Tech-Clarity's Jim Brown sits down with Chad Jackson of Lifecycle Insights to discuss how PLM can assist with change management.
Speaker: PLM 411 announces a communications breakthrough for the manufacturing industry, SamPag. With SamPag, manufacturers can easily share up to date information to get products to market fast.
Jim: Oh, wait. I just got an email notification.
Speaker: SamPag lets you instantly share important data like an updated bill of material with the right people.
Jim: Oh, great. There's an attachment. Wait, it just looks like a spreadsheet.
Speaker: With SamPag, you can easily gather feedback from other engineers, other departments, and even the supply chain.
Jim: Hold on, now we got four different email threads on the same thing and everyone’s replying to a different one.
Speaker: You always have the latest information.
Jim: [laugh] Now half of the emails have a bill of material attached and I think they're all different.
Speaker: SamPag makes sure everyone has the latest status like reviews, approvals, cut over dates.
Jim: All right, great. Now I have a bunch of documents too and they all have different information on them.
Speaker: SamPag will change the way you work. There's nothing else like it.
Jim: Actually, I'm pretty sure this is just like Office and it’s exactly what we do today and it doesn’t work very well.
Speaker: Now everyone in your company is on the same page.
Jim: Yes, no. I really don’t think so.
Speaker: Too many manufacturers rely on conventional tools like email and spreadsheets to get on the same page about complex processes. Watch PLM 411 to hear how PLM helps manufacturers truly get on the same page.
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Jim Brown: Welcome to PLM 411 where we give you straight talk about how to accelerate and improve product innovation. My name is Jim Brown, president of Tech-Clarity, and I'm joined today by Chad Jackson of Lifecycle Insights.
Today, we’re going to talk to you about change management, and one of the things that we talked about in one of the earlier shows was that PLM really is something that can help a company save money, but also to accelerate and cut time out of their development cycles.
One of the areas that we mentioned then was change management because it’s a very common problem companies face and also a big improvement or an opportunity for improvement. Chad, I know you’ve done a lot of research on this area. Maybe can you tell us a little bit about why change management is important to manufacturers?
Chad Jackson: Yes, sure. Absolutely. First off, it’s a high volume activity within many manufacturers. It’s an activity and a process a lot of people spend a lot of time on. But I think beyond that, there's a lot of very serious implications for it. There are some small changes but there are big changes where, if you don’t notify the right people, if you don’t get them involved, it can induce a lot of cost, a lot of unplanned cost, which is the worst type for a lot of companies. But on the other end, if you put a lot of scrutiny to this process, then you can just bog everything, product development, down. Those two extremes, neither of them are good.
Jim: One of the things that I've seen too is that companies, when they don’t think they have a handle on change management, they lose confidence and what they can’t do is then roll out incremental changes, small product enhancements to the market, small quality changes. And they batch them off and they wait for a long time and they bring them to market all at once when, really, sales can suffer, quality can suffer because of that. But why do companies struggle so much with change management?
Chad: I think one issue that a lot of organizations run into is that there are different types of change. There are simple changes with small modifications that could be run through very quickly. And then there are very complicated changes where you need to look at the implications for the rest of the lifecycle of the product, whether it’s a service or manufacturing or procurement.
And then the other thing too, another big issue that a lot of people run into is working against the single source of truth. If you're looking at different representations of the product, might be different versions, and different people are assessing that, that can lead you down the path to a bad decision.
And then of course, when you talk about taking enterprise considerations into account, everybody really does need to be on the same page. You’ve got to make sure that everybody’s acting on the same data and working in lockstep.
Jim: And I think one of the things too is making the decision upfront, everybody needs to have the right information, but they also need to make sure people are in the same page on an outbound basis.
Chad: Absolutely. Because once you decide you want to make the change and they make the design change, you then need to slip that into the ongoing stream manufacturing whether it’s getting the right new configuration to manufacturing or getting procurement about the right parts or even suppliers. Disseminating the right information about the change and what’s been modified is also very important. That’s a really good point.
Jim: Yes, and making sure that the change is synchronized, that everybody knows when it’s going to cut over and that sort of thing. One of the big challenges is, every time we’ve done our research on change management, what are the top tools people use? Email, spreadsheets, right?
Chad: Yes.
Jim: And you want to talk about being on the same page or not, you got nine threads of email, you're certainly not going to know exactly what’s going on. PLM, this is a big area that PLM can help with. How do you see companies use PLM to help with change management?
Chad: Actually, there's a few different areas but actually, real quick, the change process is one of those few areas where the ROI for PLM is very well-known. People have quantified it with hard dollars. It’s an opportunity a lot of organizations can go after. But standardizing a process, so it’s funny how many exceptions happened in a chain process. Almost every change can fall into that category.
The other thing is supporting a multitrack process. Being able to support very simple trade news and accelerate those and empower individuals at staff level to really go fix it and get it done and get it out there and support agile changes. But for very complex changes, really put a lot of scrutiny and due diligence into it and letting executives who have the power over big numbers and hard cost make those decisions.
I think those are a couple of the things and then of course with the email and documents, non-centralized documents, you risk losing the email, deleting the document, working on different versions. So the PLM system with workflows in a central repository, you could avoid a lot of those issues. So there's a lot to gain.
Jim: Chad, always a pleasure. Thanks for joining.
Chad: Yes, absolutely. Thank you.
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