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.
Already, Vocollect has leveraged the integration to create several new cross-functional business processes around pricing changes, for example, and product introduction. Using the workflow in the integrated system, Vocollect can now direct pricing change requests automatically to the appropriate stakeholders for approval, a previously manual process that often caused pricing and product information to fall out of sync. Manually coordinating these pricing changes also demanded a ton of manpower, requiring two to three weeks of someone's time each month. "Making sure the information is synced protects us from incoming order errors, and we're not missing an opportunity for revenue if the product is ready for order," French explains.
Another workflow created with the integrated PLM/ERP system is one that allows Vocollect to better manage its product launch process. With the "order, ship, authorization" workflow, all the different stakeholders involved in product launch — procurement specialists, customer service reps, and product managers — are alerted so they can be sure everything in their corner is ready for launch. "This gives us a way to codify, track, and formally approve when a product is available for taking orders and shipment," he says. "It prevents situations where you have product management making a product announcement that we're really not ready for."
Additional Capabilities
Other areas of PLM expansion starting to heat up include sourcing and product portfolio management. The latter delivers project management and analytic capabilities designed to help manufacturers optimize their product development investments. Agile offers both product portfolio and sourcing modules as part of its PLM suite, and UGS and Arena Solutions announced similar modules for their respective Teamcenter and Arena PLM products last quarter. There also are a number of best-of-breed providers such as Sopheon Corp. and Integrated Development Enterprise Inc. that focus on the product portfolio area.
"When you look at the lifecycle of a product, it doesn't start with a CAD drawing, it starts with a commercial definition, an idea, and an opportunity in the market," explains Jim Brown, vice president of product innovation and engineering research for Aberdeen Group. "That's where things like product portfolio management fit into PLM."
Yet, even as PLM gains attention, its adoption as an enterprise platform beyond engineering is likely to remain slow. The amount of process change demanded by PLM requires that companies bite off small initiatives that are tied to their most pressing business problems, such as creating processes to gain efficiencies in manufacturing or sourcing, or to better integrate failure data from the field into the overall product development history (see "If It Ain't Broke, Fix It?").
The lack of a PLM owner also remains a major inhibitor to widespread PLM adoption, according to Mike Burkett, a vice president with AMR Research Inc.
"PLM is a cross-functional process in vision, but in reality, PLM initiatives usually get started in silos — typically in engineering in the automotive sector, for example; or in the supply chain group at high-tech companies," Burkett explains. "When you start to talk about taking the next step — for instance, to optimize the sourcing process — the guy who deployed the PDM system for engineering is not necessarily the same guy worried about the supply chain problem. You need someone above to take ownership and say, 'We need an enterprise strategy for PLM.' And that's a slow evolution."
Adding tools like product portfolio management to the PLM suite will help get those high-level stakeholders involved, maintains Michael Topolovac, Arena's CEO, because it helps provide answers to critical questions like, When will my product ship?
"When you're just doing product definition and managing change, [PLM is] not likely to elevate too high up into an organization, but when you start doing this other stuff, it changes the rules," Topolovac says. "It provides a reason for people beyond engineering to want to interact with the PLM tool."
That's certainly the case at ATK, an advanced weapons and space systems manufacturer. While the company's use of PLM has primarily been engineering-centric, in the last year or so ATK has harnessed the collaboration capabilities of UGS Teamcenter, its PLM platform, to get multi-functional groups to work better together and to share not only engineering drawings and product specifications, but other product-related data such as contracts, program schedules, even customer requirements, according to Brian See, ATK's chief technology officer. As people get used to collaborating around a central database, their behavior is starting to change. Instead of saying, 'Send me that file,'" he says, they're starting to consider where that file is in terms of product data management.
ATK plans to expand its PLM initiative with sourcing, compliance, and maintenance, repair, and overhaul capabilities, but See admits it will be a slow ramp up. Merging the cultures and unifying business processes are integral to PLM success, and these take time.
"We've found the slow part is moving cultures and unifying processes so you can provide a common tool on top of that," See says. "It's like rewiring your house with the electricity on — you can't stop your business and restart. You have to take the time to think clearly about where to interject change and how rapidly you can do that."