Host Jim Brown and Taxal Director Allan Behrens discuss what kinds of companies can improve and accelerate product development with PLM.
Speaker: This is a public health announcement from PLM 411. Change management syndrome is on the rise in manufacturing due to increased complexity and globalization. Symptoms of CMS include confusion about which information is accurate, miscommunication, and mistakes leading the heads hitting desks.
CMS leads to business paralysis from bad or missing data. Beware, discourage can spread to co-workers who are out of the loop on changes. It frequently infects other departments who rely on current product data. Severe cases of CMS may even spread to suppliers or customers who come in contact with out of date files and revisions. What can stop the spread of this nuisance condition? PLM. Now in convenient time release capsules.
This was a funny look at a serious problem manufacturers face on a regular basis. Watch PLM 411 to see how PLM helps manufacturers improve change management and avoid these problems.
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Jim: Hi and welcome to PLM 411 where we give you straight information on how manufacturers can accelerate product innovation and product development. I’m Jim Brown of Tech-Clarity, and I’m here with Allan Behrens of Taxal.
Allan: Hi Jim.
Jim: Today we’re going to talk about who should care about PLM? And before we get started on that, maybe we should get on the same page about what PLM really is.
Allan: Yes. One of the problems of PLM is it means so many different things to different people, and that perpetuates this own problem, isn’t it?
Jim: Yes, it means so many things that it almost means nothing. Talk about product life cycle management, people get really hung up on life cycle term and they start thinking about retiring products or cradle to grave. And while that’s an element of it, it really isn’t necessarily where any given company is going to find the most value.
Allan: I agree. At the end of the day, it’s about managing products and processes in a company and that’s really all it’s about.
Jim: Why don’t we talk a little bit about company size? I know you and I talked about this before that there’s some misconceptions out there particularly about size of companies that use PLM.
Allan: Yes. It’s one of these things that kept PLM as being something that’s generally being known as being applied to big companies, especially automotive and aerospace; I think those are the domains that people think about. That’s definitely not the case. Certainly, historically, it’s very similar to the LPs. It starts with the big companies, but now it’s applicable [unintelligible 00:02:43].
Jim: Yes, absolutely. And we’re seeing a lot of smaller companies have the same issues and innovating the same issues and developing products and working with their supply chain and making sure that they’ve got quality and communicating with the shop floor, many of them are outsourcing. There’s lots of issues that are similar in the smaller companies. Typically, they just don’t have the resources to deal with it.
Allan: I agree. And in fact, that’s one of the challenges is that the problems are the same, they just don’t have either the money, the personnel, or the band worth, the financial band worth to deal with what they need to do to grow and managing that is a challenge. They need something that’s instantly productive and something that fits what they need to do now and in short term.
Jim: I’m going to react to something else you said earlier. We talked about company size and you brought up industry, in aerospace and automotive, and traditionally there’s been a lot of value for PLM on those industries but that’s a bit of a misconception now too, right?
Allan: Absolutely, yes. It’s applicable to anybody. There are obviously different work flows for different companies but it’s big and small alike, it’s just that one needs to adapt what you’re trying to do to the scale of the problem that you’re trying to actually get rid of at that particular time.
Jim: And a lot of the problems are the same. There certainly are nuances of things that are different, that drives from real problems in different industries. But at the same time, the core functionality and the core needs of being able to manage information and collaborate and keep people working on the same piece of information and working on things in a project context, that 80% is actually pretty consistent across industries.
Allan: I agree, and people forget that. I think we try and look at the problem into larger scale as opposed to actually looking at what we really need to do. Small companies need to execute what they need to do now. The 80% is what most people do most of the time, and that’s where it can really help.
Jim: Yes, no doubt. I think there’s tradeoffs between the capabilities that companies want and having something that really fits exactly what they need for their size, for their industry, for their own personal quirks of their business. But there’s a tradeoff between those deep capabilities and the complexity, and we’ve seen this in lots of software industries. People ask for a little more, they ask for a little more, and they ask for a little more, and then they say, “Wait, this is really hard to use.”
Allan: And it’s all about being able to assimilate to execute what you can do now. It’s like eating the elephant; you’ve got to do one bite at a time. You just cannot get to an end objective; I don’t think there ever is an end objective when it comes to company change. But what you need to do is define what it is you need to do today, where you want to get to perhaps tomorrow, and then don’t worry about the stuff much further down the line because things may change.
Jim: I find very few companies actually trying to eat elephants these days, I don’t know why. It seems to have gone out of but [crosstalk]. I bet. I'm not judging. But no, it’s a good analogy. Any final thoughts as we wrap up?
Allan: No. I think to me, PLM is allowing about enabling small companies and mid-sized companies to function above their weight, to compete with the larger players by doing what’s necessary to be done today.
Jim: Absolutely. To me when I think about it, there’s some real practical problems people can solve without having to boil the ocean or eat the elephant or whatever analogy we’d like to use, and that’s what we’re really going to try and focus on the show. We’re actually going to hit a lot of the specific issues one on one as we go along. Anyway, thank you. This has been a lot of fun.
Allan: Thanks so much, Jim.
Jim: All right.
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