Improving functionality

PLM has been a secret weapon in many companies’ arsenal.Larry Boldt from Ryma, Henry Seddon (Vice President Marketing) from UGS and Laurent Costa (Channel Director PTC) told BMME more.

BM. How can PLM vendors assist with change adoption as organizations try to implement best practices within product management activities, and throughout the product development lifecycle?

Larry Boldt. PLM vendors can impact change adoption issues by offering an incremental installation targeting business process as opposed to technology enablement. With increasing functionality required to support PLM, releasing small increments of this functionality to as many people as possible is essential to adoption. Contrast this to the typical approach where a few people are selected to use all the functionality possible, with the anticipation that if successful, all that functionality would be rolled out to everyone. The learning curve is too high at this point, resulting in push back, and the implementation fails to deliver the expected business value through large-scale usage.

Another method used to address change adoption is accomplished using a simple user context diagram where each user-role is listed with the data inputs required by that role and the expected business value the role can expect. If the expected benefit isn't more than the expected contribution, re-engineer the system; bottom-line - if there isn't enough benefit for that role, the overall system isn't sustainable.

Henry Seddon. By providing an end-to-end solution that allows organizations to manage their complete product development lifecycle from ideas through design, engineering into production and potentially servicing, the PLM application must be proven and aligned to industry best practice.

Many organizations have decided for a globally distributed supply chain to perform the product development lifecycle (design, engineering and manufacturing). Their goal is to assemble a value chain that comprises of the best and/or most cost effective people capable of performing every product development function. Today's PLM capability makes this challenging business initiative truly viable.

Laurent Costa. Experienced PLM vendors such as PTC can assist companies even before they decide to make the strategic decision to streamline their processes from product conception through the whole product lifecycle by implementing a PLM system. PTC, as a leading PLM vendor, has developed an expert assessment process, (based on extensive collaboration from major industrial companies and business consultants), of the customer’s organization, people and processes to identify areas where PLM will have the greatest impact. Additionally, the product development road map will help key executives define their corporate goals and tie these into the PLM technology solution that will assist their success. Change adoption can be facilitated in a controlled manner that can be planned within the corporate development timeline with realistic expectations that executives can use to manage changes within the organization because PTC provides a documented adoption plan and full implementation and support services.

BM. How can organizations better manage the relationships between IT assets, software applications, PLM processes and objectives, organizational structure, and business objectives?

HS. The importance to an organization of managing these activities and relationships is to ensure that they have the capability to deliver the optimum product portfolio strategy.

Portfolio management: The product development lifecycle process starts by evaluating project alternatives and selects a portfolio mix that matches their strategic intent. Using Portfolio management applications organizations can better understand the best mix of product projects based on optimizing timescales, alignment to strategic goals, expected returns and resource requirements; in terms of funding, staffing and equipment.

Once the optimal project mix has been determined, then the product development phases expand to include two distinct controlling disciplines to ensure that the right product is delivered at the right time.

Project execution management. Managing the delivery timeline of the project is intrinsic to the phase-gate process ensuring that resources, timelines, cost and the exit criteria for each phase is met across individual or a series of interrelated product development projects.

Requirements management. Capturing and managing the requirements are essential, this is not just an activity for the initial phase of the project, but requirements should be managed as they are disseminated into the different development functions that are responsible for their delivery. The ability to trace from the product requirement to the downstream process is key, providing decision makers visibility to the source knowledge about how or why each requirement was delivered.

AMR Research indicates that more than 50 percent of all product introductions fail because they do not meet customer requirements.

LC. In order to successfully manage the product lifecycle and utilize IT tools to the full extent to benefit the business enterprise and achieve corporate goals, it is important that all departments are involved from the outset. PLM solutions within an organization are valuable when the people involved are fully aware of the benefits that the technology can bring to both individual productivity and to the enterprise as a whole. Therefore, when a company recognizes the need to acquire the best technologies to enhance their business objectives a product development process assessment can really assist with getting all departments on board with the new adoption. The PLM solution provides collaboration possibilities throughout the various departments and various IT technologies used by the company, by acting as a platform to link people, data and processes in the most efficient form.

LB. IT plays a critical role in successful PLM implementations. Consider a product's innovation value chain. By more tightly coupling the activities within this value chain, competitive advantage is gained. Each activity within this value chain depends on information and capabilities provided by the entire information system, not just the PLM system. Integration between a PLM system and the rest of IT services is critical in maximizing competitive advantage and cost margins.

This advantage is typically found in the relationships between IT assets, software applications, business processes, organizational structure, and final business objectives. The enterprise architect is normally the steward of these relationships. The IT management process tends to break down within cross-functional applications (such as in PLM) where these types of relationships are managed internally by the tool.

Tool vendors need to provide access for the enterprise architect to see within the PLM boundaries, and facilitate leveraging this information across the rest of the enterprise in terms of common business objectives. In this way, the entire information management system can be leveraged across the innovation value chain.

BM. In what ways do PLM vendors hope to support open product innovation?

LC. PLM vendors are supporting open product development because the most powerful PLM tools can encompass a collaborative product development process whereby customers and suppliers, or even marketing departments can be involved with their input at the conception/development phase. This assists companies to produce more innovative, quality products faster that match market and customer demands. A PLM system is as inclusive as the enterprise wishes and PTC’s product development system based on Windchill can cope with partners in the product development process that are globally remote, and utilizing different design technologies. Therefore there are practically no restrictions to innovation except the imagination of the users. PLM is a product knowledge database. As such it enhances all communications relating to the development of new products, it facilitates collaboration and the enforcement of company and industry standards.

LB. PLM vendors tend to define open product management in terms of what they can deliver instead of what is needed. This is normally a bad thing, but it can also be a positive. Remember the need for incremental capability growth? What can be delivered today by the PLM vendor is in many cases more than what the organization is ready to use.

Open product innovation has the potential to change the market place. Most PLM vendors are scrambling to offer a solution here because of the synergy between open product innovation, traditional product management functions, and PLM. One step in this race is to provide customers with an underlying product management capability throughout the entire product lifecycle. This tends to surface in the two forms of product planning and product marketing. Another step in this race is the leveraging of collaboration technologies throughout the innovation value chain.

While these things are necessary, they are not sufficient. PLM vendors must address an open business model that is fundamentally different to the traditional innovation process. The open business model has issues of its own and the PLM vendor who understands these issues will produce the best sustainable solution.

HS. To answer innovation challenges in increasingly diverse and competitive markets, companies need to effectively extend their value chains to tap into a worldwide web of inventors, technologists, suppliers and partners who can help them anticipate customer demand and create the next generation of breakthrough products.

According to the analyst firm, AMR Research, “No company is capable of stimulating and capitalizing innovation on its own. Each must close the gap between itself, its customers and its partners, making every effort to collaborate effectively.” [Global business leaders told to mind the innovation gap, AMR Alert, April 13, 2006]

“Innovation is P&G’s lifeblood. Virtually every P&G billion-dollar brand was launched with a product discontinuity ... Every P&G brand that has sustained growth and leadership over time has done so with a steady stream of consumer-meaningful innovations that set and re-set consumer expectations.”
 
“Lafley calls upon P&G to find half of its new products outside its walls, up from 20 percent four years ago and about 35 percent today.” A.G. Lafley CEO Procter & Gamble Company.

Organizations can utilize PLM application such as Teamcenter to enable this process of collaboration and ideation, whilst protecting intellectual property through development and manufacture to product launch.

"Technology allows us to experiment with a far greater number of concepts that we would otherwise be able to." Allan Hocknell, VP, innovation and advanced design, Callaway Golf.

BM. How do PLM applications and processes encourage true creativity?

LB. When you think of creativity in terms of supply and demand, identifying available resources helps you more effectively satisfy that demand. Certainly PLM can help centralize the customer's needs, and even list resources available, but this is only the beginning. PLM applications come with powerful workflow engines that can help coach you through the creativity process. They provide collaborative environments where ideas from many sources can be gathered and grouped together in bundles. The list of PLM features continues.

However, creating an ideation and product innovation capability goes beyond technology. Within these fields, best practices are evolving every day and PLM must support an adaptive and agile approach to ideation and innovation. The connection between these "front-end" disciplines and other more traditional product lifecycle management disciplines needs to be tightly integrated not as a stage in a sequential process, but as a step in every process.

This is where once again an integrated product management capability becomes valuable. By combining the objectives of product marketing and product planning within each PLM step, a more aligned and focused form of creativity is available. Through the integration of product management practices with traditional PLM practices, true creativity can be supported.

HS. PLM applications will enable organizations to capture and assess ideas (voice of the customer) in a collaborative environment allowing multiple disciplines dispersed in different offices or companies around the world, to be able to work in a single environment to share, discuss and review ideas.

Some of the risks of being creative can be mitigated, through enabling this early engagement of the different disciplines to hear and interpret the voice of the customer and also allow far more iteration of a solution. So if a product is going to fail, then it should fail early in the virtual world prior to investing the large amounts of money manufacturing or launching it.

At Mercury Marine the Fred Bellio director, global product development, processes and systems, Mercury marine, says that: “We don't see having a single source of the truth conflicting with flexibility in any way. We give our engineers the flexibility as they are creating new technology, but once we decide that technology is going to be made into a product, it's ready to be structured. At that point, we get a little more stringent.”

LC. PLM streamlines the processes involved for the enterprise and in so doing, automates or removes many of the time consuming tasks that would be required. Far less time is spent on administration tasks and following up on project progress and other non-creative tasks, because all information is immediately available to the relevant partners in a secure web-based environment. In such an environment, creativity is enhanced because people can spend more time on what really matters, whether that is achieving corporate goals through having more time for strategic thinking or engineers and designers having the very best tools for collaborative and concurrent product development. PLM can make a major impact on creativity within the enterprise.

PTC, Product Development Road Map and Teamcenter Next Generation are registered trademarks.

About Larry Boldt, Ryma

Larry Boldt is Director, Product Marketing-Innovation with Ryma Technology Solutions and has over 30 years experience in the high-tech industry. For the past 14 years Larry has been actively involved in designing and developing software tools to support Application Lifecycle Management. Most recently his efforts have been focused on tools to improve and leverage ideation and integrate ALM and PLM product management. Larry has an MS in Organizational Management from Maryville University.

About Henry Seddon

Vice President, Marketing, EMEA, UGS
Henry Seddon is Vice President of EMEA marketing for UGS. UGS is a leading global provider of product lifecycle management (PLM) software and services with nearly 4 million licensed seats and 46,000 customers worldwide. The company promotes openness and standardization and works collaboratively with its customers in creating enterprise solutions that enable them to transform their process of innovation. In his current role, Henry directs EMEA marketing and go-to-market strategy for UGS’ full suite of software and services offerings worldwide.

About Laurent Costa

Laurent Costa is Channel Director at PTC for the Middle East, Eastern Europe and Russia. Since joining PTC in 1996, he has gained wide experience across the product and solution range including as a Manager for Windchill PLM. Laurent graduated in Economics and International Trade, and is driving the Channel business growth.