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Finally, I have time to share my PLM experiences with you in this blog. The past months have been very busy as I moved to a new house, and I wanted to do and control a lot of activities myself. Restructuring your house in an agile way is not easy. Luckily there was a vision how the house should look like. Otherwise, the “agile” approach would be an approach of too many fixes. Costly and probably typical for many old construction projects.
Finally, I realized the beauty of IKEA´s modular design and experienced the variety of high-quality products from BLUM (an impressive company in Austria I worked with)
In parallel, I have been involved in some PLM discussions where in all cases the connection with the real C-level was an issue. And believe it or not, my blog buddy Oleg Shilovitsky just published a post: Hard to sell PLM? Because nobody gives a SH*T about PLM software. Oleg is really starting from the basics explaining you do not sell PLM; you sell a business outcome. And in larger enterprises I believe you sell at this time the ability to do a business transformation as business is becoming digital, with the customer in the center. And this is the challenge I want to discuss in this post
The value of PLM at the C-level
Believe it or not, it is easier to implement PLM (in general) instead of explaining a CEO why a company needs modern PLM. A nice one-liner to close this post, however, let me explain what I mean by this statement and perhaps show the reasons why PLM does not seem to be attractive so much at the C-level. I do not want to offend any particular PLM company, Consultancy firm or implementor, therefore, allow me to stay on a neutral level.
The C-level time challenge
First, let´s imagine the situation at C-level. Recently I heard an excellent anecdote about people at C-level. When they were kids, the were probably the brightest and able to process and digest a lot of information, making their (school) careers a success. When later arriving in a business environment, they were probably the ones that could make a difference in their job and for that reason climbed the career ladder fast to reach a C-level position. Then arriving at that level, they become too busy to dive really deep into the details.
Everyone around them communicates in “elevator speeches” and information to read must me extremely condensed and easy to understand. As if people at C-level have no brains and should be informed like small kids.
I have seen groups of people working weeks on preparing the messages for the CEO. Every word is twisted hundred times – would he or she understand it? I believe the best people at C-level have brains, and they would understand the importance of PLM when someone explains it. However, it requires time if it does not come from your comfort zone.
Who explains the strategic value of PLM
There are a lot of strategic advisory companies who have access to the board room, and we can divide them into two groups. The ones that focus on strategy independent of any particular solution and the ones that concentrate on a strategy, guaranteeing their implementation teams are ready to deploy the solution. Let´s analyze both options and their advice:
Independent of a particular solution
When a company is looking for help from a strategic consultancy firm, you know upfront part of the answer. As every consultancy firm has a preferred sweet spot, based on their principal consultant(s). As a PLM consultant, I probably imagine the best PLM approach for your company, not being expert in financials or demagogic trends. If the advisory company has a background in accountancy, they will focus their advice on financials. If the company has a background in IT, they will focus their information on an infrastructure concept saving so much money.
A modern digital enterprise is now the trend, where digital allows the company to connect and interact with the customer and therefore react faster to market needs or opportunities. IoT is one of the big buzz words here. Some companies grasp the concept of being customer centric (the future) and adapt their delivery model to that, not realizing the entire organization including their product definition process should be changing too. You cannot push products to the market in the old linear way, while meanwhile expecting modern agile work processes.
Most of the independent strategic consultants will not push for a broader scope as it is out of their comfort zone. Think for a moment. Who are the best strategic advisors that can talk about the product definition process, the delivery process and products in operation and service? I would be happy if you give me their names in the comments with proof points.
Related to a particular solution
When you connect with a strategic advisory company, which an extensive practice in XXX or YYY, you can be sure the result will be strategic advice containing XXX or YYY. The best approach with ZZZ will not come on the table, as consultancy firms will not have the intention to investigate in that direction for your company. They will tell you: “With XXX we have successfully transformed (many) other companies like yours, so choose this path with the lowest risk.
And this is the part what concerns me the most at this time. Business is changing rapidly and therefore PLM should be changing too. If not that would be a strange situation? Read about the PLM Identity crisis here and here.
The solution is at C-level (conclusion)
I believe the at the end the future of your company will be dependent on your DNA, your CEO and the C-level supporting the CEO. Consultancy firms can only share their opinion from their point of view and with their understanding in mind.
If you have a risk-averse management, you might be at risk.
Doing nothing or following the majority will not bring more competitive advantage.
The awareness that business is global and changing rapidly should be on every company’s agenda.
Change is always an opportunity to get better; still no outsider can recommend you what is the best. Take control and leadership. For me, it is clear that the product development and delivery process should be a part of this strategy. Call it PLM or something different. I do not care. But do not focus on efficiency and ROI, focus on being able to be different from the majority. Apple makes mobile phones; Nespresso makes coffee, etc.
Think and use extreme high elevators to talk with your C-level!
Your thoughts?
Some weeks ago PLMJEN asked me my opinion on Peter Schroer´s post and invitation to an ARAS webinar called: Change Management: One Size Will Never Fit All. Change Management is actually a compelling topic, and I realized I had never written a dedicated post to such an essential topic. The introduction from Peter was excellent:
Change management is the toughest thing inside of PLM. It’s also the most important.
For the rest, the post elaborated further into software capabilities and the value of having templates processes for various industry practices. I share that opinion when talking to companies that are starting to establish their processes. It is extremely rare that an existing company will change its processes towards more standard processes delivered by the PLM system when implementing a new system. The rule of thumb is People, Processes and Tools. This all is nicely explained by Stephen Porter in his latest blog post Beware the quick fix successful plm deployment strategies. As I was not able to attend the webinar, here are my more general thoughts related to change management and why it is essential for PLM.
Change Management has always been there
It is not that PLM has invented change management. Before companies started to use ERP and PDM systems, every company had to deal with managing changes. At that time, their business was mostly local and compared with today slow. “Time to market” was more a “Time to Region” issue. Engineering and Manufacturing were operating from the same location. Change management was a personal responsibility supported by (paper) documents and individuals. Only with the growing complexity of products, growing and global customer demands and increasing regulatory constraints it became impossible to manage change in an unstructured manner.
Survival of the fittest change organization
I have worked with several companies where change management was a running Excel business. Running can be interpreted in two ways. The current operation could not stop and step back and look into an improvement cycle, and a lot of people were running to collect, check and validate information in order to make change estimates and make decisions based on the collected data.
When a lot of people are running, it means your business is at risk. A lot of people means costs for data (re)search and handling are higher than the competition if this can be done automatically. Also in countries of low labor costs, a lot of people running becomes a threat at a certain moment. In addition, running people can make mistakes or provide insufficient information, which leads to the wrong decisions.
Wrong decisions can be costly. Your product may become too expensive; your project may delay significant as information was based on conflicting information between disciplines or suppliers. Additional iterations to fix these issues lead to a longer time to market. Late discoveries can lead to severe high costs. For certain, when the product has been released to the market the cost might be tremendous.
From the other side if making changes becomes difficult because the data has to be collected from various sources through human intervention, organizations might try to avoid making changes.
Somehow this is also an indirect death penalty. The future is for companies that are able to react quickly at any time and implement changes.
The analogy is with a commercial aircraft and a fighter plane. Let’s take the Airbus 380 in mind and a modern fighter jet the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF). The Airbus 380 brings you comfortable from A to B as long as A and B are well prepared places to land. The flight is comfortable as the plane is extremely stable. It is a well planned trip with an aversion to change of the trajectory.
The JSF airplane by definition is an unstable plane. It is only by its computer steering control that the plane behaves stable in the air. The built-in instability makes it possible to react as quickly as possible to unforeseen situations, preferable faster than the competition. This is a solution designed for change.
Based on your business you all should admire the JSF concept and try to understand where it is needed in your organization.
Why is change management integrated in PLM so important?
If we consider where changes appear the most, it is evident in the early lifecycle of the product most of the changes occur. And as long as they are in the virtual world with uncommitted costs to the product they are relative cheap. To my surprise many engineering companies and engineering departments work only with change management outside their own environment. Historically because outside their environment connected to prototyping or production costs of change are the highest. And our existing ERP system has an Engineering Change process – so let’s use that.
Meanwhile, engineering is used to work with the best so far information. At any moment, every discipline stores their data in a central repository. This could be a directory structure or PDM systems. Everyone is looking to the latest data. Files are overwritten with the latest versions. Data in the PDM system shows the latest version to all users. Hallelujah
And this is the place where it goes wrong. A mechanical engineer has overlooked a requirement in the specification that has been changed. Yes, the latest version of the 20 page document is there. An electrical engineer has defined a new control system for the engine, but has not noticed that the operating parameters of the motor have been changed. Typical examples where a best so far environments creates the visibility, but the individual user cannot understand the impact of a change anymore (especially when additional sites perform the engineering work)
Here comes the value of change management in PLM. Change Management in PLM can be light weighted in the early design phases, providing checks on changes (baselines) and notifications to disciplines involved. Approval processes are more agreements to changes to implement and their impact on all disciplines.
PLM supports the product definition through the whole product lifecycle, change management at each stage can have its particular behavior. In the early stages a focus on notifications and visibility of change, later checking the impact based on the maturity of the various disciplines and finally when running into production and materials commitment towards a strict and organized change mechanism. It is only in a PLM system where the gradual flow can be supported seamless
Change Management and ERP
As mentioned before, most manufacturing companies have implemented change management in ERP as the costs of change are the highest when the product capabilities are committed. However, the ERP system is not the place to explore and iterate for further improved solutions. The ERP system can be the trigger for a change process based on production issues. However the full implementation of the change requires a change in the product definition, the area where PLM is strong.
NOTE: on purpose I am not mentioning a change in the engineering definition as in some cases the engineering definition might remain the same, but only the manufacturing process or materials need to be adapted. PLM supports iterations, not an ERP execution matter.
Change Management and Configuration Management
So far we have been discussing how the manufacturing system would be able to offer products based on the right engineering definition. As each specific product might not have an individual definition checked at any time, there is the need for configuration management (CM). Proper implemented configuration management assures there is a consistent relationship between how the product is specified and defined and the way it is produced. Read a refined and precise explanation on wiki
In one of my following posts I will focus on configuration management practices and why PLM systems and Configuration Management are like a Siamese twins
Conclusion:
Storing your data in a (PLM) system has only value if you are able to keep the actual status of the information and its context. Only then a person can make the right decisions immediately and with the right accuracy. The more systems or manual data handling, the less completive your company will be. Integrated and lean change management means survival !
Jos Voskuil's Weblog 
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