The virtual rollout last December of Boeing's 787 Dreamliner passenger aircraft was a dream come true for devotees of product lifecycle management (PLM). Instead of spending years and pouring millions of dollars into creating a physical prototype of the plane and the production line, Boeing took a chance on PLM technology to design the plane and simulate and validate its entire manufacturing process. Boeing claims the exercise will dramatically cut development costs and help it meet its aggressive rollout schedule. Pundits have lauded the 787 Dreamliner virtual introduction as a shining example of how PLM can take flight beyond engineering and drive efficiencies and business process change throughout an entire organization.

While Boeing may be airborne with a broader vision of PLM, the view on the ground is much less lofty. To be sure, manufacturers in industries from aerospace and defense to automotive and consumer packaged goods have made serious strides in leveraging pieces of PLM to streamline many of their engineering processes. There are dozens, even hundreds, of success stories of companies achieving quantifiable results by shortening development cycles, promoting parts reuse, and gaining efficiencies in engineering change orders (ECOs). Yet, the broader picture of PLM — as a "one version of the truth" set of technologies and business processes for all product-related information, throughout the entire lifecycle — has been somewhat more difficult for manufacturers to digest. Despite pioneers like Boeing, few manufacturers have tackled wide-ranging PLM initiatives that take into account the information and business processes surrounding sourcing, customer requirements, production, or in-field maintenance. Manufacturers are not ready to take off in this direction for a variety of reasons: Some are grounded by legacy systems they're not ready to replace, others are hindered by integration projects they're not ready to take on, and all are still trying to understand the organizational and cultural changes necessary for making cross-functional, enterprise PLM a reality.

"Companies have been tremendously successful and have seen tremendous payback in deploying individual solutions, from pure design packages like CAD to computer-aided engineering tools for crash simulations and stability testing," explains Peter Schmitt, vice president of marketing and business development for DELMIA at Dassault Systemes, the maker of the PLM platform at the heart of the Dreamliner 787 rollout. "What we haven't seen to the extent we'd like to is integration — going to the next level, where companies combine all the individual solutions and embrace them in a unified manner."

Mapping Out Integration

Integration — with ERP, with manufacturing execution systems (MES), and even with all the different engineering software disciplines — will be the next test for PLM in delivering on its enterprise promise. The plan is already starting to take shape. PLM providers such as Agile Software Corp., PTC, UGS, and others are beginning to offer packaged integrations to leading ERP platforms, while many of the ERP vendors, including Oracle Corp. and SAP AG, are expanding their ERP suites with PLM capabilities and touting integration as a competitive edge.

The integration of traditional PLM with MES systems has also been a hotbed of activity. Dassault's DELMIA offering lets manufacturers plan and simulate production and manufacturing processes using 3D design data, while UGS's Tecnomatix platform performs similar functions. The recent announcement of automation giant Siemens' plan to acquire UGS for $3.5 billion underscores the importance of tying the virtual world of product development (what is typically thought of as PLM) to the physical world of production (usually seen as the domain of the MES), experts say. By doing so, manufacturers will be able to tap into a new playbook of PLM benefits, including shortening the time it takes to ramp up to production as well as being able to sell the first product off the line, potentially reducing the number of products scrapped.

"MES is taking on new meaning, being a piece of a bigger thing which is PLM," explains Michael Grieves, director of industry research for the University of Arizona, a visiting professor at Purdue University's College of Technology, and a founder of the PLM Consortium at the University of Michigan. "We are making strides in the area of testing the product digitally so when we build it, we build one product to validate the tests versus building a bunch of products and then having to test them. This will take out a huge amount of cost."

Beyond MES integration, tackling PLM as an extension of an overall ERP implementation is one way to jumpstart an enterprise view that goes beyond engineering. At least that's the message from SAP and Oracle, along with many of the smaller ERP vendors now talking up PLM capabilities. "[Product data management] and PLM have been deployed independently of companies' ERP and CRM efforts, so they're viewed as just solving engineering problems like reducing the time it takes to design a product," says Manish Modi, vice president of manufacturing and PLM deployment at Oracle. "Yet, even if you reduce the time a product spends in engineering, you've done nothing about the time it takes to get a prototype finished," Modi says. Nor has the manufacturer tackled sourcing issues, or addressed other factors that can impede faster cycle times.

Oracle customer Vocollect Inc. will attest to the benefits of an integrated ERP/PLM approach. Having a single enterprise platform enables Vocollect, a maker of voice-redirected work systems, to create workflows for new business processes that would be far more difficult to make using best-of-breed PLM technology, maintains Michael French, Vocollect's director of infrastructure projects.

"For a manufacturing production supervisor to be able to look at an item and attributes related to something on the production floor and have it be the same item and record that a mechanical engineer has access to — that necessitates that PLM be an extension of ERP," French says.