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It was Heraclitus, a Greek philosopher, living around 500 BC, who told the Greek people that change is the only constant: Τα πάντα ρεί – the title of this blog post. Apparently he was not a popular philosopher and telling people there will be change during a comfortable period of time in their society does not make you loved.
As I am personally passionate about Greece in my personal life, I have also some business activities in Greece. From these experiences, I wish Heraclitus would be their leading guru. Greece at this moment is stuck in their inability to change. Old habits and private interests prevent new initiatives, and the blame for their current situation goes to the outside world: Europe.
This trick has been used over and over again by politicians when a country needs to restructure or reorganize. Create an external enemy and the majority of people swallow their distressing situation. The outside world is to blame and thanks to the external focus nothing changes internally as the population focuses on the enemy first. Where Heraclitus implies there is always change, which could be evolution, it seems that the Greek need a revolution to change their old habits and patterns in order to adapt to the new global society.
But are the Greek the only ones that need to change?
Τα πάντα ρεί also came in my mind when I read Chad Jackson’s blog post: PLM requires Business Transformation ? Bollocks for the first time. I envy Chad’s powerful writing style, which calls for action, a BLOGFIGHT among the PLM community. Unfortunate due to the word Bollocks some of the younger PLM consultants (do they exist?) might not be able to participate to this blog fight as their parental filter on the computer has blocked the page.
My first impression from Chad’s post was that he claims we just need to go to for global centralized data management and build processes digital and automated. And as he calls a PLM journey bollocks, I suppose in Chad’s ideal world all would be done in a single step or focused project. A new Big Bang! The last known successful Big Bang was approx 13.798 billion years ago. All other Big Bangs failed.
Τα πάντα ρεί
However my first impression was not 100 % correct and after rereading the post and the related comments a more elaborated picture comes up. The few other PLM consultants that participated in the BLOGFIGHT demonstrated there are many viewpoints often based on the consultant’s background. Often PLM is associated with “The single source of the Truth”, it is precisely on that point where PLM as a concept is struggling. There is no single opinion for PLM.
I am glad that we (Chad and I) agreed there is a need for change. This axiom (another Greek word known from Euclid’s Elements) is to my opinion the first starting point to consider for any PLM implementation. If you do not expect change, you will be probably forced to customize the new system the way your company worked before, maybe a little faster, leaving the organization structure as-is. And by building automation similar to the as-is organization you actually make your organization less flexible to adapt for new concepts.
Why do most of the large automotive companies have a problem with their PDM / PLM platforms? Because they have automated and customized their environments year after year. For sure there was ROI (Return On Investment) at that time, but gradually it also created an inability to change. And change is happing faster and faster. Globalization has come up so fast that most large PLM implementations seem to be too rigid to change. What to do? Change their CAD system?
Τα πάντα ρεί !
Knowing that there will be always change, companies should anticipate for change. And this is what I mean by the PLM journey. If implementing PLM is a onetime shot, you might be shooting in your own foot. And if you do not change, you end up with the same problem that Greece is currently facing: revolution or bankruptcy. Revolution is something nobody sane wants, neither bankruptcy.
Evolution is the only way to go even if this is against the way we humans in general behave: we want things to stay the same.
Now combining all ancient Greek wisdom with modern PLM wisdom, I would like to post my five axioms for PLM.
- There will be always change – build your vision for the upcoming 5 – 10 years with the anticipation there will be change – do not try to consolidate the now.
- Look for the latest best practices, not your current best practices
- Implement systems (PLM / PDM / ERP) as much as possible Out-Of-The-Box again avoiding to become dependent on specific releases or fixed environments
- Focus on areas where there is direct visible ROI or long term strategic advantage. As there will be always change, identify where to improve or alter moving towards the big picture brings visible comfort (business wise / users wise)
- Focus on a clear and business oriented data model – it is easier to maintain data through a long lifecycle when their definition is clear. This is a call for open data standards (STEP / ISO) as they bring you long term flexibility.
Concluding notes and call for action:
- If you are a respected PLM consultant, feel motivated to continue the blog fight and share your thoughts here related to this post or related to Chad’s post.
- If you are a respected PLM consultant or PLM enthusiast, please take a moment to answer six questions in the following anonymous survey to share your opinion and background. The survey closes on July 1st 2013: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/PYSMBJ9
I will publish the results in July.
LOOKING FORWARD TO YOUR RESPONSES
Related articles
- PLM is a journey (virtualdutchman.com)
Last week I was in Greece together with the Dassault Systems Value Added Reseller OVision. Everyone would expect from the first sentence I was on holiday. Yes I agree, the settings were holiday like always temperatures above 35 C (approx 100 F) and never far from the see.
However,……
….we were visiting ENOVIA SmarTeam prospects and discussed existing customer specific implementation wearing business suits – not wearing shorts. However the most interesting issue was, that we were working with companies that were in the early stages of data management.
If you look around the world, to my understanding, and would rank countries on PLM awareness and need for data management, I would rank Western Europe, Scandinavia, Japan as the countries where concepts for PLM are understood, although in many mid-market companies I would still expect on the long term a culture change to real PLM. In my previous posts, I addressed several thoughts on that.
North America and the United Kingdom I rank differently, as somehow, there are big PLM implementations, but the majority of mid-sized companies is supplier of an OEM network or sees no return on investment on a PLM implementation
Then I would rank countries like Turkey, South Africa, India, and China as the next level. As they participate in manufacturing of global companies – mainly automotive and aerospace, they are driven into the basic needs of PDM as requirement from the OEMs. This pushes in parallel the country’s infrastructure – Internet / Intranet availability.
At the fourth position, I would rank a country like Greece. As due to the local economy there is not a focus on manufacturing or a huge participation in a global supply chain, they have to introduce their data management, growing to PDM or PLM slowly on a still developing infrastructure
Disclaimer: Countries not mentioned here can fall in any of the above categories (or even below). The fact that I did not mention them, is because I have not enough experience working with these countries to judge.
Back to Greece
Apparently, due to all the beautiful islands in Greece, there are thousands of ferries traveling from island to island or other Mediterranean destinations. For that reason, there are companies that build ships, companies that refurbish ships and companies that maintain ships.
At the end, a ferryboat can be seen like single process plant. Like in a plant, you have equipment that needs to be operational and maintained during operation.
This requires a well-defined form of data management, often driven by quality processes around ISO 900x.
Companies often consider quality processes as a kind of document management. You have your manuals with procedures, templates spread around the company, and you update them before the next audit. Everyone is supposed to follow the procedures and supposed to know the latest procedures.
This is a labor-intensive activity if you want to execute as best as possible. In companies where the cost of labor is an issue, you will see that most people are loaded with work and usually the quality issue is the last activity these people will execute, first the operational issues then the rest.
In order to improve the quality of the information, document management and workflow processes are functionalities used to address the availability of the documents and the workflow ensures information to be pushed and published in a guaranteed manner.
Instead of pushing the information to all the users, the company is now able to centralize the data and users can pull the latest information from the system. The workflow processes and the document management system guarantee the right steps are followed and you are always looking to the latest versions. Also you are aware of on-going changes.
When it comes to ships however, there is more to address than ISO documentation and procedures. The ship itself has maintenance or refurbishing projects running on certain systems or locations in the ship. Here the advantages of a PDM system like ENOVIA SmarTeam appear. In the ENOVIA SmarTeam data model you are able to manage information (CAD documents and Bills or Materials too) related to a project, to a ship, to a location or system in the specific ship. There is no need for keywords on the document to describe where it applies, or have copies from a document because if applier to several ships. The data model below shows the types of information that can be stored around a ship.
Once the company has the vision, what to achieve in the upcoming years, a roadmap can be defined. Keeping user understanding, flexibility but still a continued move towards the PDM data model are parameters for the management to monitor and drive. Companies that build or refurbish ships of course have even higher needs to integrate their engineering activities with the ships maintenance data. This avoids a costly hand-over of data that already could be available in the right format.
Conclusion: Although Greece is in the fourth rank of PLM needs and awareness, the benefits to gain from PLM are there too, however due to awareness and infrastructure, they are not as visible as in the countries ranked as number one.
As Greece is the birthplace of many sciences, I am sure the awareness for where to apply PLM concepts is for sure something they will achieve.
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