Product Lifecycle Management

PLM Integration Customization

2007-11-27T06:46:00.000-08:00

When creating an integrated system for product lifecycle management remember to financial portion of the project. When thinking about all of the nice to haves and cool to haves, make sure to think if it is a must to have. To much customization will cost you loads of money up front and loads of money for maintenance. KEEP IT SIMPLE!

How to get the most out of your Contractors?

2007-11-26T12:33:00.000-08:00

Contractors are a great tool for implementing any new system, especially a PLM system. Like most tools, you know how to use them in order to get the most out of them.

Here are a couple of tips to deal with contractors:

Make sure you have a functional specification completely created and approved before dealing with a contracting agency. This will keep your scope of work focused for an accurate quote.
Limit the authority that the contractors have throughout their stay with your company. This might hurt in the long run due to over relying on the contractor because they will eventually be leaving.
For each "track" of work necessary make sure you have one person of contact from your organization responsible for that contractor. This will keep your consistency to a maximum and also your efficiency.
Because you are the lead and they are doing the work for you, make decision efficiently. I know their is no one efficient answer to any question or problem so in response of time and cost, make an educated decision and go with it. If you have to come back and make corrections then do so. At least some of the work that was supposed to be done would have gotten done and you are on the hook just for the time to correct and not recreate. This will help you to move forward and stay moving forward. Timing is everything for implementing a PLM system especially if it is tying to your ERP system. You don't want systems down to long before another one comes up.
make sure you have the contractors documenting everything that they are doing. Some best practices are to have a weekly review of the work that they have done along with the supporting documentation.

These are just a few helpful tips to deal with contractors. I will be posting some more later next year. We are in the process right now of getting new contractors because our old contractors have more on to bigger and better things.

Incorporate ERP with PDM

2007-11-07T09:15:00.000-08:00

Incorporating the ERP system up front in any implementation is very important. There are many reasons why this is so important:

Component/Assembly/End Model data will start in the PDM and be pushed to the ERP system since that is where the data originates anyways. The ERP does not create this information, the PDM system does, so you would want to make sure that you are ordering the correct part because the PDM system will hold the master data. In this case the ERP system is the slave and not the master.
Configuration of the ERP system must be designed in such a way to incorporate data from the PDM system so they have to work together and developed at the same time.
Visibility of the cost information along with the model information allows approvers of such component/assembly/end models to know what the impact would be if they approve of changes or creations.

Do What You Say and Show What You Do!

2007-09-02T19:50:00.000-07:00

During our development and deployment of our PLM system, we have not been doing such a good job at documenting out best practices and then using those documents for training and demonstration.

We decided as a PLM team to use On-Demand as our training software and documentation for all tracks of the software. Shortly after that decision was made, a manager also made a decision to have additional documentation to be created, which duplicates the information that we have on our On-Demand, for a class training session. Now we have two sources of the same information which can become out of date very easily.

You have to ask the questions, "Was that the right thing to do?" I would say not and so does the rest of the doers that I work with.

One more manager within our team thought he would have a great idea to have each one of us to create a validation plan for our software. The funny thing here is On-Demand creates a validation script for you based on the training material that you have created. Now we have another document that will be duplicating work and not associated with each other.

I hope you learn from our mistakes and do not approach this the same way.

Support Structure

2007-08-17T05:30:00.001-07:00

I just wanted to make a comment on supporting the new system that you and your team have worked so hard to supply for your company. When developing a new system, make sure that you have the support people separated from the developing people. The reason why this is needed is because, unless it is a show stopper, the developing people will be bombarded with new requests to improve the system and they would not have enough time to actually develop instead of fire fight. The company that I am with has their developers also do the support for our implementation. This causes problems for our developing time line and our support reaction time.

Many other companies who implement a system like this already has this separated which keeps them on track for implementation and support.

PLM "Why" Flash Video

2007-08-11T06:45:00.000-07:00

Here is a flash that I found that really shows the PLM vision and goal.

Click here to view the flash video of why to use PLM. When I came across this, I thought it was the best way to show the benefits of why to have a completely integrated system.

How do we impact everyone?

2007-08-07T06:30:00.001-07:00

Part of implementing a new system, you have to know how you are going to impact other people with the new system. If you are going to be working with a tool which is going to "Save" the company. You need to make sure that everyone who is going to be using it is fully trained within the tool. Besides getting the initial training, they also will need to get update training and best practices training. The reason why you need to train best practices to the users is to make them as efficient and comfortable with the new system as much as possible.

What happens when people are frustrated with a tool that they need to use to do their job?

They will adapt another system, tool, process to make it work for them. If you are a company that spend a lot of many cleaning up processes and making sure people were trained to use the system, you are not going to want the user community creating their own Frankenstein just so they can get their job done. Training, listening, training, listening, and communicating the new system and processes to the company is very important.

If you are a company that is implementing a new process and keeping or minimizing system tools. Then you need to do the exact same thing that I stated above. Training, communicating, and reviewing best practices are key to a successfully implementation of a completely integrated product life-cycle management tool.

Training Is Key

2007-01-03T21:12:00.000-08:00

We have been under going our training sessions and they came to a very nice stop last year. We are starting up again this year and I have been selected to coordinate our training at our plant (one of many). The wonderful thing about this is the fact that we all did not know about this until it was too late last year. We started training ourselves these last few days and it is not looking so good.

I just wanted to make a comment on training because besides the negative moral that is circulating the plant, we do not know how to train the personnel. The only reason why this was dropped onto our laps was because the expert that should be giving this training is out of the country until he brings his new child back to the states. I too have one on the way and am hoping to miss the training because of her arrival.

Getting the business to approve this.

2007-01-02T12:33:00.000-08:00

Now how do you get a company this big to approve this large of a project? The method that was used, was to show that "it will not take a lot of money or personnel to achieve the end goal." The only factor that was left out of that statement was the time. The amount of time that is needed will run up the bill but it was stated that it will not take a lot of money, so how do we accomplish this. We take people that currently have a job and add this responsibility to their already filled work load. Oh yeah, make sure that they are salary so we can hide the use of their time and efforts.

The method was great. The end result will be phenomenal. The moral will be crappy.

The end users have heard the complaining from the "doers" and it has a negative effect on our tools that we have selected. The tools are great and they work beautifully, but we should have staffed extra people and allowed more money so we can achieve this project in a timely manner. The project is still going and going well but the staff are ready to quit and others are holding out for other companies that will pick them up because of their experience with our company.

PLM Functional Spec Review

2006-12-28T22:01:00.000-08:00

The functional spec was completed by the consultants. They performed what is called a tier process; tier one, they reviewed the processes that were in current use; tier two, they reviewed and collaborated with each tool's company to align with the processes; tier three, a review of the functional spec with the company.

The consultants sat down with the different business owners and reviewed the process from beginning to end. Each step of the process a new business owner/s would come in and validate what they have written down was accurate. Then with each step of the process they would comment on how their tool would satisfy their needs and maybe more. I sat in on every one of these reviews and a majority of the people that sat in and helped on the validation were very impressed of the capabilities of Oracle and Teamcenter.

Author's Comments:
Just keep in mind I am only trying to get you up to speed on our current situation. We are a lot further than this right now.

Have a great New Years Day!

What goes where?

2006-12-26T20:29:00.000-08:00

I have brought you up to speed on the PLM tool and the ERP tool...little fairy dust and this will all work right away. WRONG! The next thing that we had to do is sign a contract with both UGS and Oracle to lend some of their finest to come over and help us align the tools together. They started in the concept phase of our new product and worked their way through design, testing and through to production.

They then talked to the president, VPs and directors to find out more how things work together and the tools that they use to get their job done. The next question that they asked to everyone was, "What would you like to see different?" If a lean six sigma project has been completed on a process then they would disregard that process and concentrate on something else that would help the PLM system.

After all was said and done, the consultants presented a functional spec that consisted of the entire process from beginning to end. They would then have to verify that with a series of interviews with the different businesses and departments to make sure that what they have documented actually happens.

Now What?!

2006-12-25T19:37:00.000-08:00

Now that we have an electronic tool selected to enforce this new way of thinking, we need an "Enterprise Resource Planning" (ERP) tool to financially guide ourselves to a better place in the market. Our old ERP system was custom made, so trying to get it to work with anything else would be a nightmare. What we saw here is a chance to get away from an old and outdated system and move up to bigger and better things. The tool that we looked at and have been reviewing for the last 10 years, was Oracle.

I know what you are thinking. Why didn't they go with it for their PDM and process manager? This tool is just starting out in the market place for the PLM title. We wanted something that has been tested and proven in the market place so that is why we chose Teamcenter.

Oracle is known to interface with Teamcenter very nicely and the reporting capability is endless. We currently have been testing Oracle with the new processes and slowly implementing them throughout the company. So far, I have been very impressed with the system for time control and expense reports. Everything else has not impressed me as far as its GUI is concerned, but that is probably what people in finance want. I am an engineer and like things to look clean and neat, that is my little jab at finance.

3rd Review - UGS' Teamcenter Suite

2006-12-23T19:11:00.000-08:00

Our requirements for this new PLM system are:

A product data management system with change control.
A means to manage requirements for both the company and customer.
The ability to plan out projects and allocate resources.
The ability to collaborate with people inside and outside of the company with complete access restrictions.
Bonus: A visualization software for our technical publications group.

After Oracle was thrown out of the review, we looked at a UGS product called Teamcenter. We went down to PLM World and attended as many presentations as we could. We tried the software and had them come to our company and give us a more thorough demonstration. After the several day demonstration, we were sold. We saw a huge possibility for improving the company and also improving the processes that have already been improved upon.

Teamcenter offers a variety of tracks:

Teamcenter Engineering - Product Data Management system with process flows.
Teamcenter Systems Engineering - A requirements management tool.
Teamcenter Project - A project planning tool that mimics Microsoft Project.
Teamcenter Community - A collaboration tool that can go outside the company and also allow App. Sharing Services free with the tool.
Teamcenter Visualization - A visualization tool that is mostly used by technical publications and also for markups through drawing approval process.

We have purchased more of the other tracks not mentioned and I will talk about those at a later date.

2nd Review - Oracle's "Product Lifecycle Management"

2006-12-23T06:13:00.000-08:00

The second tool that we looked at was Oracle's "Product Lifecycle Management" tool. That is what the named the tool, how bold. Within this tool, they suited many of their other tools which covered some of our requirements for collaboration, planning, and product data management. The one missing aspect was a tool to help manage our requirements. We could have disregarded a requirement managing tool but when we got into the suite from Oracle, we wanted something with a better GUI. Oracle seems to much of a "next step up from dos" than a next step up from Microsoft. The interface was very poor and the user community wanted something better.

The one nice thing though, was their ability to tie seemlessly with the Oracle ERP system. This was one aspect we needed to keep in mind for the future. Our main concentration was on the other four requirements and we felt that we could work the company to help improve or develop an ERP system.

1st Review - PTC's Windchill System

2006-12-23T06:12:00.000-08:00

As I stated before, processes needed to be improved upon first. After you have the majority of the processes completed, we then needed to find a tool that will enforce the new processes and also accomplish our needs for being able to follow a product from cradle to grave.

We started investigating software that has been designed for product lifecycle management. Because we are a Pro/E house, we wanted to stay with PTC software, hoping that would save us money. They offer a tool called Windchill which connects their cad data manager to the cad modeler. This tool also enforces processes so information will be less likely to fall in the cracks. Other advantages of this tool is it's ability to publish designs quickly for technical publications.

The problem that we found with this software is it inability to offer a better communication method for collaborating at different sites. We wanted a tool that will help collaborate with different sites, help plan projects, control and manage of requirements, and manage our product data. PTC could offer only one aspect of our requirements. So we have to keep looking.

Getting Started with Product Lifecycle Management

2006-12-22T08:58:00.000-08:00

I work for a company that has been using the same tools and processes to bring their products to production for the last 60+ years . Within the last 5 years we have noticed that our competition has been nipping at our heals as far as market shares are concerned. We have always had this mind set that we are the best and no one can touch us, so why improve ourselves. As the market closes in on us and materials are increasing in price, we felt a need to improve our Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) system.

The product lifecycle management system consists of processes, personnel, and tools. Processes were the first to be improved upon. A few departments within our manufacturing were currently using Lean Six Sigma to help improve the assembly-lines. Needless to say, we had them give us a more understanding of the methodology. After we saw the improvements that were a result of these methods, we knew we needed to get more individuals trained on the tools. Our president of the company gave the business a goal to have so-many individuals trained on these tools. After the first year went by and the number was met, he placed another goal that would keep increasing every year. The goal was to have so-many projects created and completed each year. This was a factor also of how many "Champions," "Green Belts," "Black Belts," and "Master Black Belts" that we have already trained or still need to train.

Later on, we implemented Team Leads to manage the overall Lean Six Sigma initiative and continuously seek processes to improve. Now that we had that portion under control, we had to then look at a PLM tool to help enforce these newly created processes.