Tech-Clarity's Jim Brown and Autodesk PLM360 director Ron Locklin have a discussion on how PLM can help manufacturers accelerate product development and reduce cost.
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Jim Brown: Hi and welcome to PLM 411 where we give you straight talk about how manufacturers can accelerate new product innovation and development. Today, I’m with Ron Locklin of Autodesk. He’s the director responsible for the PLM360 product.
Ron Locklin: Hi, Jim.
Jim: How are you doing?
Ron: Good.
Jim: Good. We’re going to talk about why companies should care about PLM. A lot of companies have heard about PLM, they may know a little bit about it, but they may not know is it right for them or exactly what it can do for them. So maybe I’ll just post a question, why should somebody care about PLM?
Ron: Great. The answer is really the same for whether the company is large or small but there’s two fundamental reasons, it all boils down to two things. One is it’ll give a company insight into the product, in the product innovation cycle; and second of all, it will save them money. Maybe through reducing scrap, maybe through being more rapid to market. Boils down to those two things.
Jim: Yes, and it actually matches up a lot with the research that I’ve done over a number of years now. Really seeing PLM driving top line improvements to businesses through time to market innovation, but also taking cost out of the product development process as well as taking cost at products even. So they’re very good. Maybe we can talk a little bit about what are some of the problems that companies tend to solve with PLM when they talk to you. What are they looking to fix?
Ron: Right. There’s a lot of different areas that PLM can address, PLM can work in, but what we found is fundamentally, it revolves around the bill of materials, the recipe for a product or a product design. And what PLM does is, if you start with this recipe of a product, you get control of the product, of its components, and of the processes around that, and you build off that very closely related to the recipe for the product, the bill of materials. You have the engineering change or process if something fails, if there’s a change in the design, if you switch a supplier for example, you have an engineering change order. And you have to do this efficiently and you have to do it accurately, otherwise you lose money.
Jim: Yes, absolutely. And it’s not just money, it’s time. That’s one of the things I had to study on engineering change and one of the big things that happens is, you also disappoint your customers but you don’t get the changes out as quickly, so you don’t get the benefits of the change that you’re looking for. A lot of what you talk about is internal to the business and internal in engineering but it starts to work its way out a little bit into other areas of the business, maybe we can talk a little bit about that.
Ron: As you go further beyond the bill of materials and the ECO, the Engineering Change Order process, you’re touching things like quality management and you can buy quality a management systems off the shelf. But if you tie it to the PLM process, to the bill of materials, you can do things like – if you have a part that fails, you can track it, you can adjust it, you can improve the design and work that into your process, and that’s often external to your company.
Similarly, the supply chain management process in today’s economy, even small companies as well as the large companies work globally with many other different suppliers. That’s part of the PLM ecosystem that’s well beyond your company walls, and PLM can help you manage suppliers. Another good example, again all tied to the recipe for the product, the bill of materials as well as the engineering change order process, etc.
Jim: And actually, I talked about something called the four dimensions of PLM expansion, and we see PLM really expanding to a richer view of the product further up and down the product lifecycle but also to more people and to more processes. Speaking of processes, we’ve talked a little bit about product so far maybe we should talk about PLM really addresses products but also projects and processes and work flows. Maybe you can touch on some of that.
Ron: A really good example there is the new product introduction, process NPI. Every company’s got a different way of doing it, but in companies we work with that always shows up as one of their top priorities and one of their top initiatives to manage.
The NPI process is really critical and, again, it’s very much related to the product design, it reaches out to suppliers and the quality process, and it’s about managing a project, really; how you design, innovate, and introduce a new product.
Jim: And that’s again where PLM comes back, and it can drive innovation and top level improvements, drop product cost. It’s just there’s so many places it can help. On one hand, that’s great because there’s lots of opportunity. On the other hand, it drives some confusion.
One of the things that I try and really coach people on is, find some real practical problems. Don’t try and do all of these things at once. Solve a problem, be practical, and then build on it. Actually, one of the things that we’re hoping to do with this series is talk a lot about some of the individual problems like in change control and really talk more specifically about the way that PLM helps companies improve.
Ron: That’s great. And we have a lot of good examples of how to do that. Start with one problem and branch out, gives a specific real world examples of that.
Jim: Good, fantastic. Great. Thanks, it’s been fun.
Ron: Yes, thank you.
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