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.

How do we impact everyone?

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

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.