PLM Integration Customization

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?

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.

Do What You Say and Show What You Do!

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.