It's time we explored the role of PLM in designing for agility. What does agility mean to a manufacturing organization and what role does PLM play in achieving it?
In today's IT world, agility is often tied to initiatives such as service-oriented architecture (SOA), utility and on-demand computing, and related architecture and platform solutions. It is one of those "motherhood and apple pie" words used in every speech and annual report, yet rarely articulated as a set of crisp tactics. How can it be operationalized to have meaning at a granular enough level that it can be achieved using business and IT strategies?
What the heck is agility anyway? Some think of it as the ability to quickly respond to a stimulus -- either a threat or an opportunity. Some evaluate agility by the range of responses available given the need to react or change. So, if an organization is not agile and it wants to be, how does it get there? What are the baseline measures or conditions that are used to evaluate whether it achieved "agility" when the process is ostensibly complete? This is the hard part of agility: the operationalization of the term and the ability to measure it.
Now, let's confuse the concept of agility even further by extending it to products. Are there agile products? If products are agile, what makes them so? And what is the relationship of "agility" to products and PLM?
We know PLM plays a great role in organizing and managing product development artifacts, including CAD design information, tooling and manufacturing process data, BOM, quality information, as well as the relationships among these related artifacts. The move toward flexible manufacturing, spearheaded by the automotive industry, led to tremendous investments in robotics, flexible manufacturing lines and other automation solutions. This quest for process flexibility inspired product strategies based on platforms -- baseline configurations that could be customized into multiple final products on one line.
Does that mean the platforms are the agile products? Are agile products similar to recent innovations in IT computing hardware, where, for example, extra server blades are included in a large computer chassis and can be activated remotely over the network by a client? This sounds strikingly like an agile product whose value can be increased or decreased based on client requirements.
Does the ability to add or subtract capacity from the product mean the product is agile? The Transformer action figure toys, which actually change into new toys as a child plays with them, are most certainly agile products. In this case, there is a different product outcome, not an extension of the existing functionality. Similarly, consider the rapidly evolving market for the "third screen," or your cell phone screen. The convergence of cell phones, digital cameras, PDAs, walkie talkies, and email certainly makes these devices very agile in that they can solve a wide variety of problems in a single device. Are these agile products?
If PLM is the secret to designing for flexible or agile manufacturing, once again there is the same problem we touched upon a few columns ago. Great products still rely on great product ideas, which are indeed difficult to automate using software tools. Is there a place for agile products? How can agile products become the innovation differentiation for manufacturers? What is the market value of agile products to consumers?