PLM PDM book

I've been talking about putting this together for a few years. In the early part of last year I had some discussions with one of my former bosses (while at Ford) about this.

Anyway I had some brainwaves last weekend and have a fairly detailed set of sections/chapters planned.

I think I'll post the headings etc here for comment. Let me know what you think (I'll probably add them to this post later in the week.

PLM Book

• Section1 - Executive and historical perspective
  • What is PLM
    • Right information for right people at right time
      • Right Information
      • Right people
      • Right time
    • So what is the difference between PLM and PDM?
  • History of PLM products and ideas
    • The early days
      • Metaphase
      • Product Manager
      • IMAN/PSIMANAGER
    • Late 90s
      • Agile
      • MatrixONE
      • SmartTeam
    • Mergers/Acquisitions
      • Windchill/The "Links"
      • Teamcenter(s)
      • ENOVIA
    • Brave new world?
  • Identifying ROI
    • How much does design really cost?
    • What keeps you awake at night?
    • Areas where PLM can help
    • Areas where PLM cannot help!
  • Summary/Conclusions
• Section 2 - The Building Blocks
  • Basic data management
    • Introduction
    • Document management
    • Complex data management
    • Benefits and risks
    • Summary/Conclusions
  • BOM management and effectivity
    • Introduction
    • Useful terms and concepts
      • Effectvitiy
      • Phantoms
      • Multiple views (EBOM/MBOM etc.)
      • Bucket of parts
      • Static bom (precise)
      • Non static bom(Imprecise)
    • Who owns the BOM?
      • Design v Manufacturing v Maintenance
    • Benefits and risks
    • Summary/Conclusions
  • Workflow and change
    • Introduction
    • Workflow v Change Management
    • CMII benefits/risks/costs
    • Benefits and risks
      • Automation of bad processes
    • Summary/Conclusions
  • Integration to other systems
    • Introduction
      • Types of links
        • Interface
        • Integration
        • One way/bi-directional
    • What should be integrated?
      • CAD
        • Benefits and risks
        • Summary/Conclusions
      • ERP
        • Benefits and risks
        • Summary/Conclusions
      • Suppliers/Partners
        • Benefits and risks
        • Summary/Conclusions
    • Benefits and risks
    • Summary/Conclusions
• Section 3 - Bringing it all together
  • Implementation methods
    • Why does it matter
    • Vendor v independant
    • Scope and scope creep
    • How to be sucesseful in implementations
    • Benefits and risks
    • Summary/Conclusions
  • Dealing with change
    • Benefits and risks
    • Summary/Conclusions
  • Methods/Post Go live/Updates
    • Getting ready for PLM
      • Selection process
      • Setting the right expectations
        • With Management
        • With Staff
        • With yourself
    • Planning
      • Infrastructure
        • In the data centre
        • Client
      • Education
        • Classes etc
        • Methods development and maintenance
    • The role of mentoring
      • Who should mentor
      • Why is it important
      • How long?
    • Benefits and risks
    • Summary/Conclusions
  • Customised Solutions
    • Introduction
    • Benefits
    • Upgrade paths
    • Benefits and risks
    • Summary/Conclusions
• Section 4 - Closing remarks
  • Benefits and risks
  • Summary/Conclusions

P.

youtube - a great resource for PLM

Hi all

So I was just thinking I'd be revolutionary and create a channel on youtube for PDM and PLM. So I added one here

http://www.youtube.com/user/pdmguru

But then when I looked round I found quite a lot of PLM stuff already there. Imagine my surprise.

Of course you need to talk all this stuff with a pinch of salt since a lot of it is pure marketing for the plm vendors etc, however instead of reading through large boring turgid whitepapers you might be able to glean useful stuff from youtube.

I'll make a survey of what's there in a few weeks and post on my website. At the moment I just grabbed some highlights including a great anti-plm one from Carl Bass the CEO of Autodesk.

Enjoy and have a nice week!

Implementing PDM

Wow so I was just thinking about PDM/PLM and it came to mind a number of disasters I've seen and also a number of successes as well.

What makes the difference?

Well quite simply I think three things make s difference and here they are.

1. Using someone you can trust to do the implementation. It's a fallacy that anyone can implement PLM/PDM. The success of your project depends on finding the right people. This might be MORE important than choosing the right PLM tool. Be careful in your choice, a rookie (inexperienced person) is a HUGE gamble. It could cost you more than money, it could mean the difference between your company surviving and going under.
2. Implementation methodology and project management. Again these are closely tied to choosing the right people. Check that the methodology used is REPRODUCIBLE that they have used it before and that they can demonstrate it hits all the right areas that typically cause PLM implementations to fail; namely scope creep and user acceptance.
3. Finally (and no one in the industry will thank me for this) LUCK. Yep sometimes things are either with you or against you. I've seen well managed implementation with the right tools/methods etc go belly and conversely "I've seen seat of the pants" ones where everything is chaotic be roaring successes. The point here is QUANTIFYING and MANAGING RISKS. If you don't develop risk assessments and risk mitigation then you are condemning yourself. Be careful and smart

Good luck!

Recession - a good time for PDM and PLM?

Hi there.

It's been quite a long time since my last post, so I thought with the global credit issues I'd drop the blog a line and talk about how this technology could help in these cash strapped times.

First of all I believe that lower costs by getting rid of employees can be a false ecconomy. I do understand it is a necessary evil, but I also believe that before doing that companies should be more creative about identifying cost savings. Some ways are not necessarily anything to do with PDM, such as asking skilled people to consider wage cuts (not popular, but preferable to losing all your salary for six months!).

However the main focus of this article is around how PLM and PDM can help. In a number of discussions with former colleagues we've discussed can the technology really cut costs. My general feeling is it can, the main problem is that most engineering companies work without realising how much time people waste looking for information. I think I've mentioned the "2 hour 20 minute" rule before; where people spend 2 hours looking for a part when it would take 20 minutes to re-create it. So if you implement PDM you would save that 2 hours. Well maybe.

First off for company manager's I would suggest looking at what time this is. I think many people would be suprised. So how can you get around this? Parts classification where you document the attributes of a part such as length, shape, function. material etc. can have significant benefits. The down side is that the results obtained are only as good as the data input. Also there is a reliance on engineering people adding these attributes. This is a difficult sell sometimes since designers often only see additional time and no real benefits. This is why it's critical to know how much time people spend looking. Some companies are now offering graphical query tools where you can draw a shape and ask the system to find similar parts.

The second part of the picture is understanding how much it costs your company to create a new part. This can be very large indeed, so being able to reduce duplication of parts can benefit companies.

Design re-use is another area where companies typically do not know what types of cost savings can be made.

Also PLM/PDM is ideal for capturing processes and insuring people adhere to these. I would say that the efficient use of engineering change within a corporation can save a great deal of money, but you will need to understand what your current costs are and also if the tool can really deliver savings.

So implementing some areas of PDM/PLM can assist in elimination of these issues. But be careful, full blown PDM/PLM implementations are expensive! So in the credit strapped times I would propose working with a good consultant or company to identify "low hanging fruit" such as part duplication and BOM->ERP transfers (see earlier articles). Once you have some savings and have built up an understanding of the technology then it would be good to move on, and maybe the recession is over by then too!

KISS - Keep it simple stupid!

I thought I'd jot down a few lines about KISS.

It seems like people develop a red mist before their eyes when it comes to tools such as PDM/PLM. They don't look on them like Microsoft Word and prefer to customise the heck out of the tools. This does have distinct advantages such as adherence to corporate processes etc.

In my opinion, though, people tend to forget about the long term costs of the custom solution. I've worked with a few PDM companies that have taken a long time to see the error of their ways, now producing "tailorable" tools that are out of the box (OOTB) with some things that you can change without the need to resort to coding.

The major costs for companies that adopt the custom strategy is long maintenance of the solution. Each time a new major release comes out (about once a year for most of the companies in the field) you need to do some major effort before you can deploy the solution. Often interim releases require large efforts to deploy in custom environments too! Some companies are held at very old releases due to the costs of moving their custom code (I've seen a LOT of these situations). It means that people are often working with buggy releases that the PLM companies do not even support anymore. This can lead to frustration in the workforce who use the tools.

Also custom solutions introduce errors on top of the ones from the standard product, these often lead to fingerpointing over where the actual problems lie, your fault or theirs...

The benefits of the KISS approach mean that you can almost instantaneously deploy newer releases and fixes.

I know most tools suffer from these issues but (along with ERP) people seem to feel a need to customise PLM tools to distraction.


So in closing please think about KISS whenever you are looking to deploy or update your data management tools...

Have a good weekend