Curiosity, Innovation and Modern PLM

May 28, 2024 in PLM | Tags: , , , , | Leave a comment

The past two weeks have been a fascinating journey, delving into the intersection of Curiosity, Innovation, and modern PLM. Where many PLM-related posts are about the best products and the best architectures, there is also the “soft” angle – people and culture – which I believe is the most important to start from. Without the right people and the right mindset, every PLM implementation is ready to fail.

First, I worked with Stefaan van Hooydonk, the founder of the Global Curiosity Institute and author of the bestselling book The Workplace Curiosity Manifesto, on the article Curiosity as Guiding Principle for PLM Change, which explained the importance of Curiosity in the context of sustainable product development (PLM).

The intersection between Curiosity and modern PLM is Systems Thinking.

Systems Thinking: A Crucial 21st Century Skill for Sustainable Product Development, Driven by Curiosity.

Last week, I had the privilege of attending the CADCAM Lab conference in Ljubljana. In addition to my keynote, I was inspired by several presentations on the various aspects of digital transformation: the tools, possible enablement, and the needed mindset.

One of the highlights was the talk by Tanja Mohorič, the director for innovation culture and European projects in Slovene corporation Hidria and director of Slovene Automotive Cluster ACS. Tanja shared her insights on fostering Innovation, a crucial driver for a sustainable business as companies need to innovate in order to remain significant.

One of the intersections between Innovation and modern PLM is Curiosity

Innovation is defined as the process of bringing about new ideas, methods, products, services, or solutions that have significant positive impact and value.

Let’s zoom in on these two themes.

Curiosity

I knew Stefaan from his keynote at the PLM Road Map / PDT Europe 2022 conference; you can read my review from his session here:  The week after PLM Roadmap / PDT Europe 2022.

It was an eye-opener for many of us focusing on the PLM domain. Stefaan’s message is that Curiosity is not only a personal skill; it is also something of a company’s culture. And in this age of rapid change, companies that embrace a culture of openness are outperforming their peers.

This time, on Earth Day (April 22nd), Stefaan organized an interactive webinar titled “Curiosity and the Planet,” which addressed the need for new technologies and approaches to living in a sustainable future. With my Green PLM-twisted mind, I immediately saw the overlap and intersection between our missions.

We decided to write an article together on this topic, in which we described a pathway for companies that want to develop more sustainable products or solutions, using Curiosity as one of the means.

As companies need to find their path to the digitization of their PLM infrastructure due to regulations, ESG reporting, and potentially the introduction of digital product passports and the circular economy, they need to act fast in an area not familiar to them.

Here, a curious organization will outperform the traditional, controlled enterprise.

You can read the full article here: Curiosity as Guiding Principle for PLM Change.

And as I know in our hasty society, not everyone will read the article although I think you should. For those who do not read the details, I close this topic with a quote from the article:

We define Curiosity as the mindset to challenge the status quo, explore, discover and learn.

Curiosity is often considered a trait linked to an individual, as exemplified by the constant questions of children or scientists. Groups of people or organizations can also be curious collectively. Research from INSEAD studying the level of Curiosity across the executive team uncovered that these teams are superior in two distinct ways: first, they are better at future Innovation, and second, they are better at optimizing their current operations. Curiosity on the executive team leads not only to future success but also to better short-term business results. Such teams create the perfect environment for their teams to thrive.

​Change, however, is hard, and people are often left to their own devices; they prefer to perpetuate the known past rather than invite an unknown future. Curiosity helps us lean into uncertainty. It encourages us to slow down and observe whether the status quo we hold dear is still relevant. Curiosity is the prime catalyst for change. It invites open questions.

 

Innovation

There is often confusion between Invention and Innovation. Where invention is the “Eureka” moment where a new idea gets its shape, Innovation is the process of bringing new ideas, methods, products, services, or solutions to the market.

I presented this topic at the 2013  Product Innovation Conference in Berlin. The title of the presentation was PLM Loves Innovation, and you can find it here on SlideShare.

Looking back at the presentation, I realized we were thinking linear.

Concepts of an iterative approach, DevOps and a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) were not yet there. Meanwhile, thanks to digitization, bringing Innovation to the market has changed, which made Tanja Mohorič’s presentation a significant refresh of the mind.

Tanja’s lecture was illustrated by various quotes, you can find them in her presentation . Here are a few examples:

If you really look closely, most overnight successes took a long time. (Steve Jobs)

If you read Steve Jobs’s history at Apple, you will discover it has been a long journey. Although we like to praise the hero, there were many other, less visible people and patents involved in bringing Apple’s Innovation to the market.

Innovation is the ability to convert ideas into invoices (Lewis Dunacan)

What I like about this quote is that it also shows the importance of having a positive financial outcome. Bringing Innovation to the market is a matter of timing. If you are too early, there is no market for your product (yet), and if you are too late, the market share or margin is gone.

Minds are like parachutes – they only function when open (Thomas Dewar)

Curiosity and an open mind remain needed. The parachute quote is a quote to remember, mainly if you work in a traditional, established company. The risk of conformance is high, and a “we know the best” attitude might be killing the company, as we have seen from some management examples, like Kodak, NOKIA, and others.

Tanja’s presentation addressing the elements that support Innovation and those that kill Innovation can be found here: INNOVATION AS A PRECONDITION TO SUCCESS_Tanja Mohorič.

I want to close with one of the essential images that she shared, which is very aligned with how I see companies should consider their future, not as an evolutionary path to survive but as a journey to be inspired.

 

Coaching

As the CADCAM Group is a significant implementer of the Dassault Systèmes portfolio, my presentation about digital transformation in the PLM Domain was focused on their terminology and capabilities. You can find my presentation on SlideShare here.

However, the HOW part of digital transformation is more or less independent of the software. Here, it is about people, digital skills and new ways of working, which can be challenging for an existing enterprise as the linear business must continue. You might have seen the diagram below from previous blog posts/presentations.

The challenge I discussed with a few companies was how to apply it to your company.

First of all, I am still promoting McKinsey’s approach described in their article Our insights/toward an integrated technology operating model from 2017, which might not directly mention PLM at first glance. The way you work in your business should reflect the way you work with PLM and vice versa.

Where the traditional application-domain-based model reflects the existing coordinated business, the transformation takes place by learning to work first in small pods and later in digital product teams.

It seems evident that these new teams will be staffed with young, digital-native people. However, it remains crucial that these teams are coached by experienced people who help the team benefit from their vast experience.

It is like in soccer. Having eleven highly skilled young players does not make a team successful. Success depends on the combination of the trainer and the coach, and it is a continuous interaction throughout the season.

Therefore, a question for your organization: “Where are your coaches and trainers?”

I addressed this topic in my post: PLM 2020- The next decade (4 challenges), where the topic of changing organizations and retiring people became apparent.

As a rule of thumb, I would claim that you should try to give somebody with unique knowledge and who will be retiring in 2 – 3 years the role of coach and is no longer an operational mission. It may look less effective; however, it will contribute to a smooth knowledge transition from a coordinated to a coordinated and connected enterprise.

 

Conclusion

It was great to be inspired by some of the “soft” topics related to modern PLM. We like to discuss the usage of drawings, intelligent part numbers, the EBOM, MBOM, and SBOM or a cloud infrastructure. However I enjoyed discussing perhaps the most essential parts of a successful PLM implementation: the people, their motivation and their attitude to Curiosity and Innovation – their willingness to get inspired by the future.

What do you see as the most important topic to address in the future?

How to Avoid Migration Migraine? – part 2

May 15, 2024 in 3D CAD management, Data centric, Digital Enterprise, digital thread, Migrations, PLM, Sustainability | Tags: , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Two weeks ago, I shared my first post about PDM/PLM migration challenges on LinkedIn: How to avoid Migration Migraine – part 1. Most of the content discussed was about data migrations.

Starting from moving data stored in relational databases to modern object-oriented environments – the technology upgrade. But also the challenges a company can have when merging different data siloes (CAD & BOM related) into a single PLM backbone to extend the support of product data beyond engineering.

Luckily, the post generated a lot of reactions and feedback through LinkedIn and personal interactions last week.

The amount of interaction illustrated the relevance of the topic for people; they recognized the elephant in the room, too.

 

Working with a partner

Data migrations and consolidation are typically not part of a company’s core business, so it is crucial to find the right partner for a migration project. The challenge with migrations is that there is potentially a lot to do technically, but only your staff can assess the quality and value of migrations.

Therefore, when planning a migration, make sure you work on it iteratively with an experienced partner who can provide a set of tools and best practices. Often, vendors or service partners have migration tools that still need to be tuned to your As-Is and To-Be environment.

To get an impression of what a PLM service partner can do and which topics or tools are relevant in the context of mid-market PLM, you can watch this xLM webinar on YouTube. So make sure you select a partner who is familiar with your PDM/PLM infrastructure and who has the experience to assess complexity.

 

Migration lessons learned

In my PLM coaching career I have seen many migrations. In the early days they were more related to technology upgrades, consolidation of data and system replacements. Nowadays the challenges are more related to become more data-driven. Here are 5 lessons that I learned in the past twenty years:

  1. A fixed price for the migration can be a significant risk as the quality of the data and the result are hard to comprehend upfront. In case of a fixed price, either you would pay for the moon (taking all the risk), or your service partner would lose a lot of money. In a sustainable business model, there should be no losers.
  2. Start (even now) with checking and fixing your data quality. For example, when you are aware of a mismatch between CAD assemblies and BOM data, analyze and fix discrepancies even before the migration.
  3. One immediate action to take when moving from CAD assemblies to BOM structures is to check or fill the properties in the CAD system to support a smooth transition. Filling properties might be a temporary action, as later, when becoming more data-driven, some of these properties, e.g., material properties or manufacturer part numbers, should not be maintained in the CAD system anymore. However, they might help migration tools to extract a richer dataset.
  4. Focus on implementing an environment ready for the future. Don’t let your past data quality compromise complexity. In such a case, learn to live with legacy issues that will be fixed only when needed. A 100 % matching migration is not likely to happen because the source data might also be incorrect, even after further analysis.
  5. The product should probably not be configured in the CAD environment, even because the CAD tool allows it. I had this experience with SolidWorks in the past. PDM became the enemy because the users managed all configuration options in the assembly files, making it hard to use it on the BOM or Product level (the connected digital thread).

 

 The future is data-driven

In addition, these migration discussions made me aware again that so many companies are still in the early phases of creating a unified PLM infrastructure in their company and implementing the coordinated approach – an observation I shared in my report on the PDSFORUM 2024 conference.

Due to sustainability-related regulations and the need to understand product behavior in the field (Digital Twin / Product As A Service), becoming data-driven is an unavoidable target in the near future. Implementing a connected digital thread is crucial to remaining competitive and sustainable in business.

However, the first step is to gain insights about the available data (formats and systems) and its quality. Therefore, implementing a coordinated PLM backbone should immediately contain activities to improve data quality and implement a data governance policy to avoid upcoming migration issues.

Data-driven environments, the Systems of Engagement, bring the most value when connected through a digital thread with the Systems of Record (PLM. ERP and others), therefore,  design your processes, even current ones, user-centric, data-centric and build for change (see Yousef Hooshmand‘s story in this post – also image below).

 

The data-driven Future is not a migration.

The last part of this article will focus on what I believe is a future PLM architecture for companies. To be more precise, it is not only a PLM architecture anymore. It should become a business architecture based on connected platforms (the systems of record) and inter-platform connected value streams (the systems of engagement).

The discussion is ongoing, and from the technical and business side, I recommend reading Prof Dr. Jorg Fischer’s recent articles, for example. The Crisis of Digitalization – Why We All Must Change Our Mindset! or The MBOM is the Steering Wheel of the Digital Supply Chain! A lot of academic work has been done in the context of TeamCenter and SAP.

Also, Martin Eigner recently described in The Constant Conflict Between PLM and ERP a potential digital future of enterprise within the constraints of existing legacy systems.

In my terminology, they are describing a hybrid enterprise dominated by major Systems of Record complemented by Systems of Engagement to support optimized digital value streams.

Whereas Oleg Shilovitsky, coming from the System of Engagement side with OpenBOM, describes the potential technologies to build a digital enterprise as you can read from one of his recent posts: How to Unlock the Future of Manufacturing by Opening PLM/ERP to Connect Processes and Optimize Decision Support.

All three thought leaders talk about the potential of connected aspects in a future enterprise. For those interested in the details there is a lot to learn and understand.

For the sake of the migration story I stay out of the details. However interesting to mention, they also do not mention data migration—is it the elephant in the room?

I believe moving from a coordinated enterprise to a integrated (coordinated and connected) enterprise is not a migration, as we are no longer talking about a single system that serves the whole enterprise.

The future of a digital enterprise is a federated environment where existing systems need to become more data-driven, and additional collaboration environments will have their internally connected capabilities to support value streams.

With this in mind you can understand the 2017 McKinsey article– Our insights/toward an integrated technology operating model – the leading image below:

And when it comes to realization of such a concept, I have described the Heliple-2 project a few times before as an example of such an environment, where the target is to have a connection between the two layers through standardized interfaces, starting from OSLC. Or visit the Heliple Federated PLM LinkedIn group.

Data architecture and governance are crucial.

The image above generalizes the federated PLM concept and illustrates the two different systems connected through data bridges. As data must flow between the two sides without human intervention, the chosen architecture must be well-defined.

Here, I want to use a famous quote from Youssef Housmand’s paper From a Monolithic PLM Landscape to a Federated Domain and Data Mesh. Click on the image to listen to the Share PLM podcast with Yousef.

From a Single Source of Truth towards a principle of the Nearest Source of Truth based on a Single Source of Change

  • If you agree with this quote, you have a future mindset of federated PLM.
  • If you still advocate the Single Source of Truth, you are still in the Monolithic PLM phase.

It’s not a problem if you are aware that the next step should be federated and you are not ready yet.

However, in particular, environmental regulations and sustainability initiatives can only be performed in data-driven, federated environments. Think about the European Green Deal with its upcoming Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Directive (ESPR), which demands digital traceability of products, their environmental impact, and reuse /recycle options, expressed in the Digital Product Passport.

Reporting, Greenhouse Gas Reporting and ESG reporting are becoming more and more mandatory for companies, either by regulations or by the customers. Only a data-driven connected infrastructure can deal with this efficiently. Sustaira, a company we interviewed with the PLM Green Global Alliance last year, delivers such a connected infrastructure.

Read the challenges they meet in their blog post:  Is inaccurate sustainability data holding you back?

Finally, to perform Life Cycle Assessments for design options or Life Cycle Analyses for operational products, you need connections to data sources in real-time. The virtual design twin or the digital twin in operation does not run on documents.

 

Conclusion

Data migration and consolidation to modern systems is probably a painful and challenging process. However, the good news is that with the right mindset to continue and with a focus on data quality and governance, the next step to a integrated coordinated and connected enterprise will not be that painful. It can be an evolutionary process, as the McKinsey article describes it.

How to avoid Migration Migraine – part 1

April 30, 2024 in 3D CAD management, EBOM, Migrations, PDM, PLM, Smart Numbers | Tags: , , , , , | Leave a comment

In the past months, I have had several discussions related to migrating PLM data, either from one system to another or from consolidating a collection of applications into a single environment. Does this sound familiar?

Let me share some experiences and lessons learned to avoid the Migration Migraine.

It is not a technical guide but a collection of experiences and thoughts that you might have missed when considering to solve the technical dream.

Halfway I realized I was too ambitious; therefore, another post will follow this introduction. Here, I will focus on the business side and the digital transformation journey.

 

Garbage Out – Garbage In

The Garbage Out-In statement is somehow the paradigm we are used to in our day-to-day lives. When you buy a new computer, you use backup and restore. Even easier, nowadays, the majority of the data is already in the cloud.

This simple scenario assumes that all professional systems should be easily upgrade-able. We become unaware of the amount of data we store and its relevance.

This phenomenon already has a name: “Dark Data.” Dark Data consumes storage energy in the cloud and is no longer visible. Please read all about it here: Dark Data.

TIP 1: Every migration is a moment to clean up your data. By dragging everything with you, the burden of migrating becomes bigger. In easy migrations, do a clean-up—it prevents future, more extensive issues.

Never follow the Garbage Out – Garbage in principle, even if it is easy!

 

Migrations in the PLM domain are different – setting the scene.

Before discussing the various scenarios, let’s examine what companies are doing. For early PLM adopters in the Automotive, Aerospace, and Defense Industries, migrations from mainframes to modern infrastructures have become impossible. The real problem is not only the changing hardware but also the changing data and data models.

For these companies, the solution is often to build an entirely new PLM infrastructure on top of the existing infrastructure, where manageable data pieces are migrated to new environments using data lakes, dashboards, and custom apps to support modern users.

Migration in this case is a journey as long as the data lives – and we can learn from them!

 

Follow the money

From a business perspective, migrations are considered a negative distractor. Talking about them raises awareness of their complexity, which might jeopardize enthusiasm.

For the initiator, the PLM software vendor or implementer, it might endanger the sales deal.

Traditional IT organizations strive for simplification—one CAD, one PLM or one ERP system to manage. Although this argument makes sense, an analysis should always be done comparing the benefits and the (migration) costs and risks to reach the ideal situation.

In those discussions often, migrations are downplayed

Without naming companies, I have observed the downplaying several times, even at some prominent enterprises. So, if you recognize your company in this process, you are not alone.

TIP 2: Migrations are never simple. Make migration a serious topic of your PLM project – as important as the software. This approach means analyzing the potential migration risks and their mitigation is needed.

Please read about the Xylem story in my recent post: The week after the PDSFORUM 2024

The Big Bang has the highest risk and might again lead to garbage out—garbage in.

 

You are responsible for your garbage.

It may sound disparaging, but it is not. Most companies are aware that people, tools and policies have changed over the years. Due to the coordinated approach to working, disciplines did not need to care about downstream or upstream usage of their initially created data – Excel and PDFs are the bridges between disciplines.

All the actual knowledge and context are stored in the heads of experienced employees who have gotten used to dealing with inconsistencies. And they will retire, so there is an urgent need for actual data quality and governance. Read more about the journey from Coordinated to Connected in these articles.

Even if you are not yet thinking about migrations, the digital transformation in the PLM domain is coming, and we should learn to work in a connected mode.

TIP 3: Create a team in your organization that assesses the current data quality and defines the potential future enterprise (data) architecture. Then, start improving the quality of the current generated data. Like the ISO 900x standard, the ISO 8000 standard already exists for data quality.

The future is data-driven; prepare yourself for the future.

 

Migration scenarios and their best practices

Here are some migrations scenario’s – two in this post and more in an upcoming post.

 

From Relational to Object-oriented

One of my earlier projects, starting in 2010 with SmarTeam, was migrating a mainframe-based application for airplane certification to a modern Microsoft infrastructure.

The goal was to create a new environment that could be used both as a replacement for the mainframe application and as the design and validation environment to implement changes to the current airplanes during a maintenance or upgrade activity.

The need was high because detailed documentation about the logic of the current application did not exist, and only one person who understood the logic was partly available.

So, internally, the relational database was a black box. The tables in the database contained a mix of item data, document data, change status and versions. The documents were stored in directories with meaningful file names but disconnected from the application.

The initial estimate was that the project would take two to three months, so a fixed price for two months was agreed upon. However, it became almost a two-year project, and in the end, the result seemed to be reliable (there was never mathematical proof).

The disadvantage was that SmarTeam ended up being so highly customized that automatic upgrades would not work for this version anymore—a new legacy was created with modern technology.

The same story, combined with the example of Ericsson’s migration attempt, is described in the 2016 post, The PLM Migration Dilemma. For me, the lesson learned from these examples leads to the following recommendation.

TIP 4: When there is a paradigm change in the data model, don’t migrate but establish a new (data-driven) infrastructure and connect to your legacy as much as possible in read-only mode.

The automotive and aerospace industries’ story is one of paradigm change.

Listen to the SharePLM podcast Revolutionizing PLM: Insights from Yousef Hooshmand, where Yousef also discusses how to address this transition process.

 

CAD/PDM to PLM

Another migration step happens when companies decide to implement a traditional PLM infrastructure as a System of Record, merging PDM data (mainly CAD) and ERP data (the BOM).

Some of these companies have been working file-based and have stored their final CAD files in folders; others might have a local PDM system native to the 3D CAD. The EBOM usually existed digitally in ERP, and most of the time, it is not a “pure” EBOM but more of a hybrid EBOM/MBOM.

The image above show this type of migration can be very challenging as, in the source systems, there is not necessarily a consistent 3D CAD definition matching the BOM items. As the systems have been disconnected in the past, people have potentially added missing information or fixed information on the BOM side. As in most companies, the manufacturing definition is based on drawings, and the consistency with the 3D CAD definition is not guaranteed.

To address this challenge, companies need to assess the usability of the CAD and BOM data. Is it possible to populate the CAD files with properties that are necessary for an import? For example, does the file path contain helpful information?

I have experienced a situation where a company has poorly defined 3D parts and no properties, as all the focus was on using the 3D to generate the 2D drawing.

The relevant details for manufacturing were next added to the drawing and not anymore to the parts or models – traceability was almost impossible.

In this situation, importing the 3D CAD structures into the new PLM system has limited value. An alternative is to describe and test procedures for handling legacy data when it is needed, either to implement a design change or a new order. Leave the legacy accessible, but do not migrate.

The BOM side is, in theory, stable for manufactured products, as the data should have gone through a release process. However, the company needs to revisit its part definition process for new designs and products.

Some points to consider:

  1. Meaningful identifiers are not desired in a PLM system as they create a legacy. Therefore, the import of parts with smart identifiers should map to relevant part properties besides the ID. Splitting the ID into properties will create a broader usage in the future. Read more in Smart Part Numbers – do we need them?
  2. In addition, companies should try to avoid having logistic information, such as supplier-specific part numbers to come from the CAD system. Supplier parts in your CAD environment create inefficiencies when a supplier part becomes obsolete. Concepts such as EBOM and MBOM and potentially the SBOM should be well understood during this migration.
  3. Concepts of EBOM and MBOM should also be introduced when moving from an ETO to a CTO approach or when modularity is a future business strategy.

 

 

Conclusion

As every company is on its PLM journey and technology is evolving, there will always be a migration discussion. Understanding and working towards the future should be the most critical driver for migration. Migrations in the PLM domain are often more than a data migration – new ways of working should be introduced in parallel. And for that reason the “big bang” is often too costly and demotivating for the future.

 

 

The week after the PDSFORUM 2024

April 21, 2024 in CAD data management, Circulair Economy, Digital Enterprise, digital thread, Digital Twin, Material Compliance, MBD, MBE, Modularity, PLM, Sustainability | Tags: , , , , | Leave a comment

I attended the PDSVISION forum for the first time, a two-day PLM event in Gothenburg organized by PTC’s largest implementer in the Nordics, also active in North America, the UK, and Germany.

The theme of the conference: Master your Digital Thread – a hot topic, as it has been discussed in various events, like the recent PLM Roadmap/PDT Europe conference in November 2023.

The event drew over 200 attendees, showing the commitment of participants, primarily from the Nordics, to knowledge sharing and learning.

The diverse representation included industry leaders like Vestas, pioneers in Sustainable Energy, and innovative startups like CorPower Ocean, who are dedicated to making wave energy reliable and competitive. Notably, the common thread among these diverse participants was their focus on sustainability, a growing theme in PLM conferences and an essential item on every board’s strategic agenda.

I enjoyed the structure and agenda of the conference. The first day was filled with lectures and inspiring keynotes. The second day was a day of interactive workshops divided into four tracks, which were of decent length so we could really dive into the topics. As you can imagine, I followed the sustainability track.

Here are some of my highlights of this conference.

 

Catching the Wind: A Digital Thread From Design to Service

Simon Saandvig Storbjerg, unfortunately remote,  gave an overview of the PLM-related challenges that Vestas is addressing. Vestas, the undisputed market leader in wind energy, is indirectly responsible for 231 million tonnes of CO2 per year.

One of the challenges of wind power energy is the growing complexity and need for variants. With continuous innovation and the size of the wind turbine, it is challenging to achieve economic benefits of scale.

As an example, Simon shared data related to the Lost Production Factor, which was around 5% in 2009 and reduced to 2% in 2017 and is now growing again. This trend is valid not only for Vestas but also for all wind turbine manufacturers, as variability is increasing.

Vestas is introducing modularity to address these challenges. I reported last year about their modularity journey related to the North European Modularity biannual meeting held at Vestas in Ringkøbing – you can read the post here.

Simon also addressed the importance of Model-Based Definition (MBD), which is crucial if you want to achieve digital continuity between engineering and manufacturing. In particular, in this industry, MBD is a challenge to involve the entire value chain, despite the fact that the benefits are proven and known. Change in people skills and processes remains a challenge.

 

The Future of Product Design and Development

The session led by PTC from Mark Lobo, General Manager for the PLM Segment, and Brian Thompson, General Manager of the CAD Segment, brought clarity to the audience on the joint roadmap of Windchill and Creo.

Mark and Brian highlighted the benefits of a Model-Based Enterprise and Model-Based Definition, which are musts if you want to be more efficient in your company and value chain.

The WHY is known, see the benefits described in the image, and requires new ways of working, something organizations need to implement anyway when aiming to realize a digital thread or digital twin.

In addition, Mark addressed PTC’s focus on Design for Sustainability and their partner network. In relation to materials science, the partnership with Ansys Granta MI is essential. It was presented later by Ansys and discussed on day two during one of the sustainability workshops.

Mark and Brian elaborated on the PTC SaaS journey – the future atlas platform and the current status of WindChill+ and Creo+, addressing a smooth transition from existing customers to a new future architecture.

And, of course, there was the topic of Artificial Intelligence.

Mark explained that PTC is exploring AI in various areas of the product lifecycle, like validating requirements, optimizing CAD models, streamlining change processes on the design side but also downstream activities like quality and maintenance predictions, improved operations and streamlined field services and service parts are part of the PTC Copilot strategy.

PLM combined with AI is for sure a topic where the applicability and benefits can be high to improve decision-making.

 

PLM Data Merge in the PTC Cloud: The Why & The How

Mikael Gustafson from Xylem, a leading Global Water Solutions provider, described their recently completed project: merging their on-premise Windchill instance TAPIR and their cloud Windchill XGV into a single environment.

TAPIR stands for Technical Administration, Part Information Repository and is very much part-centric and used in one organization. XGV stands for Xylem Global Vault, and it is used in 28 organizations with more of a focus on CAD data (Creo and AutoCAD). Two different siloes are to be joined in one instance to build a modern, connected, data-driven future or, as Mikael phrased it: “A step towards a more manageable Virtual Product“.

It was a severe project involving a lot of resources and time, again showing the challenges of migrations. I am planning to publish a blog post, the draft title “Migration Migraine,” as this type of migration is prevalent in many places because companies want to implement a single PLM backbone beyond (mechanical) engineering.

What I liked about the approach was its focus on assessing the risks and prioritizing a mitigation strategy if necessary. As the list below shows, even the COVID-19 pandemic was challenging the project.

Often, big migration projects fail due to optimism or by assessing some of the risks at the start and then giving it a go.

When failures happen, there is often the blame game: Was it the software, the implementer, or the customer (past or present) that caused the troubles? Mediating in such environments has been a long time my mission as the “Flying Dutchman,” and from my experience, it is not about the blame game; it is, most of the time, too high expectations and not enough time or resources to fully control this journey.

As Michael said, Xylem was successful, and during the go-live, only a few non-critical issues popped up.

When asked what he would do differently with the project’s hindsight, Mikael mentioned he would do the migrations not as a big project but as smaller projects.

I can relate a lot to this answer as, by experience, the “one-time” migration projects have created a lot of stress for the company, and only a few of them were successful.

 

Starting being coordinated and then connected

Several sessions were held where companies shared their PLM journey, to be mapped along the maturity slide (slide 8) I shared in my session: The Why, What and How of Digital Transformation in the PLM domain. You can review the content here on SlideShare.

There was Evolabel, a company starting its PLM journey because they are suffering from ineffective work procedures, information islands and the increasing complexity of its products.

Evolabel realized it needed PLM to realize its market ambition: To be a market leader within five years. For Evolabel, PLM is a must that is repeatable and integrated internally.

They shared how they first defined the required understanding and mindset for the needed capabilities before implementing them. In my terminology, they started to implement a coordinated PLM approach.

Teddy Svenson from JBT, a well-known manufacturer of food-tech solutions, described their next step in PLM. From an old AS/400 system with very little integration to PDM to a complete PLM system with parts, configurations, and change management.

It is not an easy task but a vital stepping stone for future development and a complete digital thread, from sales to customer care. In my terminology, they were upgrading their technology to improve their coordinated approach to be ready for the next digital evolution.

There were several other presentations on Day One – See the agenda here  I cannot cover them all given the limited size of this blog post.

 

The Workshops

As I followed the Sustainability track, I cannot comment much on the other track; however, given the presenters and the topics, they all appeared to be very pragmatic and interactive – given the format.

Achieving sustainability goals by integrating material intelligence into the design process

In the sustainability track, we started with Manuelle Clavel from Ansys Granta, who explained in detail how material data and its management are crucial for designing better-performing, more sustainable, and compliant products.

With the importance of compliance with (upcoming) regulations and the usage of material characteristics in the context of more sustainable products and being able to perform a Life Cycle Assessment, it is crucial to have material information digitally available, both in the CAD design environment as well in the PLM environment.

For me, a dataset of material properties is an excellent example of how it is used in a connected enterprise. You do not want to copy the information from system to system; it needs to be connected and available in real-time.

How can we design more sustainable products?

Together with Martin Lundqvist from QCM, I conducted an interactive session. We started with the need for digitalization, then looked at RoHS and REACH compliance and discussed the upcoming requirements of the Digital Product Passport.

We closed the session with a dialogue on the circular economy.

From the audience, we learned that many companies are still early in understanding the implementation of sustainability requirements and new processes. However, some were already quite advanced and acting. In particular, it is essential to know if your company is involved with batteries (DPP #1) or is close to consumers.

 

Conclusion

The PDSFORUM was for me an interesting experience for meeting companies at all different stages of their PLM journey. All sessions I attended were realistic, and the solutions were often pragmatic. In my day-to-day life, inspiring companies to understand a digital and sustainable future, you sometimes forget the journey everyone is going through.

Thanks, PDVISION, for inviting me to speak and learn at this conference.

and some sad news …..

I was sorry to learn that last week, Dr. Ken Versprille suddenly passed away. I know Ken, as shown in the picture – a passionate moderator and timekeeper of the PLM Roadmap / PDT conferences, well prepared for the details. May his spirit live through the future conferences – the next one already on May 8-9th in Washington, DC.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

PLM and Sustainability: Talking with Siemens

April 17, 2024 in Circulair Economy, Data centric, Digital Enterprise, digital thread, Digital Twin, Green Development, Life Cycle Assessment, PLM, Supply Chain, Sustainability | Tags: , , , , , | Leave a comment

Our recent interviews this year with aPriori and SAP were with companies that had less of a focus on the traditional product design process and more of a focus on the (circular) manufacturing process. In these interviews the importance of working with connected data was discussed in a shared (digital) thread.

This time, we, Mark Reisig and Jos Voskuil, were excited to talk with Siemens, not only a well-known PLM vendor but also a manufacturer of products and, therefore, having a close understanding of what is needed and can be achieved with their software solutions.

Siemens

As Siemens is such a broad enterprise; we were happy to speak with Ryan R. Rochelle, who focuses on Sustainable Production, Sustainable Manufacturing and Sustainable Industry within Siemens . In the interview we discussed the importance of digital twins and the feedback loops between design and manufacturing. Despite some flaws in the network connection, we are happy to share an informative interview.

Enjoy listening and watching the next 33 minutes, talking with Ryan Rochelle.

You can download the images shown during the interview HERE

 

What I have learned

  • Like all PLM vendors in this domain, Siemens talks about the importance of a circular economy and the need for digital threads and digital twins, confirming the need for all of us to invest in the  digitization of the product lifecycle.
  • Siemens is in a unique position as both the industrial user and software provider of its PLM suite, therefore having a unique feedback loop on the usability and applicability of its software in its industry.
  • In the area of sustainability, they learn from both customers and internal customers. They are customer zero. Here, they observe shifting in engineering activities to the left” to optimize processes, supply chain and manufacturing earlier . (<<PGGA>>: which aligns with our aPriori and Makersite interviews).
  • Siemens, SiGreen’s solution is an example of this unique position, being  be able to track the carbon footprint of products across the supply chain.

Want to learn more


Conclusion

We have been discussing the relationship between PLM and sustainability with relevant software vendors for over two years now. As we saw initially in 2022, a few companies were exploring the possibilities.

Now, with further regulations and advanced software capabilities, companies are starting to implement new capabilities to make their product development process and products more sustainable. Siemens, as a software provider and an industrial user of its tools, is leading this journey—is it time for your company to step up, too?

 

PLM and Sustainability: continue talking with SAP

March 24, 2024 in Circulair Economy, Data centric, Material Compliance, PLM, Sustainability | Tags: , , , , , | Leave a comment

Our first PGGA interview with PLM-related software vendors was two years ago with SAP. At that time, Sustainability became more visible in corporate strategies, and regulations were imminent.

This time, Klaus Brettschneider and I want to learn what has happened related to Sustainability. Is there visible progress in their organizations and customer base? And what is hot now?

And we were positively surprised by a conversation going in many directions.

SAP

The interview was again with Darren West. Darren is the product expert for SAP’s Circular Economy solutions and this time, Stephan Fester supported him. Stephan is co-leading the SAP Global Circular Manufacturing Practice and, therefore, is well-connected to the field. Last year, in particular, working in discrete manufacturing and discussing circular manufacturing.

Thanks to the expertise of our guests, the discussion went in various directions, with circularity as the central theme.

We discussed the progress of the Responsible Design & Production module that was just launched two years ago. We discussed the Green Ledger and Carbon Accounting, of course, in the context of circular manufacturing.

But also, we discussed the Digital Product Passport. Catena-X, what is it, and what is it targeting?

We also discussed how to deal with the scarcity of materials and materials harvesting.   The interview could not be complete without mentioning AI.

Enjoy the 35-minute interview with Darren and Stephan on our YouTube channel.

The slides shown in this recording can be found here: PGGA talking again with SAP.

 

What we have learned

  • Regulations heavily push SAP customers and require adequate reporting tools, not only for finance and material use but also for sustainability KPIs
  • The Responsible Design & Production module launched two years ago is already in use with 60+ customers, showing the importance of having data-driven decision support for plastic packaging – to be extended to the product. Of course, as a PLM community, we are interested in understanding the next steps toward the product.
  • The insights from Stephan Fester on circular manufacturing can be a logical evolution of the linear product process, as Stephan’s image shows.
  • Great insights on Catena-X as an independent network for data sharing in the global network

 

Want to learn more?

Events and Shows:

Websites:

 

Conclusion

It was a great discussion with a company that is quite active in supporting its customers on a sustainable journey. The journey is complex and has many aspects, as Darren and Stephan shared in this dialogue. The good news is that SAP’s customers are actively implementing measures and processes – going circular is happening!

 

Join the PDSFORUM next month and join me to get inspired an participate in a Think Thank session on day 2 related to designing more sustainable products. Will we meet there?

 

The week after the 2024 3DEXPERIENCE User Conference

March 20, 2024 in 3DExperience, Artificial Intelligence, Cloud, Data centric, ENOVIA, Life Cycle Assessment, Platform, PLM | Tags: , , , , , | Leave a comment

Last week, I participated in the annual 3DEXPERIENCE User Conference, organized by the ENOVIA and NETVIBES brands. With approximately 250 attendees, the 2-day conference on the High-Tech Campus in Eindhoven was fully booked.

My PDM/PLM career started in 1990 in Eindhoven.

First, I spent a significant part of my school life there, and later, I became a physics teacher in Eindhoven. Then, I got infected by CAD and data management, discovering SmarTeam, and the rest is history.

As I wrote in my last year’s post, the 3DEXPERIENCE conference always feels like a reunion, as I have worked most of my time in the SmarTeam, ENOVIA, and 3DEXPERIENCE Eco-system.

 

Innovation Drivers in the Generative Economy

Stephane Declee and Morgan Zimmerman kicked off the conference with their keynote, talking about the business theme for 2024: the Generative Economy. Where the initial focus was on the Experience Economy and emotion, the Generative Economy includes Sustainability. It is a clever move as the word Sustainability, like Digital Transformation, has become such a generic term. The Generative Economy clearly explains that the aim is to be sustainable for the planet.

Stephane and Morgan talked about the importance of the virtual twin, which is different from digital twins. A virtual twin typically refers to a broader concept that encompasses not only the physical characteristics and behavior of an object or system but also its environment, interactions, and context within a virtual or simulated world. Virtual Twins are crucial to developing sustainable solutions.

Morgan concluded the session by describing the characteristics of the data-driven 3DEXPERIENCE platform and its AI fundamentals, illustrating all the facets of the mix of a System of Record (traditional PLM) and Systems of Record (MODSIM).

 

3DEXPERIENCE for All at automation.eXpress

Daniel Schöpf, CEO and founder of automation.eXpress GmbH, gave a passionate story about why, for his business, the 3DEXPERIENCE platform is the only environment for product development, collaboration and sales.

Automation.eXpress is a young but typical Engineering To Order company building special machinery and services in dedicated projects, which means that every project, from sales to delivery, requires a lot of communication.

For that reason, Daniel insisted all employees to communicate using the 3DEXPERIENCE platform on the cloud. So, there are no separate emails, chats, or other siloed systems.

Everyone should work connected to the project and the product as they need to deliver projects as efficiently and fast as possible.

Daniel made this decision based on his 20 years of experience in traditional ways of working—the coordinated approach. Now, starting from scratch in a new company without a legacy, Daniel chose the connected approach, an ideal fit for his organization, and using the cloud solution as a scalable solution, an essential criterium for a startup company.

My conclusion is that this example shows the unique situation of an inspired leader with 20 years of experience in this business who does not choose ways of working from the past but starts a new company in the same industry, but now based on a modern platform approach instead of individual traditional tools.

 

 

Augment Me Through Innovative Technology

Dr. Cara Antoine gave an inspiring keynote based on her own life experience and lessons learned from working in various industries, a major oil & gas company and major high-tech hardware and software brands. Currently, she is an EVP and the Chief Technology, Innovation & Portfolio Officer at Capgemini.

She explained how a life-threatening infection that caused blindness in one of her eyes inspired her to find ways to augment herself to keep on functioning.

With that, she drew a parallel with humanity, who continuously have been augmenting themselves from the prehistoric day to now at an ever-increasing speed of change.

The current augmentation is the digital revolution. Digital technology is coming, and you need to be prepared to survive – it is Innovate of Abdicate.

Dr. Cara continued expressing the need to invest in innovation (me: it was not better in the past 😉 ) – and, of course, with an economic purpose; however, it should go hand in hand with social progress (gender diversity) and creating a sustainable planet (innovation is needed here).

Besides the focus on innovation drivers, Dr. Cara always connected her message to personal interaction. Her recently published book Make it Personal describes the importance of personal interaction, even if the topics can be very technical or complex.

I read the book with great pleasure, and it was one of the cornerstones of the panel discussion next.

 

It is all about people…

It might be strange to have a session like this in an ENOVIA/NETVIBES User Conference; however, it is another illustration that we are not just talking about technology and tools.

I was happy to introduce and moderate this panel discussion,also using the iconic Share PLM image,  which is close to my heart.

The panelists, Dr. Cara Antoine, Daniel Schöpf, and Florens Wolters, each actively led transformational initiatives with their companies.

We discussed questions related to culture, personal leadership and involvement and concluded with many insights, including “Create chemistry, identify a passion, empower diversity, and make a connection as it could make/break your relationship, were discussed.

 

And it is about processes.

Another trend I discovered is that cloud-based business platforms, like the 3DEXERIENCE platform, switch the focus from discussing functions and features in tools to establishing platform-based environments, where the focus is more on data-driven and connected processes.

Some examples:

Data Driven Quality at Suzlon Energy Ltd.

Florens Wolters, who also participated in the panel discussion “It is all about people ..” explained how he took the lead to reimagine the Sulon Energy Quality Management System using the 3DEXPERIENCE platform and ENOVIA from a disconnected, fragmented, document-driven Quality Management System with many findings in 2020 to a fully integrated data-driven management system with zero findings in 2023.

It is an illustration that a modern data-driven approach in a connected environment brings higher value to the organization as all stakeholders in the addressed solution work within an integrated, real-time environment. No time is wasted to search for related information.

Of course, there is the organizational change management needed to convince people not to work in their favorite siloes system, which might be dedicated to the job, but not designed for a connected future.

The image to the left was also a part of the “It is all about people”- session.

 

Enterprise Virtual Twin at Renault Group

The presentation of Renault was also an exciting surprise. Last year, they shared the scope of the Renaulution project at the conference (see also my post: The week after the 3DEXPERIENCE conference 2023).

Here, Renault mentioned that they would start using the 3DEXPERIENCE platform as an enterprise business platform instead of a traditional engineering tool.

Their presentation today, which was related to their Engineering Virtual Twin, was an example of that. Instead of using their document-based SCR (Système de Conception Renault – the Renault Design System) with over 1000 documents describing processes connected to over a hundred KPI, they have been modeling their whole business architecture and processes in UAF using a Systems of System Approach.

The image above shows Franck Gana, Renault’s engineering – transformation chief officer, explaining the approach. We could write an entire article about the details of how, again, the 3DEXPERIENCE platform can be used to provide a real-time virtual twin of the actual business processes, ensuring everyone is working on the same referential.

 

Bringing Business Collaboration to the Next Level with Business Experiences

To conclude this section about the shifting focus toward people and processes instead of system features, Alizée Meissonnier Aubin and Antoine Gravot introduced a new offering from 3DS, the marketplace for Business Experiences.


According to the HBR article, workers switch an average of 1200 times per day between applications, leading to 9 % of their time reorienting themselves after toggling.

1200 is a high number and a plea for working in a collaboration platform instead of siloed systems (the Systems of Engagement, in my terminology – data-driven, real-time connected). The story has been told before by Daniel Schöpf, Florens Wolters and Franck Gana, who shared the benefits of working in a connected collaboration environment.

The announced marketplace will be a place where customers can download Business Experiences.

There is was more ….

There were several engaging presentations and workshops during the conference. But, as we reach 1500 words, I will mention just two of them, which I hope to come back to in a later post with more detail.

  • Delivering Sustainable & Eco Design with the 3DS LCA Solution

    Valentin Tofana from Comau, an Italian multinational company in the automation and committed to more sustainable products. In the last context Valentin   shared his experiences and lessons learned starting to use the 3DS LifeCycle Assessment tools on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform.
    This session gave such a clear overview that we will come back with the PLM Green Global Alliance in a separate interview.
  • Beyond PLM. Productivity is the Key to Sustainable Business
    Neerav MEHTA from L&T Energy Hydrocarbon demonstrated how they currently have implemented a virtual twin of the plant, allowing everyone to navigate, collaborate and explore all activities related to the plant.I was promoting this concept in 2013 also for Oil & Gas EPC companies, at that time, an immense performance and integration challenge. (PLM for all industries) Now, ten years later, thanks to the capabilities of the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, it has become a workable reality. Impressive.

 

Conclusion

Again, I learned a lot during these days, seeing the architecture of the 3DEXPERIENCE platform growing (image below). In addition, more and more companies are shifting their focus to real-time collaboration processes in the cloud on a connected platform. Their testimonies illustrate that to be sustainable in business, you have to augment yourself with digital.

Note: Dassault Systemes did not cover any of the cost for me attending this conference. I picked the topics close to my heart and got encouraged by all the conversations I had.

 

PLM and Sustainability: Talking with aPriori

March 12, 2024 in Data centric, Digital Twin, PLM, Sustainability | Tags: , , | Leave a comment

This post shares our second interview this year in the PLM Global Green Alliance series, where we talked with PLM-related software vendors and their activities related to Sustainability. Last year, we spoke mainly with the more traditional PLM vendors, but this year, we started with Makersite, a company specialized in Product Lifecycle Intelligence supporting sustainability analysis.

And now we are happy to talk this time with Mark Rushton,  Senior Product Marketing Manager and Ryan Flavelle, Associate Product Owner, both at aPriori Technologies. For my PGGA partner Mark Reisig and me, it was an interesting discussion in a domain where the focus was not on product design at the time.

 

aPriori

aPriori, according to their website, focuses on Digital Manufacturing, digitizing the entire manufacturing process, from design to production, and therefore able to asses environmental impact in a reliable manner.

It was an informative dialogue. Watch the 35-minute discussion here and learn how aPriori uniquely digitizes the manufacturing processes to support Sustainability.

Slides shown during the interview combined with additional company information can be found HERE.

 

What we have learned

  • aPriori’s customers have pushed the company to provide faster and digital sustainability insights in their manufacturing processes, illustrating that companies are really acting to understand their environmental impact. To measure is to know.
  • In this interview, we saw the concepts of the digital twin of manufacturing processes and the digital twin of a plant.
  • aPriori uniquely starts their impact analysis based on the 3d CAD geometry, being more accurate than what most LCA tools do, a BOM-based assessment,

Want to learn more?

Here are some links to the topics discussed in our meeting:

 

Conclusions

When it comes to sustainability in action, you need to be able measure and understand your environmental impact. Where traditional PLM activities focus on the design phase, there is also a lot to learn during the manufacturing phase. aPriori is doing this on a unique manner, not just based on BOM-analysis. In addition companies like aPriori have already a longer term experience with the virtual twin for manufacturing, originally used for cost and manufacturability analysis. Now extended to sustainability and their customers are working on it.

Next week more about the 3DEXPERIENCE conference – did I see you there?

 

 

 

 

 

PLM and Sustainability: talking with Makersite

February 26, 2024 in Artificial Intelligence, Data centric, Digital Twin, Green Development, Life Cycle Assessment, Material Compliance, Platform, PLM, Supply Chain, Sustainability | Tags: , , , , | Leave a comment

We are happy to start the year with the next round of the PLM Global Green Alliances (PGGA) series: PLM and Sustainability. This year, we will speak with some new companies, and we will also revisit some of our previous guests to learn about their progress.

Where we talked with Aras,  Autodesk, CIMdata,  Dassault Systèmes, PTC, SAP, Sustaira and Transition Technologies PSC, there are still a lot of software companies with an exciting portfolio related to sustainability.

Therefore, we are happy to talk this time with  Makersite, a company whose AI-powered Product Lifecycle Intelligence software, according to their home page, brings together your cost, environment, compliance, and risk data in one place to make smarter, greener decisions powered by the deepest understanding of your supply chain. Let’s explore

Makersite

We were lucky to have a stimulating discussion with Neil D’Souza, Makersite’s CEO and founder, who was active in the field of sustainability for almost twenty years, even before it became a cool (or disputed) profession.

It was an exciting dialogue where we enjoyed realistic answers without all the buzzwords and marketing terms often used in the new domain of sustainability. Enjoy the 39 minutes of interaction below:

 

Slides shown during the interview combined with additional company information can be found HERE.

 

What we have learned

  • Makersite’s mission, to enable manufacturers to make better products, faster, initially applied to economic parameters, can be easily extended with sustainability parameters.The power of Makersite is that it connects to enterprise systems and sources using AI, Machine Learning and algorithms to support reporting views on compliance, sustainability, costs and risk.
  • Compliance and sustainability are the areas where I see a significant need for companies to invest. It is not a revolutionary business change but an extension of scope.We discussed this in the context of the stage-gate process, where sustainability parameters should be added at each gate.
  • Neil has an exciting podcast, Five Lifes to Fifty, where he discusses the path to sustainable products with co-hosts Shelley Metcalfe and Jim Fava, and recently, they discussed sustainability in the context of the stage-gate process.
  • Again, to move forward with sustainability, it is about creating the base and caring about the data internally to understand what’s happening, and from there, enable value engineering, including your supplier where possible (IP protection remains a topic) – confirming digital transformation (the connected way of working) is needed for business and sustainability.

 

Want to learn more?

Here are some links to the topics discussed in our meeting:

Conclusions

With Makersite, we discovered an experienced company that used its experience in cost, compliance and risk analysis, including supply chains, to extend it to the domain of sustainability. As their technology partners page shows, they can be complementary in many industries and enterprises.

We will see another complementary solution soon in our following interview. Stay tuned.

 

 

 

 

 

Where traditional PLM fails …..

February 20, 2024 in Data centric, digital thread, PLM, Supplier Collaboration | Tags: , , , , | Leave a comment

One year ago, I wrote the post: Time to Split PLM, which reflected a noticeable trend in 2022 and 2023.

If you still pursue the Single Source of Truth or think that PLM should be supported by a single system, the best you can buy, then you are living in the past.

It is now the time to move from a Monolithic PLM Landscape to a Federated Domain and Data Mesh (Yousef Hooshmand) or the Heliple Federated PLM project (Erik Herzog) – you may have read about these concepts.

When moving from a traditional coordinated, document-driven business towards a modern, connected, and data-driven business, there is a paradigm shift. In many situations, we still need the document-driven approach to manage baselines for governance and traceability, where we create the required truth for manufacturing, compliance, and configuration management.

However, we also need an infrastructure for multidisciplinary collaboration nowadays. Working with systems, a combination of hardware and software, requires a model-based approach and multidisciplinary collaboration. This infrastructure needs to be data-driven to remain competitive despite more complexity, connecting stakeholders along value streams.

Traditional PLM vendors still push all functionality into one system, often leading to frustration among the end-users, complaining about lack of usability, bureaucracy, and the challenge of connecting to external stakeholders, like customers, suppliers, design or service partners.

 

Systems of Engagement

It is in modern PLM infrastructures where I started the positioning of Systems or Record (the traditional enterprise siloes – PDM/PLM, ERP, CM) and the Systems of Engagement (modern environments designed for close to real-time collaboration between stakeholders within a domain/value stream). In the Heliple project (image below), the Systems of Record are the vertical bars, and the Systems of Engagement are the horizontal bars.

The Heliple PLM Approach

The power of a System of Engagement is the data-driven connection between stakeholders even when working in different enterprises. Last year, I discussed with Andre Wegner from Authentise, MJ Smith from CoLab, and Oleg Shilovitsky from OpenBOM.

They all focus on modern, data-driven, multidisciplinary collaboration. You can find the discussion here: The new side of PLM? Systems of Engagement!

Where is the money?

Business leaders usually are not interested in a technology or architectural discussion – too many details and complexity, they look for the business case. Look at this recent post and comments on LinkedIn – “When you try to explain PLM to your C-suite, and they just don’t get it.”

It is hard to build evidence for the need for systems of engagement, as the concepts are relatively new and experiences from the field are bubbling up slowly. With the Heliple team, we are now working on building the business case for Federated PLM in the context of the Heliple project scope.

Therefore, I was excited to read the results of this survey: Quantifying the impact of design review methods on NPD, a survey among 250 global engineering leaders initiated by CoLab.

CoLab is one of those companies that focus on providing a System of Engagement, and their scope is design collaboration. In this post, I am discussing the findings of this survey with Taylor Young, Chief Strategy Officer of CoLab.

CoLab – the company /the mission

Taylor, thanks for helping me explain the complementary value of CoLab based on some of the key findings from the survey. But first of all, can you briefly introduce CoLab as a company and the unique value you are offering to your clients?

Hi Jos, CoLab is a Design Engagement System – we exist to help engineering teams make design decisions.

Product decision-making has never been more challenging – or more essential – to get right – that’s why we built CoLab. In today’s world of product complexity, excellent decision-making requires specialized expertise. That means decision-making is no longer just about people engaging with product data – it’s about people engaging with other people.

PLM provides a strong foundation where product data is controlled (and therefore reliable). But PLM has a rigid architecture that’s optimized for data (and for human-to-data interaction). To deal with increased complexity in product design, engineers now need a system that’s built for human-to-human interaction complimentary to PLM.

CoLab allows you to interrogate a rich dataset, even an extended team, outside your company borders in real-time or asynchronously. With CoLab, decisions are made with context, input from the right people, and as early as possible in the process. Reviews and decision-making get tracked automatically and can be synced back to PLM. Engineers can do what they do best, and CoLab will support them by documenting everything in the background.

Design Review Quality

It is known that late-stage design errors are very costly, both impacting product launches and profitability. The report shows design review quality has been rated as the #1 most important factor affecting an engineering team’s ability to deliver projects on time.

Is it a severe problem for companies, and what are they trying to do to improve the quality of design reviews? Can you quantify the problem?

Our survey report demonstrated that late-stage design errors delay product launches for 90% of companies. The impact varies significantly from organization to organization, but we know that for large manufacturing companies, just one late-stage design error can be a six to seven-figure problem.

There are a few factors that lead to a “quality” design review – some of the most important ones we see leading manufacturing companies doing differently are:

  • Who they include – the highest performing teams include manufacturing, suppliers, and customers within the proper context.
  • When they happen – the highest performing teams focus on getting CAD to these stakeholders early in the process (during detailed design) and paralleling these processes (i.e., they don’t wait for one group to sign off before getting early info to the next)
  • Rethinking the Design Review meeting – the highest performing teams aren’t having issue-generation meetings – they have problem-solving meetings. Feedback is collected from a broad audience upfront, and meetings are used to solve nuanced problems – not to get familiar with the project for the first time.

Multidisciplinary collaboration

An interesting observation is that providing feedback to engineers mainly comes from peers or within the company. Having suppliers or customers involved seems to be very difficult. Why do you think this is happening, and how can we improve their contribution?

When we talk to manufacturing companies about “collaboration” or how engineers engage with other engineers – however good or bad the processes are internally, it almost always is significantly more challenging/less effective when they go external. External teams often use different CAD systems, work in different time zones, speak other first languages, and have varying levels of access to core engineering information.

However, as we can read from the HBR article What the Most Productive Companies Do Differently, we know that the most productive manufacturing companies “collaborate with suppliers and customers to form new ecosystems that benefit from agglomeration effects and create shared pools of value”.

They leverage the expertise of their suppliers and customers to do things more effectively. But manufacturing companies struggle to create engaging, high-value, external collaboration and ‘co-design’ without the tools purpose-built for person-to-person external communication.

Traceability and PLM

One of the findings is that keeping track of the feedback and design issues is failing in companies. One of my recommendations from the past was to integrate Issue management into your PLM systems – why is this not working?

We believe that the task of completing a design review and the task of documenting the output of that review should not be two separate efforts. Suppose we are to reduce the amount of time engineers spend on admin work and decrease the number of issues that are never tracked or documented (43%, according to our survey).

In that case, we need to introduce a purpose-built, engaging design review system that is self-documenting. It is crucial for the quality of design reviews that issues aren’t tracked in a separate system from where they are raised/developed, but that instead, they are automatically tracked just by doing the work.

Learn More?

Below is the recording of a recent webinar, where Taylor said that your PLM alone isn’t enough: Why you need a Design Engagement System during product development.

  • A traditional PLM system is the system of record for product data – from ideation through sustaining engineering.
  • However one set of critical data never makes it to the PLM. For many manufacturing companies today, design feedback and decisions live almost exclusively in emails, spreadsheets, and PowerPoint decks. At the same time, 90% of engineering teams state that product launches are delayed due to late-stage changes.
  • Engineering teams need to implement a true Design Engagement System (DES) for more effective product development and a more holistic digital thread.

 Conclusion

Traditional PLM systems have always been used to provide quality and data governance along the product lifecycle. However, most end users dislike the PLM system as it is a bureaucratic overhead to their ways of working. CoLab, with its DES solution, provides a System of Engagement focusing on design reviews, speed, and quality of multidisciplinary collaboration complementary to the PLM System of Record – a modern example of how digitization is transforming the PLM domain.

Next upcoming event – will we meet there ?

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  2. Unknown's avatar
  3. Håkan Kårdén's avatar

    Jos, all interesting and relevant. There are additional elements to be mentioned and Ontologies seem to be one of the…

  4. Lewis Kennebrew's avatar

    Jos, as usual, you've provided a buffet of "food for thought". Where do you see AI being trained by a…

  5. Håkan Kårdén's avatar