM. Moving to a data-driven enterprise with all stakeholders connected is the challenging journey. Can we build robust concepts taking accuracy, security, and speed into account? I believe so, in particular when dreaming at the beach.

 

Bye for now