Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), is one of the most holistic business strategies ever defined. It has evolved enough robustness, bandwidth, information and process management capabilities to be a viable choice for bringing together information technologies (IT), operational technologies (OT) and engineering technologies (ET)—even at the highest digital levels of your enterprise.
Creating this enterprise-level lifecycle management environment is an eminently worthwhile goal—but it can be elusive. Many well-staffed and well-funded efforts focused on bringing IT, OT and ET together have had only limited success. There are three big stumbling blocks—organizational structures, standards and technological silos—and they are the focus of this article.
What Your Enterprise-Level Lifecycle Management Environment Might Look Like
To CIMdata's knowledge, a fully-enabled, enterprise-level lifecycle management environment hasn't been created yet because of three major stumbling blocks: organizational structures, standards and technological silos. If these were not in the way, PLM could reach new levels of integration and optimization and be lifted beyond, mainly supporting product development throughout the enterprise.
Consider if the connection was possible today. The corresponding gains in depth, breadth and processing speeds would enable users to access every data repository in the enterprise. That would inevitably lead to some form of access to the repositories of suppliers, partners and customers who make up the complete extended enterprise. Ultimately, PLM-enabling technologies would provide unconstrained access and valuable data via the cloud, the Internet of Things (IoT) and countless Big Data repositories.
Until now, PLM solutions have been primarily used and regarded as application and engineering toolsets. They can be used to generate complex and sophisticated digital or virtual representations of products and other physical and logical assets, such as production systems and service structures. If PLM could successfully embrace IT, OT and ET, however, product development would transform into true enterprise lifecycle development and optimization. It would be the ultimate end-to-end development and optimization of systems of systems. Everyone in your enterprise would be able to collaborate to fulfill the goals of leadership and business model requirements in near real-time.
More effective collaboration and reliable information access would sharply reduce the time wasted reformatting and re-entering information that is traditionally moved between toolsets, systems and repositories. Tedious verifications and repetitive validations could also be pared back.
The Hurdles to Making Your Enterprise Lifecycle Management Environment Fully Functional
Organizational structures are often the main impediment blocking a company's ability to optimize throughout the lifecycle and across its various functional groups. Mid-level managers often fail to appreciate the importance of similar functions and departments that interact at different points in the product lifecycle. This disconnected mindset can lead managers to block interfaces to their data that would make access and sharing straightforward. It also often results in suboptimization.
Standards pertaining to implementing PLM are incomplete, often in conflict and built on differing underlying assumptions to meet different needs. Because of PLM's broad end-to-end reach, tallies of relevant standards run from a dozen to well into the hundreds. They have never been adequately reconciled, and CIMdata knows of no significant effort to do so.
Technological silos thwart information access, analysis, decision-making and collaboration everywhere in the enterprise. These disconnected and often obsolete data repositories are widely recognized as causing headaches, but they persist because exclusive knowledge and data are seen as forms of power. And every organization has people suspicious of outsiders wanting to use their data.
The Technical Challenges of Joining IT, ET and OT Into One Integrated Environment
From a technological point of view, joining IT to ET and OT may lead to installing or reinstalling PLM-enabling solutions in the cloud. That would shift responsibility for cybersecurity and physical security to the solution providers—which is a good thing.
Solution providers and their cloud security teams have far more expertise than all but a few experts in aerospace, defense and classified government agencies. With economies of scale on their side, solution providers and their cloud security teams are more tightly focused than any enterprise IT security team can ever be, and they can react faster.
However, combining IT, ET and OT into one integrated enterprise lifecycle management environment raises other technical issues at the highest levels of the enterprise.
Significant scalability and technology platform upgrades will be needed to accommodate dozens of non-engineering applications. Some of these applications may grow rapidly, have many more repositories and have surges in data transactions—millions of digital events per second in some cases. Such numbers are almost never seen in conventional PLM installations. File openings, closings and information modifications in engineering will seem comparatively infrequent.
Bringing IT, OT and ET together will inevitably lead to a jump in the number of discrete new systems and toolsets that need to be addressed, managed, analyzed and connected. While engineering uses dozens of applications and toolsets, far more are used in operations, production and elsewhere in the organization. This means data governance must be greatly scaled up, strengthened, extended and adapted.
Bringing IT, OT and ET together will also require new digital skills and raise questions of staffing a team to choose, analyze and implement such a radically new digital environment. IT and engineering teams will know what is in these digital stacks. Still, their perspectives and hands-on experience vary widely, and that will be needed for top-of-the-enterprise integration. As often part of finance, IT may be able to secure funds more easily. Engineers, however, will have an edge in knowing how PLM's capabilities operate.
Other Business Adaptations Created by an Enterprise-Level Lifecycle Management Environment
Regardless of how PLM may be understood and implemented in this ideal digital future, management of the product lifecycle must assume a new status at the top of the enterprise. The enterprise's long-term viability—even its survival—can only be assured with a reliable flow of competitive and profitable new products, productions, support systems and physical assets.
In addition, the meanings and uses of PLM's most familiar terms—digital twins, digital threads, end-to-end lifecycle connectivity—will be redefined. When they at last represent the enterprise or large portions of it, digital twins will be transformed. They will be pulled apart and reassembled in unexpected ways with virtual reality, data analytics and artificial intelligence. These will be crucial to the enterprise but, until now, have often been peripheral to individual product instances. Even now, however, many twins reach gigabyte sizes.
Digital threads will also multiply as they spread into IT and deeper into OT, expanding far beyond product development. At the IT-OT-ET level, webs and networks of threads will link and transmit new information types, formats, linkages, feedback loops, metadata and much else that is not yet foreseeable. Threads will be two to five times faster and have many times more capacity. New connections and feedback loops can be expected to grow into the thousands, and maybe even millions, per thread. More frequent access to the Internet of Things (IoT) will further boost these numbers.
Everything that IT-OT-ET convergence does to digital threads will be reflected in PLM's end-to-end lifecycle connectivity and optimization. As they are reoriented away from physical things and toward people and issues, digital threads will be reconfigured to meet dramatically larger and very different demands.
For PLM solutions to become the medium of information exchange—and access and collaboration—across the enterprise as well as up and down its information flows and connections, PLM must no longer be seen as "something for engineering." Changing this view requires a fundamental rethink by the solution providers of their technology approaches—and the ways in which these approaches are described and presented.
How We Will One Day Enable an Integrated Enterprise-level Lifecycle Management Environment
Such are the foreseeable stumbling blocks of what I shall label, for the present anyway, Enterprise Lifecycle Management—that is, systems of systems lifecycle optimization.
Stumbling blocks aside, product development can morph into enterprise development. Transformations of this magnitude have occurred and will continue to occur in data management, analytics, spreadsheets and even word processors. The use of PLM to bring IT, OT, ET and their users together is virtually assured as innovative digital capabilities always find their way into the enterprise limelight. When this happens, enterprises will be forever changed for the better.
Nevertheless, the many challenges to effectively bringing IT, OT and ET together must not be taken lightly. They will not magically disappear; if anything, these stumbling blocks will get worse as time passes. Only concerted and persistent initiatives by top management, including some organizational restructuring, can bring IT, OT and ET together to optimize an organization's return on investment.