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It is time to continue with my posts about ROI and the need for measuring. I described in previous posts the concept phase and planning phase and will touch in this post the development phase.
But before doing so, there are two points I want to share before.

Queen’s Day in the Netherlands 2009

First as a Dutchman (although many times virtual) I enjoy April 30,  as a special day, as it is our Queen’s Day.
People around the world celebrate the 1st of May, we Dutch celebrate Queen’s Day the day before.

It is a celebration of the people, with free flee markets, concerts and activities all around the country and at some special locations our royal family contributes to the atmosphere by participating amongst us. We celebrate this day not because the Dutch are so royalty minded, it is also a good excuse to celebrate our existence together, and there is always the discussion if a president of the country would bring more to the country as compared to the royal family.

This year Queens Day however became the blackest Queens Day ever. A lunatic apparently decided to make a statement and tried to drive his car into the bus with the royal family. However to get there he drove through the cheering crowd – 7 people died, including the driver because of this attempt. It makes you realize that in the modern society innocence is gone and that life is not as obvious as it is.

Hopefully Queen’s Day will be again a day of the people celebrating , with respect to the victims, still  we should not change our lives because we fear.

Concurrent Engineering around the BOM

Next point, back to PLM again, I read an interesting discussing on two blogs regarding the need for the BOM – For me the shared and consolidated BOM, is the major object (placeholder / entry point) for a company to share developed data, so it is an interesting discussion.

Read these posts at: vuuch.com and plwtwine.com – they give points to consider, and I support the observation that although we try to do concurrent engineering already for many years, I haven’t seen many successful implementations, mainly due to the human behavior. Classically PDM and PLM require the BOM for collaboration and we might stay with this concept for a long time. Knowing the mid-market, I believe alternative solutions have to come up as a boom embraced by everyone  (and conquer the market within a few years) or we will stick to what we know and what we are doing – changing habits and culture is hard. For the moment I stick to the current situation.

To PLM or Not to PLM – Measuring the development phase

So what happens in the development phase.> We have a concept and a plan and now we need to develop or change the product. In the past this was much easier. Companies worked mainly locally and around a single discipline. Now product development has the typical challenges of collaboration between different locations (many times around the globe), different disciplines (mechanical, electrical, software), integrate suppliers (as we focus on core competence) and meanwhile comply to (local) regulations. A lot of activities in parallel that should run coordinated to a single goal, the developed product. The phase where a lot of data is created and need to be shared among along the enterprise.

So the most important questions related to the development phase are:

• How many review cycles does a product introduction require in general?
  Measure: time spent on getting a joined status on development and plan next detailed steps
  Analyze: Can we improve the quality of the status information to better plan next steps
• How much time does it take to prepare a product status review
  Measure: the amount of time and people spent to collect information to make a status review
  Analyze: Can this process of collecting data be shortened and (semi-) automated
• How do we make sure we select the right parts and solutions for a certain function / system ?
  Measure: The amount of changes during  the development phase or after this phase 
  Analyze: Why were these changes needed ? Missing information, obsolete/redundant parts, failed solutions ?
• How do we make sure our products comply to local regulations
  Measure: At which state of the development process compliance is checked and how it affects development / go to market time.
  Analyze: Can we verify compliance earlier than current  – and how
• How much effort does it take to communicate around an engineering change
  Measure: What does it take to communicate and implement a change during the development phase. How much time, many resources are involved around this communication process (and how reliable is it)
  Analyze: Can we improve by doing things different ?  Implementing processes, push technology, ….?

Most of the above points focus on facilitating (global) processes  and making information available anywhere needed. This brings me to my previous post, where I talked about Can ERP vendors do PLM ?  The ERP vendors that do PLM, will claim they are addressing these points in their PLM offering too.  The major difference however is that (and I am generalizing) ERP based systems score low on usability as their systems are not planned to work from within an application (CAD or Office for example) . This is the major difference with PLM systems, closely related to CAD systems. Through their CAD integrations, the PLM environment will be embedded in the day-to-day user / design environment (immersive is the term).

An immersive integration has the benefit that collecting data is much more natural and the chance of having more accurate data available all the time is higher. So most of the point mentioned above will have a higher ROI when working from an integrated PLM environment.  And in addition to that, in the mid-market users have a voice – their acceptance is also part of the ROI.

Conclusion
The keywords for the development phase are global collaboration and visibility of actual data and affected changes. To make data available, integration with the data creator’s desktop is important as then it will be available straight from the source. I keep it here to ‘classical’ PDM / PLM as new concepts like PLM 2.0 will drastically change the way we work, however getting there will take years

Note: It might be misleading to talk about ROI benefits per phase, as other and additional benefits may come from doing the whole process different.  I will stick to my initial approach as it will give you a baseline to start working from. Remember in order to understand– you need to start measuring even if it is not the ultimate approach

And closing with Queen’s day how it could be (2008 – learning Dutch is not required)