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After all my writing about The road to model-based and connected PLM, a topic that interests me significantly is the positive contribution real PLM can have to sustainability.
To clarify this statement, I have to explain two things:
- First, for me, real PLM is a strategy that concerns the whole product lifecycle from conception, creation, usage, and decommissioning.
Real PLM to articulate the misconception that PLM is considered as an engineering infrastructure of even system. We discussed this topic related to this post (7 easy tips nobody told you about PLM adoption) from my SharePLM peers.
- Second, sustainability should not be equated with climate change, which gets most of the extreme attention.
However, the discussion related to climate change and carbon gas emissions drew most of the attention. Also, recently it seemed that the COP26 conference was only about reducing carbon emissions.
Unfortunately, reducing carbon gas emissions has become a political and economic discussion in many countries. As I am not a climate expert, I will follow the conclusions of the latest IIPC report.
However, I am happy to participate in science-based discussions, not in conversations about failing statistics (lies, damned lies and statistics) or the mixture of facts & opinions.
The topic of sustainability is more extensive than climate change. It is about understanding that we live on a limited planet that cannot support the unlimited usage and destruction of its natural resources.
Enough about human beings and emotions, back to the methodology
Why PLM and Sustainability
In the section PLM and Sustainability of the PLM Global Green Alliance website, we explain the potential of this relation:
The goals and challenges of Product Lifecycle Management and Sustainability share much in common and should be considered synergistic. Where in theory, PLM is the strategy to manage a product along its whole lifecycle, sustainability is concerned not only with the product’s lifecycle but should also address sustainability of the users, industries, economies, environment and the entire planet in which the products operate.
If you read further, you will bump on the term System Thinking. Again there might be confusion here between Systems Thinking and Systems Engineering. Let’s look at the differences
Systems Engineering
For Systems Engineering, I use the traditional V-shape to describe the process. Starting from the Needs on the left side, we have a systematic approach to come to a solution definition at the bottom. Then going upwards on the right side, we validate step by step that the solution will answer the needs.
The famous Boeing “diamond” diagram shows the same approach, complementing the V-shape with a virtual mirrored V-shape. In this way providing insights in all directions between a virtual world and a physical world. This understanding is essential when you want to implement a virtual twin of one of the processes/solutions.
Still, systems engineering starts from the needs of a group of stakeholders. So it works to the best technical and beneficial solution, most of the time only measured by money.
System Thinking
The image below from the Ellen McArthur Foundation is an example of system thinking. But, as you can see, it is not only about delivering a product.
Systems Thinking is a more holistic approach to bringing products to the market. It is about how we deliver a product to the market and what happens during its whole life cycle. The drivers for system thinking, therefore, are not only focusing on product performance at the most economical price, but we also take into account the impact on resource extraction in the world, the environmental impact during its active life (more and more regulated) and ultimately also how to minimize the waste to the eco-system. This means more recycling or reuse.
If you want to read more about systems thinking more professionally, read this blog post from the Millennium Alliance for Humanity and the Biosphere (MAHB) related to Systems Thinking: A beginning conversation.
Product as a Service (PaaS)
To ensure more responsibility for the product lifecycle, one of the European Green Deal aspects is promoting Product as a Service. There is already a trend towards products as a service, and I mentioned Ken Webster’s presentation at the PLM Roadmap & PDT Fall 2021 conference: In the future, you will own nothing, and you will be happy.
Because if we can switch to such an economy, the manufacturer will have complete control over the product’s lifecycle and its environmental impact. The manufacturer will be motivated to deliver product upgrades, create repairable products instead of dumping old or broken stuff because this is cheap for selling. PaaS brings opportunities for manufacturers, like greater customer loyalty, but also pushes manufacturers to stay away from so-called “greenwashing”. They become fully responsible for the entire lifecycle.
A different type of growth
The concept of Product as a Service is not something that typical manufacturing companies endorse. Instead, it requires them to restructure their business and restructure their product.
Delivering a Product as a Service requires a fast feedback loop between the products in the field and R&D deciding on improving or adding new features.
In traditional manufacturing companies, the service department is far from engineering due to historical reasons. However, with the digitization of our product information and connected products, we should be able to connect all stakeholders related to our products, even our customers.
A few years ago, I was working with a company that wanted to increase their service revenue by providing maintenance as a service on their products on-site. The challenge they had was that the total installation delivered at the customer site was done through projects. There was some standard equipment in their solution; however, ultimately, the project organization delivered the final result, and product information was scattered all around the company.
There was some resistance when I proposed creating an enterprise product information backbone (a PLM infrastructure) with aligned processes. It would force people to work upfront in a coordinated manner. Now with the digitization of operations, this is no longer a point of discussion.
In this context, I will participate on December 7th in an open panel discussion Creating a Digital Enterprise: What are the Challenges and Where to Start? As part of the PI DX spotlight series. I invite you to join this event if you are interested in hearing various digital enterprise viewpoints.
Doing both?
As companies cannot change overnight, the challenge is to define a transformation path. The push for transformation for sure will come from governments and investors in the following decades. Therefore doing nothing is not a wise strategy.
Early this year, the Boston Consultancy Group published this interesting article: The Next Generation of Climate Innovation, showing different pathways for companies.
A trend that they highlighted was the fact that Shareholder Returns over the past ten years are negative for the traditional Oil & Gas and Construction industries (-18 till -6 %). However, the big tech and first generation of green industries provide high shareholders returns (+30 %), and the latest green champions are moving in that direction. In this way, promoting investors will push companies to become greener.
The article talks about the known threat of disrupters coming from outside. Still, it also talks about the decisions companies can make to remain relevant. Either you try to reduce the damage, or you have to innovate. (Click on the image below on the left).
As described before, innovating your business is probably the most challenging part. In particular, if you have many years of history in your industry. Processes and people are engraved in an almost optimal manner (for now).
An example of reducing the damage could be, for example, what is happening in the steel industry. As making steel requires a lot of (cheap) energy, this industry is powered by burning coal. Therefore, an innovation to reduce the environmental impact would be to redesign the process with green energy as described in this Swedish example: The first fossil-free production of steel.
On December 9th, I will discuss both strategies with Henrik Hulgaard from Configit. We will discuss how Product Lifecycle Management and Configuration Lifecycle Management can play a role in the future. Feel free to subscribe to this session and share your questions. Click on the image to see the details.
Note: you might remember Henrik from my earlier post this year in January: PLM and Product Configuration Management (CLM)
Conclusion
Sustainability is a topic that will be more and more relevant for all of us, locally and globally. Real PLM, covering the whole product lifecycle, preferably data-driven, allows companies to transform their current business to future sustainable business. Systems Thinking is the overarching methodology we have to learn – let’s discuss
This week I attended the PLM Roadmap & PDT Fall 2021 with great expectations based on my enthusiasm last year. Unfortunately, the excitement was less this time, and I will explain in my conclusions why. This time it was unfortunate again a virtual event which makes it hard to be interactive, something I realize I am missing a lot.
Over two hundred attendees connected for the two days, and you can find the agenda here. Typically I would discuss the relevant sessions; now, I want to group some of them related to a theme, as there was complementary information in these sessions.
Disruption
Again like in the spring, the theme was focusing on DISRUPTION. The word disruption can give you an uncomfortable feeling when you are not in power. It is more fun to disrupt than to be disrupted, as I mentioned in my spring presentation. Read The week after PLM Roadmap & PDT Spring 2021
In his keynote speech Peter Bilello (CIMdata) kicked off with: The Critical Dozen: 12 familiar, evolving trends and enablers of digital transformation that you cannot or should not live without.
You can see them on the slide below:
I believe many of them should be familiar to you as these themes have been “in the air” already for quite some time. Vendors first and slowly companies start to investigate them when relevant. You will find many of them back in my recent series: The road to model-based and connected PLM, where I explored the topics that would cross your path on that journey.
Like Peter said: “For most of the topics you cannot pick and choose as they are all connected.”
Another interesting observation was that we are more and more moving away from the concept of related structures (digital thread) but more to connected datasets (digital web). Marc Halpern first introduced this topic last year at the 2020 conference and has become an excellent image to frame what we should imagine in a connected world.
Digital web also has to do with the uprise of the graph database mentioned by Peter Bilello as a potentially disruptive technology during the fireside chat. Relational databases can be seen as rigid, associated with PLM structures. On the other hand, graph databases can be associated with flexible relations between different types of data – the image of the digital web.
Where Peter was mainly telling WHAT was happening, two presentations caught my attention because of the HOW.
First of all, Dr. Rodney Ewing (Cummins) ‘s session: A Balanced Strategy to Reap Continuous Business Value from Digital PLM was a great story of a transformational project. It contained both having a continuous delivery of business value in mind while moving to the connected enterprise.
As Rodney mentioned, the contribution of TCS was crucial here, which I can imagine. It is hard for a company to understand what is happening in the outside (PLM) world when applying it to your company. Their transformation roadmap is an excellent example of having the long-term vision in mind, meanwhile delivering value during the transformation.
Talking about the right partner and synergy, the second presentation I liked in this context of disruption was Ian Quest’s presentation (Quick Release): Open-source Disruption in Support of Audacious Goals. As a sponsor of the conference, they had ten minutes to pitch their area of expertise.
After Ian’s presentation, focused on audacious goals (for non-English natives translated as “brave” goals), there was only one word that stuck to my mind: pragmatic.
Instead of discussions about the complexity, Ian gave examples of where a pragmatic data-centric approach could lead to great benefits, as you can see from one of the illustrated benefits below:
Standards
A characteristic topic of this conference is that we always talk about standards. Torbjörn Holm (Eurostep) gave an excellent overview of where standards have led to significant benefits. For example, the containerization of goods has dramatically improved transportation of goods (we all benefit) while killing proprietary means of transport (trains, type of ships, type of unloading). See the image below:
Torbjörn rightfully expanded this story to the current situation in the construction industry or the challenges for asset operators. Unfortunately, in these practices, many content suppliers remain focusing on their unique capabilities, reluctantly neglecting the demand for interoperability among the whole value chain.
It is a topic Marc Halpern also mentioned last year as an outcome of their Gartner PLM benefits survey. Gartner’s findings:
Time to Market is not so much improved by using PLM as the inefficient interaction with suppliers is the impediment.
Like transport before containerization, the exchange of information is not standardized and designed for digital exchange. Torbjorn believes that more and more companies will insist on exchange standards – like CHIFOS – an ISO1596-derived exchange standard in the process industry. It is a user-driven standard, the best standard.
In this context, the presentation from Kenny Swope (Boeing) and Jean Yves Delaunay (Airbus) The Business Value of Standards-based Information Interoperability for Aerospace & Defense illustrated this fact.
While working for competitors, the Aerospace industry understands the criticality of standards to become more efficient and less vendor-dependent. In the aerospace & defense group, they discuss these themes. The last year’s 2020 Fall sessions showed the results. You can read their publications here
The A&D PLM action group uses the following framework when evaluating standards – as you can see on the image below:
The result – and this is a combined exercise of many participating experts from the field; this is their recommendation:
To conclude:
People often complain about standards, framed by proprietary data format vendors, that they lead to a rigid environment, blocking agility.
In reality, standards allow companies to be more agile as the (proprietary) data flow is less an issue. Remember the containerization example.
Sustainability and System Thinking
This conference has always been known for its attention to the circular economy and green thinking. In the past, these topics might have been considered disconnected from our PLM practices; now, they have become a part of everyone’s mission.
Two presentations stood out on this topic for me. First, Ken Webster, with his keynote speech: In the future, you will own nothing and you will be happy was a significant oversight of how we as consumers currently are disconnected from the circular economy. His plea, as shown below, for making manufacturers responsible for the legal ownership of the materials in the products they deliver would impact consumer behavior.
Product as a Service (PaaS) and new ways to provide a service is becoming essential. For example, buildings as power stations, as they are a place to collect solar or wind energy?
His thoughts are aligned with what is happening in Europe related to the European Green Deal (not in his presentation). There is a push for a PaaS model for all products as this would be an excellent stimulant for the circular economy. PaaS combined with a Digital Product Passport – more on that next year.
Making upgrades to your products has less impact on the environment than creating new products to sell (and creating waste of the old product). Ken Webster was an interesting statement about changing the economy – do we want to own products or do we want to benefit from the product and leave the legal ownership to the manufacturer.
A topic I discussed in the PLM Roadmap & PDT Conference Spring 2021 – look here at slide 11
Patrick Hillberg‘s presentation Rising to the challenge of engineering and optimizing . . . what? was the one closest to my heart. We discussed Sustainability and Systems Thinking with Patrick in our PLM Global Green Alliance, being pretty aligned on this topic. Patrick started by explaining the difference between Systems Engineering and Systems Thinking. Looking at the product go-to-market of an organization is more than the traditional V-model. Economic pressure and culture will push people to deviate from the ideal technological plan due to other priorities.
Expanding on this observation, Partick stated that there are limits to growth, a topic discussed by many people involved in the sustainable economy. Economic growth is impossible on a limited planet, and we have to take more dimensions into account. Patrick gave some examples of that, including issues related to the infamous Boeing 737 Max example.
For Patrick, the COVID-pandemic is the end of the old 2nd Industrial Revolution and a push for a new Fourth Industrial Revolution, which is not only technical, as the slide below indicates.
With Patrick, I believe we are at a decisive moment to disrupt ourselves, reconsider many things we do and are used to doing. Even for PLM practitioners, this is a new path to go.
Data
There were two presentations related to digitization and the shift from document-based to a data-driven approach.
First, there was Greg Weaver (Gulfstream) with his presentation Indexing Content – Finding Your Needle in the Haystack. Greg explained that by using indexation of existing document-based information combined with a specific dashboard, they could provide fast access to information that otherwise would have been hidden in so many document or even paper archives.
It was a pragmatic solution, making me feel nostalgic seeing the SmarTeam profile cards. It was an excellent example of moving to a digital enterprise, and Gulfstream has always been a front runner on this topic.
Warning: Don’t use this by default at home (your company). The data in a regulated industry like Aerospace is expected to be of high quality due to the configuration management processes in place. If your company does not have a strong CM practice, the retrieved data might be inaccurate.
Martijn Dullaart (ASML)’s presentation The Next disruption, please….. was the next step into the future. With his statement “No CM = No Trust,” he made an essential point for data-driven environments.
There is a need for Configuration Management, and I touched on this topic in my last post: The road to model-based and connected PLM (part 9 – CM).
Martijn’s presentation can also be found on his blog here, and I encourage you to read it (saving me copy & paste text). It was interesting to see that Martijn improved his CM pyramid, as you can see, more discipline and activity-oriented instead of a system view. With Martijn and others, I will elaborate on this topic soon.
Conclusion
This has been an extremely long post, and thanks for reading until the end. Many interesting topics were presented at the conference. I was less excited this time because many of these topics are triggers for a discussion. Innovation comes from meeting people with different backgrounds. In a live conference, you would meet during the break or during the famous dinner. How can we ensure we follow up on all this interesting information.
Your thoughts? Contact me for a Corona Friday discussion.
Last week I wrote about the recent PLM Road Map & PDT Spring 2021 conference day 1, focusing mainly on technology. There were also interesting sessions related to exploring future methodologies for a digital enterprise. Now on Day 2, we started with two sessions related to people and methodology, indispensable when discussing PLM topics.
Designing and Keeping Great Teams
This keynote speech from Noshir Contractor, Professor of Behavioral Sciences in the McCormick School of Engineering & Applied Science, intrigued me as the subtitle states: Lessons from Preparing for Mars. What Can PLM Professionals Learn from This?
You might ask yourself, is a PLM implementation as difficult and as complex as a mission to Mars? I hoped, so I followed with great interest Noshir’s presentation.
Noshir started by mentioning that many disruptive technologies have emerged in recent years, like Teams, Slack, Yammer and many more.
The interesting question he asked in the context of PLM is:
As the domain of PLM is all about trying to optimize effective collaboration, this is a fair question
Structural Signatures
Noshir shared with us that it is not the most crucial point to look at people’s individual skills but more about who they know.
Measure who they work with is more important than who they are.
Based on this statement, Noshir showed some network patterns of different types of networks.
Click on the image to see the enlarged picture.
It is clear from these patterns how organizations communicate internally and/or externally. It would be an interesting exercise to perform in a company and to see if the analysis matches the perceived reality.
Noshir’s research was used by NASA to analyze and predict the right teams for a mission to Mars.
Noshir went further by proposing what PLM can learn from teams that are going into space. And here, I was not sure about the parallel. Is a PLM project comparable to a mission to Mars? I hope not! I have always advocated that a PLM implementation is a journey. Still, I never imagined that it could be a journey into the remote unknown.
Noshir explained that they had built tools based on their scientific model to describe and predict how teams could evolve over time. He believes that society can also benefit from these learnings. Many inventions from the past were driven by innovations coming from space programs.
I believe Noshir’s approach related to team analysis is much more critical for organizations with a mission. How do you build multidisciplinary teams?
The proposed methodology is probably best for a holocracy based organization. Holocrazy is an interesting concept for companies to get their employees committed, however, it also demands a type of involvement that not every person can deliver. For me, coming back to PLM, as a strategy to enable collaboration, the effectiveness of collaboration depends very much on the organizational culture and created structure.
DISRUPTION – EXTINCTION or still EVOLUTION?
We talk a lot about disruption because disruption is a painful process that you do not like to happen to yourself or your company. In the context of this conference’s theme, I discussed the awareness that disruptive technologies will be changing the PLM Value equation.
A disruption like the switch from mini-computers to PCs (killed DEC) or from Symbian to iOS (killed Nokia) is therefore not likely to happen that fast. Still, there is a need to take benefit from these new disruptive technologies.
My presentation was focusing on describing the path of evolution and focus areas for the PLM community. Doing nothing means extinction; experimenting and learning towards the future will provide an evolutionary way.
Starting from acknowledging that there is an incompatibility between data produced most of the time now and the data needed in the future, I explained my theme: From Coordinated to Connected. As a PLM community, we should spend more time together in focus groups, conferences on describing and verifying methodology and best practices.
Nigel Shaw (EuroStep) and Mark Williams (Boeing) hinted in this direction during this conference (see day 1). Erik Herzog (SAAB Aeronautics) brought this topic to last year’s conference (see day 3). Outside this conference, I have comparable touchpoints with Martijn Dullaert when discussing Configuration Management in the future in relation to PLM.
In addition, this decade will probably be the most disruptive decade we have known in humanity due to external forces that push companies to change. Sustainability regulations from governments (the Paris agreement), the implementation of circular economy concepts combined with the positive and high Total Share Holder return will push companies to adapt themselves more radical than before.
What is clear is that disruptive technologies and concepts, like Industry 4.0, Digital Thread and Digital Twin, can serve a purpose when implemented efficiently, ensuring the business becomes sustainable.
Due to the lack of end-to-end experience, we need focus groups and conferences to share progress and lessons learned. And we do not need to hear the isolated vendor success stories here as a reference, as often they are siloed again and leading to proprietary environments.
You can see my full presentation on SlideShare: DISRUPTION – EXTINCTION or still EVOLUTION?
Building a profitable Digital T(win) business
Beatrice Gasser, Technical, Innovation, and Sustainable Development Director from the Egis group, gave an exciting presentation related to the vision and implementation of digital twins in the construction industry.
The Egis group both serves as a consultancy firm as well as an asset management organization. You can see a wide variety of activities on their website or have a look at their perspectives
Historically the construction industry has been lagging behind having low productivity due to fragmentation, risk aversion and recently, more and more due to the lack of digital talent. In addition, some of the construction companies make their money from claims inside of having a smooth and profitable business model.
Without innovation in the construction industry, companies working the traditional way would lose market share and investor-focused attention, as we can see from the BCG diagram I discussed in my session.
The digital twin of construction is an ideal concept for the future. It can be built in the design phase to align all stakeholders, validate and integrate solutions and simulate the building operational scenarios at almost zero materials cost. Egis estimates that by using a digital twin during construction, the engineering and construction costs of a building can be reduced between 15 and 25 %
More importantly, the digital twin can also be used to first simulate operations and optimize energy consumption. The connected digital twin of an existing building can serve as a new common data environment for future building stakeholders. This could be the asset owner, service companies, and even the regulatory authorities needing to validate the building’s safety and environmental impact.
Beatrice ended with five principles essential to establish a digital twin, i.e
I think the construction industry has a vast potential to disrupt itself. Faster than the traditional manufacturing industries due to their current needs to work in a best-connected manner.
Next, there is almost no legacy data to deal with for these companies. Every new construction or building is a unique project on its own. The key differentiators will be experience and efficient ways of working.
It is about the belief, the guts and the skilled people that can make it work – all for a more efficient and sustainable future.
Leveraging PLM and Cloud Technology for Market Success
Stan Przybylinski, Vice President of CIMdata, reported their global survey related to the cloud, completed in early 2021. Also, Stan typified Industry 4.0 as a connected vision and cloud and digital thread as enablers to implementing this vision.
The companies interviewed showed a lot of goodwill to make progress – click on the image to see the details. CIMdata is also working with PLM Vendors to learn and describe better the areas of beneft. I remain curious about who comes with a realization and business case that is future-proof. This will define our new PLM Value Equation.
Conclusion
These were two exciting days with enough mentioning of disruptive technologies. Our challenge in the PLM domain will be to give them a purpose. A purpose is likely driven by external factors related to the need for a sustainable future. Efficiency and effectiveness must come from learning to work in connected environments (digital twin, digital thread, industry 4.0, Model-Based (Systems) Engineering.
Note: You might have seen the image below already – a nice link between sustainability and the mission to Mars
Last Friday, we discussed with several members of the PLM Global Green Alliance the book: “How to avoid a Climate Disaster” written by Bill Gates. I was happy to moderate the session between Klaus Brettschneider, Rich McFall, Lionel Grealou, Ilan Madjar and Patrick Hillberg. From the LinkedIn profiles of each of them, you can see we are all active in the domain of PLM. And they have read the book upfront before the discussion.
I think the book addresses climate change in a tangible manner. Bill Gates brings structure into addressing climate changes and encourages you to be active. What you can do as an individual, as a citizen. My only comment to this book would be that as a typical nerd, Bill Gates does not understand so much human behavior, understanding people’s emotions that might lead to non-logical behavior.
When you browse through the book’s reviews, for example, on Goodreads, you see the extreme, rating from 1 to 5. Some people believe that Bill Gates, due to his wealth and ways of living, is not allowed to write this book. Other like the transparent and pragmatic approach discussing the related themes in the book.
Our perspective
Klaus, Rich, Lio, Ilan and Patrick did not have extreme points of view – so don’t watch the recording if you are looking for anxiety. They reviewed How to Avoid a Climate Disaster from their perspective and how it could be relevant for PLM practitioners. It became a well-balanced dialogue. You can watch or listen to the recording following this link:
Book discussion: How to avoid a climate disaster written by Bill Gates
Note: we will consolidate all content on our PLMGreenAlliances website to ensure nothing is lost – feel free to comment/discuss further.
More on sustainability
If you want to learn more about all sorts of disruption, not only disruption caused by climate change, have a look at the upcoming conference this week: DISRUPTION—the PLM Professionals’ Exploration of Emerging Technologies that Will Reshape the PLM Value Equation.
My contribution will be on day 2, where I combine disruptive technology with the need to become really sustainable in our businesses.
It will be a call for action from our PLM community. In the coming nine years, we have to change our business, become sustainable and use the relevant new technologies. This requires system thinking – will mankind being able to deal with so many different parameters.
Conclusion
Start the dialogue with us, the PLM Global Green Alliance, by watching and reading content from the website. Or become an active member participating in discussion sessions related to any relevant topic for our alliance. More to come at the end of May, you too?
This Friday, February 26th, we had a PLM Green Global Alliance (PGGA) core team meeting to discuss our current status and next steps for 2021. If you are a PGGA member, you joined us because of the PLM Green Global Alliance LinkedIn group. The LinkedIn group is currently our primary channel for social interaction with the outside world.
Meanwhile, in the background, Rich McFall has been working on structuring the PLM Green Alliance website, which you can find here.
The PLM Green Alliance website is the place where we consolidate information and will experiment with forum discussions. LinkedIn is not the place to serve as an archive for information. Neither is LinkedIn a place for discussion on sensitive topics. Viewpoints on LinkedIn might even damage your current or future career if you have a controversial opinion. More about the forum discussions soon.
The PLM Green Alliance website
Therefore, the PLM Green Alliance website will be the place where interested parties can obtain information and active members can participate in forum discussions.
As a reminder, all our actions are related to PLM and PLM-related technologies – a niche environment bringing PLM-related skills and a Green and Sustainable society together.
Our actions are driven by a personal interest to contribute. With the limited time and means, we are aware of the differences with more prominent and professional organizations addressing a much broader scope and audience.
What makes us unique is the focus on PLM and PLM-related practices/technologies.
The PLM Green Themes
Although the website is still under development, our intentions become visible through the home page header. I want to zoom in on the area where we are currently focusing, the PLM Green Themes.
We decided on five PLM Green Themes, with each of them having their dedicated moderation and focus. Although the themes can overlap, they will help us to specialize and dive deeper into specific topics.
PLM and Climate Change
You might argue PLM and its related technologies do not directly impact activities related to climate change. However, as the moderators of this theme group, Klaus Brettschneider, and Richard McFall state:
The goal of this PLM Green discussion forum and working group on Climate Change is to promote activities to understand, analyze and reduce human-generated greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions through PLM-enabling technologies. We hope to help to answer the question of what the role and value of PLM technologies is in addressing the most critical challenge facing humankind this century, climate change.
And although there are still individuals with other opinions, the group will focus on the targeted outcome: reducing greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere. What are the types of innovations that make this possible? Find interesting posts here and start contributing.
PLM and Sustainability
This theme will be moderated by me, Jos Voskuil. We are still looking for one or more volunteers to extend our capabilities here.
The topic of sustainability is again broad, as you can read on the Sustainability theme page.
To be more precise, the page states:
Specific topics we wish to discuss further in this forum include how PLM can be used to:
- Make products and processes more efficient and greener.
- Understand and measure the impact on the carbon footprint of design decisions and production processes, along with changes to them.
- Develop, distribute, and use new sources of renewable green energy.
- Design products and their lifecycles to be sustainable.
- Recycle, reuse, or repurpose assets, materials, and natural resources.
- Enhance the resiliency and Sustainability of infrastructures, communities, and economies.
In my early 2021 survey asked participants their viewpoint on PLM and Sustainability. As you can see from the scores, the majority of us are currently observing what is happening.
One of the interesting “other” responses I highlighted here: “I am not sure if you mean real sustainability or just greenwashing.”
Good point. Greenwashing is needed when you know you have something to fix/hide. We are not fixing or hiding; we will discuss and share information and probably dismantle greenwashing attempts.
PLM and Green Energy
Green energy is an important topic on its own as many of the issues related to a green and sustainable society are dealing with the transition from limited fossil energy sources to a sustainable energy model. The moderator of this theme group, Bjorn Fidjeland, is well known for his skills and coaching on PLM in the context of Plant Lifecycle Management through his PLMpartner website.
Of course, we are looking for an additional moderator to support Bjorn, so feel free to contact Bjorn through the website if you can and want to contribute. The theme group objectives are:
…. to share experiences, examples, and best practices in a collaborative mode to promote discussion, learning, and understanding with respect to the mentioned focus areas. We also plan to publish our own “industry heads up” news, articles and case studies illustrating all that is happening in the global race towards “going green” and a low-carbon economy.
PLM and a Circular Economy
As the Circular Economy is itself an innovation, it provides an opportunity to innovate business models and reimagine how we consider something to be a product, a service, or a product as a service. Similarly, a more circular way of thinking requires different expectations when it comes to Information Technology systems, including PLM, that support the enablement of these new business models and the execution of their commercial strategies.
This theme group is currently moderated by a real passionate follower of the Circular Economy, Hannes Lindfred, and also here we are looking to another volunteer.
A year ago, I saw Hannes Lindfred presentation at the TECHNIA PLM Innovation Forum and wrote about his lecture as one of the highlights from the first day.
See my blog post: The Weekend after the PLM Innovation Forum, where I mention his session in the Business drivers for Sustainable Manufacturing paragraph.
The circular economy framework nicely aligns with concepts like “Product as a Service” or Outcome-based services. The original manufacturer becomes responsible for the full lifecycle of their products. A theme group, I expect we can make a lot of progress through sharing.
Accordingly, the main objective within our theme discussion group is to provide a support network for PLM professionals who seek to overcome the legacy linear economy mindset that may be systemic in their jobs, products, employers, or industries. We hope to incite the development and use of road maps for employing both existing and new PLM technologies to implement Circular Economy principles and best practices.
PLM and Industry 4.0
A topic that is closely related to PLM is Industry 4.0. At first glance, Industry 4.0 is an initiative to manufacture products smarter, more flexible, more automated, more modular by using new technologies and practices, all with the goal for (initially German) companies to become more competitive.
We are pleased that the PLM and Industry 4.0 theme group’s moderator is Lionel Grealou, quite active in the area of knowledge sharing related to PLM. A second moderator would be more than welcome too for this theme.
Recently Lionel published this interesting article on engineering.com: Exploring the Intersection of PLM and Industry 4.0. In this article, Lionel touches briefly on the potential contribution of Industry 4.0 towards a circular economy, new business models, and waste reduction, thanks to the interaction of PLM and Industry 4.0. There is a lot to explore, as Lionel states on the theme group introduction page:
This PLM Green theme group’s plan will explore the “intersection” of how PLM strategies and technologies enable the vision of Industry 4.0 for a more sustainable circular economy. In doing so, we plan to investigate the following questions concerning their green value:
- How do data and product connectivity contribute to feeding smart factories and enhancing the product lifecycle practice?
- How to improve feedback loops and data integration upstream-downstream of new product development to contribute positively to the circular economy?
- How to drive downstream waste reduction by improving data traceability and accessibility with better product analytics throughout its lifecycle?
- How to link more tightly manufacturing planning and execution?
- How to more robustly connect and integrate engineering, manufacturing, and service/maintenance process operations?
- How to reduce time to market, with both product development and production cost optimization, integrating co-creation from the design office to the shop floor?
- How to align the digital and the physical worlds, delivering more customer-centric products enabled by fully horizontally-integrated PLM strategies, taking an ecosystem approach to collaboration, leveraging more agile and continual release processes?
- How to reduce pre-launch costs and generate downstream manufacturing improvements?
Much more to do.
As you can see, the PLM Green Global Alliance is transforming slowly, as we are not marketing people, web designers, or a sponsored organization. We rely on our networks and your inputs to reach the next level of interaction. The majority of the PLM Themes need a second moderator to keep the workload balanced.
Do you want to contribute?
In the core team meeting, we also discussed improving ways to make the PLM Green Alliance more interactive, shifting and balancing the LinkedIn group’s activities and the persistent PLM Green Alliance website.
Conclusion
As a person, I cannot do big things for our future society; however, I can do small things. And if we all make sure our “small things” are directed to the same outcome, we achieve big things without a revolution. Be part of the active PLM Global Green Alliance with your small things.
It Is 2021, and after two weeks’ time-out and reflection, it is time to look forward. Many people have said that 2020 was a “lost year,” and they are looking forward to a fresh restart, back to the new normal. For me, 2020 was the contrary of a lost year. It was a year where I had to change my ways of working. Communication has changed, digitization has progressed, and new trends have become apparent.
If you are interested in some of the details, watch the conversation I had with Rob Ferrone from QuickRelease, just before Christmas: Two Santas looking back to 2020.
It was an experiment with video, and you can see there is a lot to learn for me. I agree with Ilan Madjar’s comment that it is hard to watch two people talking for 20 minutes. I prefer written text that I can read at my own pace, short videos (max 5 min), or long podcasts that I can listen to, when cycling or walking around.
So let me share with you some of the plans I have for 2021, and I am eager to learn from you where we can align.
PLM understanding
I plan a series of blog posts where I want to share PLM-related topics that are not necessarily directly implemented in a PLM-system or considered in PLM-implementations as they require inputs from multiple sources. Topics in this context are: Configuration Management, Product Configuration Management, Product Information Management, Supplier Collaboration Management, Digital Twin Management, and probably more.
For these posts, I will discuss the topic with a subject matter expert, potentially a vendor or a consultant in that specific domain, and discuss the complementary role to traditional PLM. Besides a blog post, this topic might also be more explained in-depth in a podcast.
The PLM Doctor is in
Most of you might have seen Lucy from the Charley Brown cartoon as the doctor giving advice for 5¢. As an experiment, I want to set up a similar approach, however, for free.
These are my conditions:
- Only one question at a time.
- The question and answer will be published in a 2- 3 minute video.
- The question is about solving a pain.
If you have such a question related to PLM, please contact me through a personal message on LinkedIn, and I will follow-up.
PLM and Sustainability
A year ago, I started with Rich McFall, the PLM Green Global Alliance. Our purpose to bring people together, who want to learn and share PLM-related practices, solutions, ideas contributing to a greener and more sustainable planet.
We do not want to compete or overlap with more significant global or local organizations, like the Ellen McArthur Foundation or the European Green Deal.
We want to bring people together to dive into the niche of PLM and its related practices. We announced the group on LinkedIn; however, to ensure a persistent referential for all information and interactions, we have launched the website plmgreenaliance.com.
Here I will moderate and focus on PLM and Sustainability topics. I am looking forward to interacting with many of you.
PLM and digitization
For the last two years, I have been speaking and writing about the gap between current PLM-practices, based on shareable documents and files and the potential future based on shareable data, the Model-Based Enterprise.
Last year I wrote a series of posts giving insights on how we reached the current PLM-practices. Discovering sometimes inconsistencies and issues due to old habits or technology changes. I grouped these posts on a single blog page with the title: Learning from the past.
This year I will create a collection of posts focusing on the transition towards a Model-Based Enterprise. Probably the summary page will be called: Working towards the future currently in private mode.
Your feedback
I am always curious about your feedback – to understand in which kind of environment your PLM activities take place. Which topics are unclear? What am I missing in my experience?
Therefore, I created a small anonymous survey for those who want to be interacting with me. On purpose, the link is at the bottom of the post, so when you answer the survey, you get my double appreciation, first for reaching the end of this post and second for answering the survey.
Take the survey here.
Conclusion
Most of us will have a challenging year ahead of us. Sharing and discussing challenges and experiences will help us all to be better in what we are doing. I look forward to our 2021 journey.
Image courtesy of http://www.blagues-et-dessins.com
For those living in the Northern Hemisphere: This week, we had the shortest day, or if you like the dark, the longest night. This period has always been a moment of reflection. What have we done this year?
Rob Ferrone (Quick Release), the Santa on the left (the leftist), and Jos Voskuil (TacIT), the Santa on the right (the rightist), share in a dialogue their highlights from 2020
Wishing you all a great moment of reflection and a smooth path into a Corona-proof future.
It will be different; let’s make it better.
About a year ago we started the PLM Global Green Alliance, further abbreviated as the PGGA. Rich McFall, the main driver behind the PGGA started the website, The PLM Green Alliance, to have a persistent place to share information.
Also, we launched the PLM Global Alliance LinkedIn group to share our intentions and create a community of people who would like to share knowledge through information or discussion.
Our mission statement is:
The mission of the new PLM Green Alliance is to create global connection, communication, and community between professionals who use, develop, market, or support Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) related technologies and software solutions that have value in addressing the causes and consequences of climate change due to human-generated greenhouse gas emissions. We are motivated by the technological challenge to help create a more sustainable and green future for our economies, industries, communities, and all life forms on our planet that depend on healthy ecosystems.
My motivation
My personal motivation to support and join the PGGA was driven by the wish to combine my PLM-world with interest to create a more sustainable society for anyone around the world. It is a challenging combination. For example, PLM is born in the Aerospace and Defense industries, probably not the most sustainable industries.
Having worked with some companies in the Apparel and Retail industry, I have seen that these industries care more about their carbon footprint. Perhaps because they are “volume-industries” closely connected to their consumers, these industries actively build practices to reduce their carbon footprint and impact societies. The sense or non-sense of recycling is such a topic to discuss and analyze.
At that time, I got inspired by a session during the PLM Roadmap / PDT 2019 conference.
Graham Aid‘s from the Ragn-Sells group was a call to action. Sustainability and a wealthy economy go together; however, we have to change our habits & think patterns. You can read my review from this session in this blog post: The weekend after PLM Roadmap / PDT 2019 – Day 1
Many readers of this post have probably never heard of the Ragn-Sells group or followed up on a call for action. I have the same challenge. Being motivated beyond your day-to-day business (the old ways of working) and giving these activities priority above exploring and learning more about applying sustainability in my PLM practices.
And then came COVID-19.
I think most of you have seen the image on the left, which started as a joke. However, looking back, we all have seen that COVID-19 has led to a tremendous push for using digital technologies to modernize existing businesses.
Personally, I was used to traveling every 2 – 3 weeks to a customer, now I have left my home office only twice for business. Meanwhile, I invested in better communication equipment and a place to work. And hé, it remains possible to work and communicate with people.
Onboarding new people, getting to know new people takes more social interaction than a camera can bring.
In the PGGA LinkedIn community, we had people joining from all over the world. We started to organize video meetings to discuss their expectations and interest in this group with some active members.
We learned several things from these calls.
First of all, finding a single timeslot that everyone worldwide could participate in is a challenge. A late Friday afternoon is almost midnight in Asia and morning in the US. And is Friday the best day – we do not know yet.
For that reason, we are probably moving to the PLM Green Alliance website and combine this environment with a space for discussion outside the LinkedIn scope. More to come on the PGGA website.
Finally, we will organize video discussion sessions to ask the participants to prepare themselves for a discussion. Any member of the PGGA can bring in the discussion topics.
It might be a topic you want to clarify or better understand.
What’s next
For December 4th, we have planned a discussion meeting related to the Exponential Roadmap 2019 report, where 36 solutions to halve carbon emission by 2030 are discussed. In our video discussion, we want to focus on the chapter: Digital Industries.
We believe that this topic comes closest to our PLM domain and hopes that participants will share their thinking and potential activities within their companies.
You can download the Exponential Roadmap here or by clicking on the image. More details about the PLM Global Green Alliance you will find in the LinkedIn group. If you want to participate, let us know.
The PGGA website will be the place where more and more information will be collected per theme, to help you understand what is happening worldwide and the place where you can contribute to let us know what is happening at your side.
Conclusion
The PLM Global Green Alliance exists now for a year with 192 members. With approximately five percent active members, we have the motivation to grow our efforts and value. We learned from COVID-19 there is a need to become proactive as the costs of prevention are always lower than the costs of (trying) fixing afterward.
And each of us has the challenge to behave a little differently than before.
Will you be one of them ?
I usually write a post after participating in a PLM conference. Last week, I participated in TECHNIA’s PLM Innovation Forum, which was a 100 % virtual event with over 1500 registered participants from 58 countries. These numbers show the power of a virtual conference during these difficult times. It is an excellent option for a sustainable future – less travel to be there.
The additional beauty of this event is that, although the live sessions are over, all the content will be available until May 31st. You can still join!
It was (and is) a well-organized and massive event with over 70 sessions; the majority pre-recorded. As you can imagine 70 live sessions in two days would be too massive to grasp. Today the Friday after the event, I have been watching other sessions that have my interest, and it felt like another conference day.
TECHNIA, globally the largest Dassault Systèmes (DS) implementer after DS themselves as Jonas Geyer, Technia’s CEO, mentioned in his introduction speech, illustrated the breadth of their industry and technology skills complementary or based on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform.
TECHNIA was supported by Dassault Systèmes Execs and subject experts. In addition, a larger group of companies and interest groups supported the conference, even our humble PLM Green Alliance as you can see in the image above.
I followed the full two live days in real-time, meanwhile man sitting in my virtual booth to chat with virtual visitors. To my surprise, the anxiety during the conference felt like a physical conference – you get energized.
The positive point for me, no finger food or a standing lunch and decent coffee when needed. The point to enhance and learn for this type of event, is to make the booth a little more human – perhaps supported by video?
At the end, a great event, and if you are interested in the Dassault Systèmes/TECHNIA combined offering, supported by customer stories, take the chance till the end of May to register and browse the rich content.
Now I will share some of my picks from the live event. Another post will come based on my additional discoveries and networking discussions.
The B.CONNECT project
Fabien Hoefer and Philip Haller both from B.Braun, a medical device, and pharmaceutical company, with a wide range of products. Their massive PLM-project, approx. sixty persons involved was driven by the fact that every product has a lot of related data stored in different silos that it becomes impossible to have the correct understanding and status and to maintain it for the product and service lifecycle, on average, 10 – 15 years.
Their target is a real PLM-platform implementation connecting the people, the processes, data, and systems. Their aim is really about the “connected” approach, a characteristic of a digital company.
As you can still watch the presentation, look at the following topics discussed:
- focus on product archetypes instead of division (portfolio management)
- data templates based on classification, global and specific data sets (data governance)
- the need to have a Master Data Management in place (data governance)
- the unique product identifier (remember the FFF-discussion in my blog)
- data-driven documentation (a perfect example of a digital PLM implementation)
- platform strategy (one application for one capability in a heterogeneous systems environment)
- Ownership of the PLM implementation at board level (it is not an engineering tool)
- in the Q&A – the mix of waterfall & agile – the hybrid approach (as in the medical world the validation of the system is required – a point we missed in the SmarTeam FDA toolkit – validation of a system is needed when the system/processes change)
In the Q&A session, it was clear that the big elephant in the room, the migration, has been identified, but no answers yet. See my presentation to understand the reference to the elephant. I am curious about B. Braun’s approach, given my experience with PLM digital transformations. Will it be entirely digital or hybrid.
Looking forward to learning more from Fabien or Philip.
Business drivers for Sustainable Manufacturing
This session, presented by Hannes Lindfred from TECHNIA, was one of my favorite presentations, as it links tightly to what we want to achieve with the PLM Green Alliance.
The subtitle of the presentation says it all: “How PLM can support Supply chain transparency, Circular economy, and System oriented product development”.
In a relaxed and entertaining manner, he explained the concepts and the needs of a circular economy, combined with examples from reality. In particular, I liked his closing statement linking the potential of digitization, modern PLM, and the circular economy. We have to learn to think and act circular. Highly recommended to watch!
Leading PLM Trends & Potential Disruptors
A PLM conference would not be a PLM-conference if Peter Bilello from CIMdata would not be speaking. We share a lot of insights related to digital transformation and the understanding it requires the involvement of PLM. However, it is not the traditional PLM that is needed.
PLM needs to be rethought, think about the concept of a Product Innovation Platform. A digital platform is required if we want end-to-end digitalization; otherwise, we keep working in optimized silos.
Peter shared some survey results (see below) from early this year. It illustrates that most companies currently invest in traditional PDM aspects. Restating the need for our PLM communities to learn and educate and rethink aspects of PLM and learn to communicate them.
Remarkably similar to some of the aspects I explained in my: From Coordinated to Connected presentations. Changing to data, changing workforce, changing processes meaning systems thinking. Another plea for everyone to invest in learning. See his concluding remarks:
The closing Q&A session was interesting, addressing additive manufacturing, the graph database, and potential PLM disruptors coming from outside the traditional PLM space.
I recommend, pay attention to the closing questions – so many good points to put PLM in perspective.
From Coordinated to Connected & Sustainable
Of course, I recommend you watch my presentation. It is one of the few opportunities to hear in a short time all the thoughts and concepts that I developed over the past 5 – 6 years. It saves you reading all my blog posts, which are less structured than this presentation.
I recommend you to watch this presentation in the context of Peter Bilello’s presentation as there are a lot of similarities, told in different words.
After my presentation, I appreciated the Q&A part, as it allowed me to point to some more of the related topics: Legacy CAD-issues – the incompatibility of the past and future data, Management vision and the Perception of ROI.
Professional PLM
Raise your standards and your horizons
An interesting presentation to watch, after seeing Peter Bilello’s presentation and my presentation, is the one given by Roger Tempest. Roger is another veteran in the PLM-world and co-founder of the PLM Interest group. For many years Roger is striving to get the PLM professional recognized and certified. We both share the experience that being a PLM consultant is not a profession to become wealthy.
One of the reasons might be that the scope of PLM and what is the required skill level is not precise. PLM considered as an engineering tool and PLM having so many diverse definitions.
The challenge of Roger’s approach is that it tries to capture people within a standardized PLM framework, which becomes apparent in the Q&A session. Currently, he is in the stage of building a steering group, “looking for companies that are fairly committed to PLM”. So which companies are the ones interested in PLM to commit time and resources to build a professional PLM body? This can be only academic people and PLM Vendors/Implementers. The last group will probably not likely agree on standardization.
Also related to the question about the different industries and maturity levels for companies came with an unsatisfactory answer. He talks about “absolute” PLM and no need to compare PLM with other industries. Here I believe there is such a fundamental difference in the meaning of PLM when talking to the traditional manufacturing companies as compared to high-tech/software-driven industries. I inserted here Marc Halpern’s maturity/technology diagram that I have been referencing in my presentation too.
The final question about vendors joining the PLM standardization group seems to be a utopia. As I expressed in my presentation, referring to Marc Halpern’s business maturity diagram, the vendors show us the vision of various business aspects related to PLM.
Marc already indicated this is the phase of the Product Innovation Platform.
As long as the professional PLM organization is focusing on defining the standard, I foresee the outside world will move faster and be more diverse than a single PLM expert can handle. A typical issue with many other standards as you can see below.
What’s Next
I hope to see and participate more in virtual PLM conferences as it allows much larger audiences to connect compared to traditional conferences. However, there are things to improve, and therefore I want to propose some enhancements:
Make sure during the “live” sessions, there is the experience of “being live and connected”. Even when streaming a pre-recorded lecture, always follow-up immediately with a live Q&A session. I found the Q&A sessions very educative as they clarify or put the presentation in a broader context.
The current virtual booth as only a chat room is too primitive – it reminded me of the early days of internet communication – discussion groups in ASCII-terminal mode through Compuserve (remember). A booth could become a virtual meeting space on its own – all, of course, depending on the amount of bandwidth available. The feeling of “The Doctor is in”
It is great that the content is available for 30 days, and I agree there is a need for a time limit on the content; otherwise, the conference becomes more a library. What I would like to see after the “live” days to still have a kind of place for sharing. What are your favorite presentations, and why should others look at it?
Conclusion
A great event and learning experience for me. Virtual conferences are the future for sure, and I encourage others to develop this type of conferences related to PLM further. It is a way to share knowledge and discuss topics in a sustainable manner. In the upcoming 30 days, I will come back to the conference one more time, based on interesting topics discovered or discussion related to the content.
Meanwhile, I encourage you too – if you are still in lockdown and if there is time to study – this is one of these unique opportunities.
Life goes on, and I hope you are all staying safe while thinking about the future. Interesting in the context of the future, there was a recent post from Lionel Grealou with the title: Towards PLM 4.0: Hyperconnected Asset Performance Management Framework.
Lionel gave a kind of evolutionary path for PLM. The path from PLM 1.0 (PDM) ending in a PLM 4.0 definition. Read the article or click on the image to see an enlarged version to understand the logical order. Interesting to mention that PLM 4.0 is the end target, for sure there is a wishful mind-mapping with Industry 4.0.
When seeing this diagram, it reminded me of Marc Halpern’s diagram that he presented during the PDT 2015 conference. Without much fantasy, you can map your company to one of the given stages and understand what the logical next step would be. To map Lionel’s model with Marc’s model, I would state PLM 4.0 aligns with Marc’s column Collaborating.
In the discussion related to Lionel’s post, I stated two points. First, an observation that most of the companies that I know remain in PLM 1.0 or 2.0, or in Marc’s diagram, they are still trying to reach the level of Integrating.
Why is it so difficult to move to the next stage?
Oleg Shilovitsky, in a reaction to Lionel’s post, confirmed this. In Why did manufacturing stuck in PLM 1.0 and PLM 2.0? Oleg points to several integration challenges, functional and technical. His take is that new technologies might be the answer to move to PLM 3.0, as you can read from his conclusion.
What is my conclusion?
There are many promising technologies, but integration is remaining the biggest problem for manufacturing companies in adopting PLM 3.0. The companies are struggling to expand upstream and downstream. Existing vendors are careful about the changes. At the same time, very few alternatives can be seen around. Cloud structure, new data management, and cloud infrastructure can simplify many integration challenges and unlock PLM 3.0 for future business upstream and especially downstream. Just my thoughts…
Completely disconnected from Lionel’s post, Angad Sorte from Plural Nordic AS wrote a LinkedIn post: Why PLM does not get attention from your CEO. Click on the image to see an enlarged version, that also neatly aligns with Industry 4.0. Coincidence, or do great minds think alike? Phil Collins would sing: It is in the air tonight
Angad’s post is about the historical framing of PLM as a system, an engineering tool versus a business strategy. Angrad believes once you have a clear definition, it will be easier to explain the next steps for the business. The challenge here is: Do we need, or do we have a clear definition of PLM? It is a topic that I do not want to discuss anymore due to a variety of opinions and interpretations. An exact definition will never lead to a CEO stating, “Now I know why we need PLM.”
I believe there are enough business proof points WHY companies require a PLM-infrastructure as part of a profitable business. Depending on the organization, it might be just a collection of tools, and people do the work. Perhaps this is the practice in small enterprises?
In larger enterprises, the go-to-market strategy, the information needs, and related processes will drive the justification for PLM. But always in the context of a business transformation. Strategic consultancy firms are excellent in providing strategic roadmaps for their customers, indicating the need for a PLM-infrastructure as part of that.
Most of the time, they do not dive more in-depth as when it comes to implementation, other resources are needed.
What needs to be done in PLM 1.0 to 4.0 per level/stage is well described in all the diagrams on a high-level. The WHAT-domain is the domain of the PLM-vendors and implementers. They know what their tools and skillsets can do, and they will help the customer to implement such an environment.
The big illusion of all the evolutionary diagrams is that it gives a false impression of evolution. Moving to the next level is not just switching on new or more technology and involve more people.
So the big question is HOW and WHEN to make progress.
HOW to make progress
In the past four years, I have learned that digital transformation in the domain of PLM is NOT an evolution. It is disruptive as the whole foundation for PLM changes. If you zoom in on the picture on the left, you will see the data model on the left, and the data model on the right is entirely different.
On the left side of the chasm, we have a coordinated environment based on data-structures (items, folders, tasks) to link documents.
On the right side of the chasm, we have a connected environment based on federated data elements and models (3D, Logical, and Simulation models).
I have been discussing this topic in the past two years at various PLM conferences and a year ago in my blog: The Challenges of a connected ecosystem for PLM
If you are interested in learning more about this topic, register for the upcoming virtual PLM Innovation Forum organized by TECHNIA. Registration is for free, and you will be able to watch the presentation, either live or recorded for 30 days.
At this moment, the detailed agenda has not been published, and I will update the link once the session is visible. My presentation will not only focus on the HOW to execute a digital transformation, including PLM can be done, but also explain why NOW is the moment.
NOW to make progress
When the COVID19-related lockdown started, must of us thought that after the lockdown, we will be back in business as soon as possible. Now understanding the impact of the virus on our society, it is clear that we need to re-invent ourselves for a sustainable future, be more resilient.
It is now time to act and think differently as due to the lockdown, most of us have time to think. Are you and your company looking forward to creating a better future? Or will you and your company try to do the same non-sustainable rat race of the past and being caught by the next crises.
McKinsey has been publishing several articles related to the impact of COVID19 and the article: Beyond coronavirus: The path to the next normal very insightful
As McKinsey never talks about PLM, therefore I want to guide you to think about more sustainable business.
Use a modern PLM-infrastructure, practices, and tools to remain competitive, meanwhile creating new or additional business models. Realizing concepts as digital twins, AR/VR-based business models require an internal transition in your company, the jump from coordinated to connected. Therefore, start investigating, experimenting in these new ways of working, and learn fast. This is why we created the PLM Green Alliance as a platform to share and discuss.
If you believe there is no need to be fast, I recommend you watch Rebecka Carlsson’s presentation at the PLMIF event. The title of her presentation: Exponential Tech in Sustainability. Rebecca will share insights for business development about how companies can upgrade to new business models based on the new opportunities that come with sustainability and exponential tech.
The reason I recommend her presentation because she addresses the aspect of exponential thinking nicely. Rebecka states we are “programmed” to think local-linear as mankind. Exponential thinking goes beyond our experience. Something we are not used doing until with the COVID19-virus we discovered exponential growth of the number of infections.
Finally, and this I read this morning, Jan Bosch wrote an interesting post: Why Agile Matters, talking about the fact that during the design and delivery of the product to the market, the environment and therefore the requirements might change. Read his post, unless as Jan states:
Concluding, if you’re able to perfectly predict the optimal set of requirements for a system or product years ahead of the start of production or deployment and if you’re able to accurately predict the effect of each requirement on the user, the customer and the quality attributes of the system, then you don’t need Agile.
What I like about Jan’s post is the fact that we should anticipate changing requirements. This statement combined with Rebecka’s call for being ready for exponential change, with an emerging need for sustainability, might help you discuss in your company how a modern New Product Introduction process might look like, including requirements for a sustainable future that might come in later (per current situation) or can become a practice for the future
Conclusion
Now is the disruptive moment to break with the old ways of working. Develop plans for the new Beyond-COVID19-society. Force yourselves to work in more sustainable modes (digital/virtual), develop sustainable products or services (a circular economy), and keep on learning. Perhaps we will meet virtually during the upcoming PLM Innovation Forum?
Note: You have reached the end of this post, which means you took the time to read it all. Now if you LIKE or DISLIKE the content, share it in a comment. Digital communication is the future. Just chasing for Likes is a skin-deep society. We need arguments.
Looking forward to your feedback.
Jos Voskuil's Weblog 
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