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I realized that time is flying when you are busy, and I promised to publish the conclusion from my previous post: More on who decides for plm in a mid market company. In my two previous posts, I described the difficulties companies have to select the right PLM system. So far I discussed the two extremes, the silent approach where a possible bottom up approach was discussed and as the opposite where an ‘academical’ approach was followed.
Now it is time to get the answers on the academical approach.
These were the questions to be answered in the previous post:
- How much time has passed since the management decided PLM was good for their organization?
- How independent is the consultancy firm?
- Did they consider open source PLM as a solution?
- What was the ranking of the PLM vendors?
How much time has passed since the management decided PLM was good for their organization?
The whole process of selecting a PLM system often takes more than one or two years, starting from the first activities till the final conclusion to start. I believe this is unavoidable, as especially in mid-market companies the business values that PLM can bring are not always discussed and realized on the strategic level.
However, I believe the recent years PLM has been recognized by analysts, by software vendors and many young companies as a necessity for innovation and in the long term remaining competitive. And this is not only in the classical domains where PLM started – automotive / aero / industrial equipment. PLM value is everywhere in different industries, even apparel for example.
For companies that are now in the decision process, I believe 2009 and early 2010 are the years to decide, because a recovery of the economy might put back the focus on execution and not on strategy and they might miss the management focus for PLM. And as I wrote in a previous post, companies who made the best pit stop will benefit upmost.
For companies still in doubt: It is now or never
How independent is the consultancy firm?
It is clear that real independent consultancy firms do not exist – even if a consultant wants to be independent, there are three challenges to meet:
- How can a consultant evaluate or judge PLM systems they have not seen?
- How much experience does the consultant have in your business?
- How much work is there required in the project for the consultant?
As you can imagine, reviewing the above challenges, you will realize that consultants usually specialize in systems, where their expertise it required – as they also want to make a living. Consultants cannot afford to be an academic institute, as coming back to the previous point, all consultancy work at the end will be paid by the customer.
So to conclude on this point, if you want to be cost-effective, a company should do already a pre-selection based on systems and possible implementation partners, that fit naturally to their type of business and then evaluate how consultancy can be achieved.
What you will find out is that the major ‘expensive’ packages have loads of consultants to offer en the more and more you go into a mid-market environment, consultants become rare. For software from PLM vendors you will usually find a reseller network with people close to your offices that can support you. For Open Source software you will need to find the consultancy services through their software delivery program.
Anyway remember: 50 % of the success of a PLM implementation is based on the right implementation approach and partner not on the PLM functions and features.
Did they consider open source PLM as a solution?
No, because the consultant was not familiar with it, and discouraged the company to look at it. In general Open Source PLM, like PLM On-Demand are interesting trends to follow and should not be neglected. However the focus and approach for this type of solutions is different. I will not generalize at this moment as also I have no clear picture where Open Source PLM or PLM on Demand would be a big differentiator. I will try to evaluate and report it in future posts.
Comments from Open Source PLM Vendors or On Demand PLM Vendors are welcome to complete the PLM selection approach.
What was the ranking of the PLM vendors?
Ranking was done by the management, the selection team and the design department. These were the results plus their major comment:
Management
1. The slide show PLM provider – they liked the business pitch
2. The CAD supplier with PLM features and gadgets – good guys – we know them
3. The PLM provider who showed everything – too much handling of data – too complex
Selection Team
1. The PLM Provider who showed everything – they really did it
2. The CAD supplier with PLM features and gadgets– we understand where they are going
3. The slide show PLM provider – do they really have a solution?
The Designers
1. The CAD supplier with PLM features and gadgets– he knows what we want
2. The slide show PLM provider– could be a good solution too
3. The PLM Provider who showed everything – too complex, it will limit our productivity
As the management had the final vote, they decided for the slide show PLM Provider, as they felt most comfortable with them.
The reason to drop the CAD supplier was that they were too afraid this provider does not know all about PLM. Both management and users felt the PLM provider that showed everything was too complex, this opposite to the project team where the members were very familiar with PLM capabilities after two years investigation and many demos and trade shows.
Conclusion: Selecting PLM, even in an academical manner is a subjective process. As in general the customer does not exactly knows what he needs and often the PLM provider shows too much in detail, the real journey starts at implementation time. And in this stage you need an experienced implementation partner who can match and communicate the expectations
Two weeks ago I was writing about the Silent PLM approach. What I showed in that post that often the PLM vision as a complete vision does not exist in all layers of the organization.
Often the management in is not aware of where and how PLM can have an impact. In the Silent Management approach, one or more visionary people believe they can introduce PLM by starting it in their department, and from there grow and extend the impact of PLM. As I concluded, this approach usually fails in most of the cases as when the decisive step comes to extend PLM to other departments and to change current processes, this is the point where is mostly gets stuck.
Other departments and the management do not see how this engineering / CAD extension could benefit for them and the whole organization. Why not extending our ERP system as this already exists ? And here a stand still will come up until a push comes. The push can come from the top or from the outside world. From my experience more then half of the companies that started this silent PLM approach got stuck where they are ……..
So this time another approach, called the academical approach. And again a disclaimer, I am generalizing and putting some points a little more in the extreme to demonstrate the difference between the approaches. Any similarity with the real world is pure coincidence
Approach 2: Academical PLM
Inside our mid-market company ACCPY, the management has understood that PLM will bring a lot of benefits and in case they were not aware of it, they have learned from analyst reports, from blogs and from their network that PLM should bring a lot benefit for them.
So the management decides to prepare and educate themselves and they start a PLM taskforce inside ACCPY to collect and digest all the information. The team has enthusiastic members from all departments and starts buying some books and reports on PLM. In addition they visit some PLM events all around the country and sometimes around the continent. These visits lead to contact with PLM Vendors who also start to educate why their PLM is the one fitting ACCPY the best. After one or two years of education they are theoretical skilled and know to differentiate between EDM, PDM, cPDM and even they learn to understand the difference between PDM and ERP.
As a conclusion of their learning stage the PLM taskforce presents to the management a firm report, explaining what is PLM and how ACCPY can benefit from it plus recommendations how to proceed.
The management is happy with the result, that what they thought two year ago was really valid and agrees with the report and recommendations. Now the selection of the PLM system needs to be done and who will be the implementation partner. Although all PLM vendors have been knocking on their door already to explain the benefits and implementation approach from their solution, ACCPY decides to hire an ‘independent’ PLM consultancy firm to assist with the selection of the solution.
The consultancy firm starts with interviewing the key members of ACCPY, in order to understand the major processes and the needs per department. A month later they present to the management a PLM Vendor Selection Procedure, where in 15 pages the PLM Vendor has to explain and confirm requirement per requirement, the implementation approach and give a budget estimate.
This RFQ will be sent to 5 PLM vendors which were already in touch with ACCPY since the PLM research started. Also the consultancy firm brought in a company which they new very well. It takes a few weeks for the consultancy firm to compile the RFQ and two months later the responses are there.
From the received proposals three PLM vendors are invited to benchmark their system and company based on a business case developed by the consultancy firm together ACCPY.
PLM Vendor 1
The first PLM vendor gives a standard demo of the system and explains that the business case is well known to them and therefore instead of showing it, they give a whole set of screenshots and references. The attendees had a good feeling with this vendor
PLM Vendor 2
The second PLM vendor tries to follow exactly the business case as defined. The attendees liked the fact that all was demonstrated so well, however the PLM system seems to be rather too complex and giving a lot of overhead to the engineers, according to their impression.
PLM Vendor 3
The third PLM vendor was already known to the company as they were also providing the 3D CAD system. In their presentation they explained how well they knew ACCPY already and that the business case was too artificial. They demonstrated some gadgets of their PLM system which none of the competing vendors could do, thanks to their tight integration with the CAD system. The attendees were impressed, however a few days later, they were asking themselves, why were those gadgets needed ? None of the other vendors talked about it and it was also not part of the RFQ.
So now it was time for the consultancy firm together with the task force to process all the information and to determine the final score. On product features they had a nice comparison – only hard to tell what was most important. On usage it was more difficult, as they got three different approaches during the benchmark, so the scores for this section was rather artificial. Also the financial part seemed to be hard to compare but at least it gave an indication.
As it is an academical approach, my post for this week ends here. We need to give the ACCPY task force together with the consultancy firm some time to build a justification for their choice and next week we will discover how this story ended. Meanwhile ask yourself:
- how much time has passed since the management decided PLM was good for their organization ?
- how independent is the consultancy firm ?
- did they consider open source PLM as a solution ?
- what was the ranking of the PLM vendors ?
- read the book Blink the power of thinking without thinking about intuition
Conclusion (so far): Academical PLM takes time and it would be unfair to explain it all in one post.
So next week the real conclusion.
This week I realized that, although I believe the benefits of PLM are more and more accepted in mid-market companies, the decision how to start and where to start with PLM is often not clear. I recognize several approaches which I will describe in this and some upcoming posts.
All persons in this post are fiction and in case you recognize these persons in your company, it is pure coincidence. Instead of talking about approaches,I was tempted to call it strategies, but when you read my observation you will realize the word strategy would not fit.
Approach 1: The silent PLM
Inside our company, often there is an engineer or an engineering manager, who got caught by the PxM virus. The PxM virus is a modern virus, which makes you a believer that PDM or PLM will bring your company a lot of benefits. Documents and proof points of the severe impact exist all around the world. However nobody has gotten infected so far in this company. Everyone is working the way they worked since many years and life is secure and predictable.
Now this infected engineer is getting exited and dreams about the introduction of PLM in his company and how he will become the hero of the company and gets a big promotion. Unfortunate for him in this kind of business there are no big bonuses to collect, so the honor of promotion is already a big achievement.
So the first thing this engineer does is chatting with his peers and friends to find out where PxM has been implemented successful and he studies some success stories which he learned from his network.
Now the challenge starts.
He goes to the management and shows a nice PowerPoint, explaining why the company needs PxM and what are the expected benefits, based on reference stories. The management has no real clue what he is talking about, but it looks promising and they allow him to select a PxM system for his department and to start a pilot.
The engineer already knows which PxM system to choose. The one, recommended by the friendly reseller, who sold them their 3D CAD system (which is a success) and worked hard with him to finalize the slides. As requested by the management he had to invite two other PxM vendors to make an objective selection and at the end an impressive comparison matrix is shown to the management why system A has been chosen.
Now the implementation starts and step 1 is very successful. The document management part around the CAD system goes smoothly and everyone in the engineering department starts to be happy.
Following this successful implementation there are two options:
- the engineer does not get promoted and the implementation ends. It will remain a silent document management implementation and the dream is put aside.
- the engineer gets promoted and continues to push his vision as now he has a broader audience to spread the PxM virus. We will follow this story line…….
The engineer gets promoted and continues to push his vision
This is the best that can happen and the engineer, who now became the head of engineering, starts to express his vision to his fellow managers, explaining the advantages of PLM. Notice, he is now talking about PLM as the scope has been extended beyond product data management, involving other disciplines in the organization.
And here the head of engineering discovers that his fellow managers are also infected by a virus. Not the PxM virus, but one of them has already for many years the ERP virus. And as the ERP virus addresses the operational and financial tasks in the organization, the management trusts him. The sales and marketing department seems to be infected by CRM, but currently they caught a social disease, which made them push for all kind of communities. The management either likes it (as their kids are also on Facebook) or dislikes it, because they believe work is a serious business and being on internet all day is considered gaming.
So the head of engineering realizes that he has some freedom within his department, but the other departments and the management have their own priorities. And PLM is not on their list. Together with the friendly CAD reseller, who meanwhile was promoted to be Senior PLM Consultant, they work on a perfect PLM environment within the engineering department and they believe their success will show off in the upcoming years.
And then the crisis came and the company had to cut budgets. To be continued in (hopefully) 1 or 2 years
Conclusion: The silent PLM approach has a huge chance to fail as there is no corporate vision and management push to get PLM implemented. PLM should be addressed top-down. As in many mid-market companies there was also no strategically partner, who could assist the management to build a vision and to set priorities.
Next week:
approach 2: Academical PLM
This week I was reading a management article completely unrelated to PLM, but very applicable for PLM. The article stated that one of the basics of capitalism is innovation through crisis. Never let a crisis pass by without using it for your benefits was the message.
As we are currently in the middle of the economical downturn (according to the optimists or pessimists – we still have to figure out who is right), this is the moment for the management to decide. Do we try to sit still till it does not hurt anymore , or are we making strategic changes that will for sure demolish some holy houses but from the other hand will create a more lean and stronger organization after the change ?
Examples of IBM and GM were given from the nineties. IBM made the change from a hardware company towards a software company, where GM kept on doing the same with even bigger SUVs’. We know the results…….
Does it prove anything ?
For sure there are many companies that haven’t survived the nineties as they were not successful in their transformation, although they really tried. So where is the relation to PLM ?
I believe that the problem of implementing PLM, and specially in mid-market companies is the fact that there is no ambition for change when things are going relatively well. In one of my old posts I referred to the story of the boiling frog.
This happens when an organization is slipping down slowly and it is hard for the management to change and define and sell internally another strategy. Jobs and people are kept in place as long as affordable and only natural evolvement (an aging workforce) or mergers are drivers for a change.
Now with this crisis it is different. Everyone realizes (or should realize) that going on the same manner with the same people is not good for survival (unless you are in one of the few industries that benefit from the crisis – apparently the fast food industry I read)
In times of a crisis, first of all the management is challenged to come with a survival plan and in most cases this time they can get support from their employees as there is always the threat of lay offs if people are not creative or flexible for change. Secondly, employees will be also more flexible to save their jobs and the company (usually in this order)
Therefore this is the ideal moment to implement PLM in phased approach. For a successful PLM implementation you need employees, who are open minded to change the way they work, plus you need internal resources that have time to work with the implementer to fine tune the PLM system.
This moment exists now and by implementing PLM in a phased approach, each phase will bring ROI, perhaps even before the end of the crisis as you can start with the low hanging fruits and start to collect the benefits.
In parallel there is the discussion around free open source software or dumping software for free by some PLM providers in order to stay in the market. I think here as a customer you should always realize that every company, also software providers, need to survive the crisis and will look for income in another way – services / maintenance / additional software.
So my conclusion this time:
I never realized that both capitalism and PLM were striving for innovation. They have a crisis in common – For capitalism it is a must to push innovation for PLM it is an enabler for innovation
I am not sure if it depending on the holiday season but apparently from my side at this moment things have gone quiet. Customers are either on holiday or delaying their PLM processes due to holidays or economical downturn. For that reason some unstructured thoughts
How PLM is Nokia ?
Two weeks ago I wrote a post about the problems found with the introduction of the new N97 phone from Nokia – see How PLM is NOKIA. As a victim of their NPI process I am still trying to understand their business reasons to be quiet in their responses. From the NOKIA forum, at this moment already 14 pages of discussion, there is no response from NOKIA, see GPS is cutting out on my N97. It is clear that NOKIA is following the discussion as the moderator has removed some posts, but no positive response from NOKIA’s side. Personally I believe a missed opportunity.
Interesting to see that NOKIA avoids to communicate around this problem. I can imagine keeping the problem silent at least does not alert people not using the GPS, from the other side, in times of crisis customer loyalty is probably something that assists a company in hard times.
PLM lesson learned: the costs of fixing problems once your product is in the field is dramatically higher as compared to the cost made during engineering. Did they do virtual testing ? Did they have a prototype phase ? Or was the product dumped into the market to compete with the iPhone ?
An interesting case to follow – anyone from NOKIA to comment ?
PLM Market Forecast Revised Downward.
V or a W-shape?
Another surprise was the report coming out from CIMdata where they mention that the initial growth expectation for PLM needs to be adjusted – see PLM Market Forecast Revised Downward.
In March, the research house had predicted 3.8% year-over-year growth in 2009 and 6.3% compound annual growth over the next five years — which would have pushed the market to $36 billion in revenue in 2013. Stating in a mid-year report released this week that “the global economic situation has been even more severe than anticipated,” the PLM consulting and research firm said it circled back to include data from the first half of 2009 in its figuring.
CIMdata revised its forecast for the PLM software market in 2009 and beyond, saying it now expects a decline of 2.1% in 2009 from 2008 revenue levels and a 3.5% compound annual growth rate from 2009 to 2013, to just under $31 billion in 2013. The company estimated the 2009 market at $25 billion.
The article contains some more interesting details, as it is also mentions virtual manufacturing, which I believe is one of the key benefits of PLM. I see it as one of the competitive advantages many companies should pursue to cut costs even though it requires an investment and change of work ( real PLM implementation)
This brought me to the good (or relative good) news. According to the first optimistic signs we have had our worst point of the recession and things can only go better – this are the V-shape believers. After the downturn we will continue as before.
The more pessimistic analysts say we are in a W-shaped recession. Although things are getting better, we will fall back again and recover later, perhaps in 2010.
Both might be right, but what I see is that either end of 2009 or end of 2010 the estimates are that PLM is back in focus. Will this be business as usual or did companies take the opportunity to modernize themselves towards PLM ? The CIMdata reports suggest the opposite, in my post Economical Crisis and PLM – YES WE CAN I tried to explain that investing now in PLM brings an advantage for the future. Companies that now do not look or investigate in PLM might come in a more difficult situation when the economical growth starts again. As the focus will be than on the old business, the chance for management attention and focus on PLM might become too low. Companies that currently invest in PLM take obviously more risk at this time, but will already reap the benefits faster
PLM, PLM 2.0 or a new PLM ?
Another interesting and ongoing discussion is the discussion where PLM is heading. Where in mid-market companies the discussion often is around the need for PLM beyond CAD data management and ERP, others are already visionary talking about the new PLM, which is based on people, social networking and communities. Look at Vuuch and discussions on PLMTwine and Tech-Clarity. Main question here how will people change, will it be the new workforce that naturally replaces the old workforce and while replacing introduces new ways of PLM or will it be a concept driven from the big enterprises as a new wave of PLM ? I believe this will become more clear when the economy picks up again and companies might have the bandwidth again for some experiments in this area.
Meanwhile I stay on my island
You might have heard about the chaos theory and the butterfly effect ? In general, the theory promoted by Edward Lorentz and others, claims that the flapping of the wings of a butterfly, somewhere in South America may influence ultimately the path of a tornado, either preventing or accelerating that a tornado may hit at a certain place in North America.
WOW, if a butterfly can do this, can you imagine the impact of all of us, flapping our notes and plans around PLM in an organization ? What a chaos we can create ?
I came to this association, looking back on my activities the past three weeks. Talking with implementers and companies, who all had a tornado of wishes and activities, trying to create order through a PLM implementation – the anti-chaos theory.
Most of the discussions were based on a typical mid-market approach.
What do I mean by a typical mid-market approach – and I am generalizing here. None of the people I have been talking to in the past weeks match the exact characteristics, however all contributed to the picture in my mind.
Typical mid-market approach (my generalization):
- (Power) User Driven / Do It yourself approach – inside the organization there are people who have the dream to improve the company with PDM / PLM and the energy to prove it. They build the plan and define the solutions. External resources are only hired to do specialized services, fitting in the thought process of the power users. They believe that everyone will see the benefits of the implementation and join their approach step-by-step enthusiastically.
- Focus on technical details– often the wishes are based on implementing technical capabilities close to the understanding of users, usually requiring a minimum of change in the daily processes. For example the focus might be on a technical capability how to connect the PLM system to the ERP system (Middleware / XML /Web Services / …..) instead of discussing how it will work from the process point of view – how is the process impacted ?
- Task solving – much in combination with the previous point, the focus is on optimizing and/or automating tasks of a certain user. The end-user’s daily tasks/pains are the focus for solving, which means trying to automate as much as possible, providing as much as possible single system / single screen solutions.
- Risk Avoidance – often these companies do not have the capabilities (people / time / budget) to experiment with new directions. Approaches from other similar companies are followed (looking for references). For sure not a bad approach, however the result is it will be harder to be differentiate from your competitors. And of course risk avoidance should always be considered in the scope of manageable risks.
- Lack of top-management investment / push – although the top management in these companies subscribe to the needs for PLM, the focus of the investment is usually mainly on the external costs (software and services), where internal resources are forced to do the PLM activities beside daily tasks. Later the management will wonder why things are going slow, as they did their job (they approved the investment– waiting for the results now)
- Focus on business skills – the people in the project team are often well educated in their daily business and practices, but lack project management, risk management and change management skills. These ‘soft’ skills are often acquired by buying a book to be placed on the desk.
After writing these generalizations, I had the feeling that instead of characteristics, i was writing about risks . As this was not the intention, let see the how to manage these risks:
- The power users should realize that they are sent on a difficult mission which requires a lot of creativity to implement changes in the context of the PLM project. And strange as it seems the PLM software might not be the biggest challenge.
The biggest challenge will be on choosing the right best practices and to implement them with acceptance of the users. This is change management combined with implementation knowledge / experience. They point for the power users should be to have an implementation partner with experience, who can explain why best practices work and explain how other companies address this issue. Without practical guidance the power users have become pioneers, which is something the management for sure wants to avoid.
Often to avoid user objections, the project team decides on heavy customizations or ‘weird’ compromises – nice to keep the user community quiet, but bad for the future, as benefits will not be the same.
This mainly happens as there is too much focus the ‘hard’ side of the project ( hardware /software /IT /Services ) , and no or limited attention to the human / change management side.
Power Users – be aware ! - The management should realize that it is a company’s decision and vision. So from their side a steering committee with a clear vision is required. Their job is to keep the vision, prioritize the activities and make sure the power users are not creating an isolated solution based on their dreams.
The most important role of the management is to take continues responsibility for the project – it does not end by giving the approval for the project and budget. Where users might reluctantly accept changes, it is the job of the management to enforce the changes and support them.
This can be done in a harsh way by imposing the changes, however this will cause resistance and the end users will demonstrate the management was wrong. This leads at the end to a situation where the company as a whole will be in a worse position as before.
So managing by motivation should be the approach, as after all the power lies in motivated users, who understand the benefits of the changes and benefits for their future job.
Management – be aware ! - Make sure the focus and priority is on business not on IT. Sell and explain the business benefits internally all the time.
All be aware !
To conclude:
- The mid-market characteristics look like risks for a successful PLM implementation, if not addressed and taken seriously
- There is significant management support and control needed to monitor, guide and sell the PLM project.
To make sure the company benefits are targeted and not the individual users or departments demands only. - Implement bottom up but control and direct top-down
- Your implementation partner should have resources with skills for both levels – so not only programmers who can do miracles, but also consultants that can explain, validate best practices based on other experiences
Understanding chaos – enjoy:
I am writing this week’s post on my way to a customer to finalize an implementation and in parallel describing the Return On Investment of this project. But before that, I would like to have a short note about my previous post ‘Free PLM software does not help companies“.
The reason I wrote this post was because I wanted to assure that companies do not believe that ROI for implementing PLM is based on the software costs. PLM implementations are a combination of software, business skills and the company culture. Specially in the current economical situation, I wanted to make clear that these factors are not overlooked. Also I did not want to say Open Source PLM is bad, I made my points on the messaging, however in functionality and usage I do not see a big difference between other types of PLM systems. I got some interesting comments on this post and I advise all of you, who have read the post to go through the comments to get a broader perspective. Once I have had some more opportunity to investigate this area deeper, I will come with a more in-depth post on this topic.
To PLM or Not To PLM
But now back to: To PLM or Not To PLM, where I wrote in a first post on this topic that before judging the costs and ROI of PLM, we should start analyzing our current processes and situation and use this as a baseline to guesstimate the PLM benefits.
The first PLM phase to analyze is the concept phase, where new ideas are picked up (or not). Actually this is the phase where we define the future of the company. The economical recession in a way forces companies to rethink their strategy and fortunately all of the competition is in a similar position. downturn means less activities, the company might be in the position to allocate time to address these analysis for PLM ROI. Instead of making people redundant, use these people to work on a new and optimized product strategy.
Existential questions to ask yourself as a company
The basic questions to ask about the concept phase:
- Do we know where our products are currently in their lifecycle ?
Measure: quantity, sales trends, margin
Analyze: is our portfolio healthy ? - How do customer rate our products ?
Measure: market share, market awareness, customer satisfaction, quality, field issues
Analyze: will customers keep on buying from us ? - Where are we different from the competition ?
Measure: where do we win/ where do we loose and compare per quarter ?
Analyze: how can we improve the success ratio ? - In case of bidding
Measure: how many bids do we handle per quarter and with which effort
Analyze: What is the win percentage and how to influence this ? - Who are our customers ?
Measure: does the 80-20 rule apply – does 80 % of the revenue come from 20 % of the customers ?
Analyze: What is the trend specially in relation to the current market situation - Where does innovation come from ?
Measure: the amount of new ideas, the source (people, customers) and the ones that reach it to the portfolio
Analyze: Do we have a guarantee for innovation ?
Additional questions to be asked due to current financial and global situation: 
- How do we strive for climate neutral products – sustainable development ?
Measure: the amount of energy used to build the products but also to recycle and what remains
Analyze: How can we change our products and production process ? - How do we capture our company’s IP due to the aging workforce in most of the countries
Measure: How many people with the specific knowledge will retire in 5 – 10 years ?
Analyze: Where and how can I assure this knowledge remains in the company ?
For many of the above questions you might say that you know how to conduct your business as you are doing most of these activities and even more. However the question you should ask yourself also is: How long does it take to answer these questions and to react on these trends ?
Because all the above topics are positively influenced by PLM – here it the PLM ROI !
Project and Portfolio Management, company wide workflow process allow the company to measure, to run analysis and to have information within hours (or worse case in days), where in a company where every department and discipline has their own environment, the effort to collect this information becomes huge and not natural. And as it will take a lot of time to collect the information, people tend to react on their guts or intuition, which might be wrong if you are among the wrong people or if the world changes in a way never seen before.
Additional capturing product and process knowledge allows companies to contain their IP. And just to make this point clear: Product knowledge is not only CAD and Bills of Materials. It is all collected information: issues during design, during production, coming from field services, best practices used and more. The challenge anyway for every PLM system is to provide an environment, user-friendly enough for all users, to start managing their total product IP in a single environment.
Conclusion
PLM as a total approach brings a lot of value and control in the concept phase, the phase where the company’s future is merely defined. And it is obvious that the future should be green and sustainable. Use the current downturn to shape the future – the questions in this post and your analysis should be the base.
In the past year I shared with you my thoughts around PLM. Most of the post were based on discussions with customers, implementers, resellers and peers around the world. I learned a lot and will keep on learning I assume, as PLM has many aspects:
– the products, there are many products with the label PLM
– the concept, how do we interpret PLM per industry
– the customers, what do they want to achieve, without buzz-word
– the world, people and economic trends drive us sometime to irrational decisions
In this post I will give an overview from the 2008 posts, categorized by topic. I am looking forward to further suggestions in the comments if you are interested in more depth in certain areas. In parallel I will continue to share my experiences and provide an overview of best-practices and terminology experienced in the PLM space.
PLM concepts
Managing the MBOM is crucial for PLM
Is there a need for classification – and how should it be done ?
Is the PLM concept applicable for mid-market companies too ?
What will happen with PLM – looking towards 2050
PLM and ERP
PLM and ERP – the culture change, continued
Connecting PLM and ERP – part 1, part 2, part 3
PLM and ROI
Implementing PLM is too costly ?
Implementing PLM takes too long ?
Why implement PLM next to an ERP system ?
How is PLM different from CAD data management ?
Economical crisis creates the opportunity for change
Business Process Change
PLM in SMB requires a change in thinking
The management is responsible to initiate a change towards PLM
The change in automotive/aero supply chains to more advanced partners
How will mid-market companies pick-up the benefits from implementing PLM ?
Experiences
European Enovia Customer Conference (ECC)
PLM in Greece – does it exist ?
Is the concept for PLM mature enough ?
Don’t expect a bottom up PLM implementation to become successful
Conclusion
I would like to conclude with a quote from my favorite scientist, who taught us everything is relative, however:
“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”
Looking forward to your feedback, wishes in 2009 !
Jos Voskuil
This post is a reply on a post from YML, with whom I have been working in the past. At that time we had interesting discussions on various topics around PLM and I am happy to continue this discussion in blog space. Please read his post in order to understand the full reasoning below.
First I want to make a statement to avoid misconception. I am a PLM evangelist and perhaps my definition of PLM is wider than what PLM vendors currently offer. For me PLM focuses not only on storing and managing the product data (PDM), but also on the whole process of how new products or improved products are created, designed, produced and supported.
From the Dassault Systemes and Autodesk (read Jim Brown’s comments on them) perspective, there is a lot of focus on the collaboration around the virtual product, however for me personally, when working with mid-market customers, I am mainly focusing on capturing design knowledge and IP plus creating visibility of knowledge inside a company, without being dependent on knowledge stored in people brains.
Interesting development in that area I am observing recently is in www.vuuch.com. An initiative to empower design discussions.
Now back to the reply on YML’s post:
So when Yann writes:
However I disagree with the statement that you use as foundation : Software vendor are proposing excellent product with a good ROI and SMB customer don’t understand it because they do not have a vision.
I must say: read my statement above – there is still work to be done. When I am talking about the lack of vision in the mid-market companies, I will provide an update based on some experiences I had the past few weeks, where lack of vision is blocking process improvements.
Next Yann is mentioning all the propriety formats of all vendors, PLM vendors, vendors of authoring tools (CAD, Content,…) and even limited version support. Yann makes a point for open-source solutions, which are part of the WEB 2.0 evolution. Interesting to see that at the same time Kurt Chen writes an interesting post on What Can PLM Offer for SMBs? in the same context.
My main comment on this topic is that I understand the beauty of open source, however I also believe that if you want to work with open source solutions, you need to have a 100 % clear concept of what the product should do (that is why Linux is successful – I believe PLM is not there yet) or you need companies that have strong IT-knowledge/support to adapt the software to their needs.However, this contradicts the fact that mid-market companies usually do not have these resources to invest in this kind of activity. So what would they do ? Hire consultancy firms or software companies (sometimes the original developer of the open source software) to adapt the software to their needs. This creates almost the same dependency as what customers would have with traditional PLM vendors – they rely on their software provider as the resource to drive PLM.
Then the question comes up:
Who would I trust to assist my mid-market company to evolve towards PLM ?
A company developing software or a company that has experience in my industry and perhaps does not deliver the best in class product (yet).I have met a company that decided to discontinue PLM software as the provider only brought programmers into the game, they tried to solve requests from the users and at the end – after 1.5 year of programming the system became so complex but crucial details were missing. An industry knowledgeable person with PLM knowledge would approach it different – first focusing on the process and then analyze where automation would bring benefits.Also Yann mentions:
It is interesting to note that nobody is blaming Ford, GM, … of not being able to see that they have good chance to go bankrupt in some month from now. It is interesting that many people blame now these companies of not being able re-invent/adapt their products to their market. when all of them where using PLM systems and had huge PLM projects on going
and additional:
In order to develop this agility SMB need to put very high in the list of capabilities for their information system the following features : Agility, re-configuration, continuous evolution / transformation, openness, ease of integration with unknown system, overall strategy of the PLM vendor
Here I disagree with the first quote. Ford and GM have no PLM implementations, they built a dinosaur type of implementation with focus on product development – yes provided by PLM vendors, but so rigid implemented that they lost the capabilities to be connected to the market.And I fully agree with the second quote – nothing to add. PLM should be implemented in such a way that it does not restrict a company in its flexibility – as innovation does not come from doing a process more efficient – it comes from doing things different
So to conclude for today:
- Yes, current PLM vendors are not perfect and there is a challenge to reach the mid-market
- Open Source solutions make only sense if combined with industry knowledge
- Agility, re-configuration, continuous evolution / transformation, openness, ease of integration with unknown systems should be the overall strategy of the PLM vendor (not only mid-market)
Thanks Yann, and enjoy your fishing, take notice of what could happen:
The past few weeks a had various moments to interrogate myself about the values for PLM and what would be the best way to address PLM for a mid-market company.
First I was in Copenhagen, attending the Microsoft Convergence event. A meeting where Dynamic customers, resellers and partners from all around Europe came together to learn the latest from Microsoft, to network with other partners and discuss their business processes.
Of course the focus from all of the 4000 attendees was around logistical processes, I was very curious to learn how manufacturing companies would describe their needs and where they feel the missing link – PLM.
But they did not feel it ……….
I believe this is one of the most challenging issues for mid-market companies. They have been investing in their ERP system and consider this as the company’s backbone. Their production and finance is dependent on it. Other departments, like sales and engineering provide somehow their inputs to the system, often Excel is here the information carrier. No PLM vision exist – or in case it exists – it is perfectly hidden.
I touched this topic in one of my previous post, called: “We do not need PLM, we already have ERP”
So why is PLM not yet adopted by mid-market companies and I raise this question mainly for those companies that obvious would benefit from PLM ?
I believe the major reason is the fact that often in mid-market companies there is no high-level strategy available analyzing where the company should be in 5 years from now and what are the challenges to overcome. Most of the companies I am currently working with want to implement something they call PLM, but often it is just PDM.
The big difference between PLM and PDM is that PLM requires the company to work different across departments, where PDM is considered more as an automated way to centralize product data, without changing the department responsibilities.
And now some generalizations
In addition mid-market CAD resellers try to explain their customers that PLM is only for big enterprises and that they just need PDM. This of course makes their sales beyond CAD easier, as touching cross-departmental processes requires different knowledge (which their resellers do not have), a different product (which they do not sell) and of course a longer sales cycle.
The same happens from the ERP side. ERP resellers consider what happens in the engineering department as a black box, where product data is generated and at the end a (configurable) Bill Of Materials. ERP vendors do not jump on PLM as extending the process to engineering requires different knowledge (which is not their domain) , a more extended product (which they do not have (yet))
Mid-market companies are of course influenced by these resellers of their core components and as mentioned before do not have the time and budget to take a strategic, holistic view where the company should be in 5 years. Usually their focus is on solving the pains they experience in their organization. For example we have too many databases and spreadsheets per department, let’s put them all in one central place – more an IT focus then a business focus.
So how to get the vision ?
Companies should ask themselves the following questions:
- what is the success of my company ?
- will I still be successful in 5 years from now if I keep on doing the same ?
- how does globalization affect me ? Risks but also challenges.
- how do I capture the knowledge of my (experienced) workforce before they retire ?
To answer these questions (and the above ones are only the most probing) it requires time and understanding to build a vision. Perhaps the economical downturn creates the opportunity or need to prepare for the future (survival).
And if you are working in a mid-market manufacturing company, chances are big that implementing PLM is a way to guarantee the company’s future and success. This has been proven in big enterprises and mid-market companies are not so different at the end.
Adapting business processes and connecting the whole product lifecycle are key activities. Beyond PDM and ERP it brings portfolio management (which product bring the real revenue) and innovation (New Product Introduction – how do we make sure we introduce a good product in the market).
Conclusion
PLM requires a company vision and strategy. Building the vision is something that PLM vendors, business consultants and others can assist you with. Each group has its own pro’s and con’s but at the end it is the vision that is needed before making the change – it requires first of all an investment in brain power – not in products
Interesting to read:
Stay with the business processes or change them ?
Jos Voskuil's Weblog 
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