If General Motors made cars that people wanted to buy, what kind of a company would it be? And is the problem related to "how" to design or is it more of a "what" to design challenge? General Motors' business problems are headline material, but the root cause must surely be related to making great products that the market wants, right?
The real issue is designing products based on data about what customers really want. But, is this an issue of the intelligent design process, or are intelligent designers the secret? Or is there something else going on?
This is where product lifecycle management (PLM) applications come in. PLM has already transitioned from the early category stage into vertically-oriented PLM products targeting specific industries. The PLM category consolidates many formerly-siloed engineering disciplines into a software suite that addresses products by their complete lifecycle, from concept to end of life, from the individual components to the complete bill of material for a final product to after sales service.
When I worked in the automotive industry, one of the big buzzwords was design for manufacturing (DFM). A lot of effort went into designing products that optimized manufacturing processes and labor costs. Simulation, where the CAD designs of the vehicles were used to create paint paths and CMM paths, for example, was also fairly new. Product data management products were maturing at that time to help manage all the product data and related information. Now, thankfully, PLM has "rolled up" these disparate solutions into an integrated suite oriented horizontally across the entire product lifecycle.
However, PLM as a category of software does not address the fundamental question: What is more important, intelligent design or intelligent designers? What about the business decisions that are made upstream from the PLM solutions? Are these considered PLM? Are they part of intelligent design? Consider all of the upstream decisions that take place before the design work is performed in a PLM system. We're talking about market research, gathering and understanding demographic data and a host of other issues. Designers must have this information at their fingertips as they begin designing products.
It is true that PLM has become an official category as anointed by the analyst firms and enthusiastically endorsed by the PLM vendors. However, there is a lot more to the product development process than the PLM part of product design. By the time the product concept commitment has been made and the PLM portion of the new process begins, the marketing folks have already determined what products to make. These then go to intelligent designers who use PLM tools to create their intelligent designs and bring the products to market.
In other words, intelligent designers may create intelligent designs of a crummy product and bring it to market faster, cheaper and even designed for efficient manufacturing. But it still won't sell any better.
So, before we anoint PLM the answer to some subset of manufacturing challenges, let's be clear on what the problem is and whether it is indeed being solved. I'm quite positive GM has world-class product design capabilities or PLM processes; however, it's not designing the right products. Intelligent designs and intelligent designers using PLM solutions still rely on upstream research and corporate decision making processes to determine what to create. If these decisions are wrong, perhaps they can use a new PLM module called Design for Chapter 11.