_ 27. January. 2014
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_ 27. January. 2014
03
PRODUCT LIFECYCLE MANAGEMENT
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Ȗ Once the domain of blue chip companies, such as Toyota and Boeing, product lifecycle manage-ment (PLM) is filtering through the mid-market to small and medium-sized companies.
The common drivers are a better understanding of what PLM does and the economic constraints fac-ing business. People have realised PLM is a powerful tool to get the most out of several design stake-holders within, and outside, an organisation.
And companies want to inter-pret the vast amounts of data they amass into intelligent product development. PLM can provide this interpretation.
Established in the automotive arena, PLM is pushing hard into aerospace. Analysts Cambashi forecast that the compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of PLM in the aerospace and defence sectors is 7.5 per cent – compare this with CAGR rates of any other business IT class and the power of PLM is clear to see.
Marshall Aerospace and Defence, the large mid-market, privately-owned engineering group with a £300-million turnover, is cur-rently exploring its PLM require-ments. The group works with prime contractors, such as Lock-
heed, on complex assemblies.“Every customer has their own
practices which we adopt to enable close collaboration that ensure the delivery of the project on time, to cost and to specification,” says Marshall’s head of marketing sup-port Oliver Drury. “PLM allows us to benefit from significant efficiencies, increased visibility and transparency, which help us to manage the variety of processes through the whole lifecycle for our customers and our suppliers.”
However, is PLM, relevant to companies’ boards as well as their design studios? The answer must be “yes”.
When big primes like Airbus, Rolls-Royce and more recently retailers such as Marks & Spencer implement PLM, they are signing up to a new means of working – a form of change management – for the organisation which can involve pain.
The challenge for companies, PLM experts like Cambashi’s Peter Thorne says, is where stakeholders of an existing product line have a vested interest in it, perhaps in a commission structure linked to sales, and are resistant about the effect collaboration could have on their stake in the product. PLM gets under the skin of design hier-archies in companies and, in that
sense, is a disruptive influence.Despite the pain that a truly col-
laborative PLM network can inflict on well-established systems, this is normally outweighed by strong economic and efficiency drivers.
Look at Crossrail, the UK govern-ment’s £16-billion civil engineer-ing project. With 42 kilometres of new tunnels, it is the biggest works on the London Underground in 50 years.
When Transport for London specified the contracts for Cross-rail, the use of building informa-tion modelling (BIM), a form of PLM for the construction industry, was a pre-requisite to tender. All the prime contractors, such as Balfour Beatty and Laing O-Rourke, including their board directors, as well as the multitude of construction manufacturers supplying parts to the project, needed to commit to supplying BIM-versant data. The driver was waste reduction, better data flow and time savings.
As with PLM, the traceability in BIM helps immeasurably on these vast engineering projects, pin-pointing modifications and fault-finding. “When choosing BIM for Crossrail, a key factor was the desire to simplify future mainte-nance and overhaul of a 100-year-old system that uses different drawing standards throughout,” says Malcolm Taylor, head of tech-nical information for Crossrail.
PLM is also disruptive in the semiconductor industry, which for years applied Moore’s Law – make more of it and cheaper every year.
“Recent studies show that the number of PCs and even mobile phones globally will fall. This ‘stack it cheap’ model no longer applies and people are thinking more con-servatively about resources and better delivery, where PLM can help,” says Cambashi’s Mr Thorne.
Multi-site collaboration of design teams for PLM is well known, but other benefits of the software class are becoming more familiar. Cap-
turing customer tastes via PLM is now firmly established in the retail industry.
High street labels, such as per una, part of Marks & Spencer, and Austin Reed, are examples. per una is considered by some as an impor-tant factor in the revitalisation of Marks & Spencer’s women’s cloth-ing business. The label uses PLM platform Buyerplan, acknowledg-ing that the software has made a “significant contribution to our success” by providing customer feedback to shape lines.
Retail, along with the finance industry, is the big new market sector for PLM. Two thirds of Fortune 500 retail companies are PTC customers, the vendor of PLM solutions says. PTC custom-ers include Deckers, who attribute $5 million of savings from imple-menting PLM.
Product lifecycle management may become, as Cambashi’s chief executive Mr Thorne says, a seri-ous challenger to enterprise resource planning and computer-aided design as the number-one, de facto IT class for businesses that make and sell products.
OVERVIEW
BIG SAVINGS FROM LOVE OF LIFECYCLE
Retail, along with the finance industry, is the big new market sector for PLM
DISTRIBUTED IN
TIM BAINESProfessor of operations strategy at Aston Business School, he is an international authority on servitisation and works extensively with manufacturers.
LINDSAY CLARKFormer news editor at Computer Weekly, he has written about technology for the Financial Times, Guardian Public and business magazines.
LEO KINGFreelance journalist, he was news editor at Computerworld UK and deputy editor at IT Europa, and now contributes regularly to the Financial Times and Forbes.
JOHN LAMBEditor and writer specialising in IT, he has edited a number of publications, including Computer Weekly, InformationWeek and Information Economics Journal.
WILL STIRLINGManaging editor of The Manufacturer and Lean Management Journal, he has also worked for Euromoney and IPC Media.
MALCOLM WHEATLEYBusiness writer and editor, he is a visiting fellow at Cranfield University School of Management.
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COMMISSIONING EDITORWill Stirling
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The merits of a collaborative approach to developing products, concern for a product’s total lifecycle and the benefits of customer feedback, have pushed product lifecycle management into new sectors of mainstream business, as Will Stirling reports
04 05raconteur.net twitter: @raconteur raconteur.net twitter: @raconteur04 05
PRODUCT LIFECYCLE MANAGEMENT PRODUCT LIFECYCLE MANAGEMENT
simulation and analysis software was worth around $4 billion in 2012 and will grow to more than $7 billion in 2017, nearly 12 per cent annual growth.
While large manufacturers are investing in PLM, smaller compa-nies want to achieve a similar boost to innovation.
Irish engineering firm Suretank, with a turnover of €71 million, expects to grow 15 per cent annu-ally. The company is a year into a PLM project to support manufac-turing of its products, including chemical and acid transport tanks, helicopter fuel tanks for oil rigs and offshore containers.
It first deployed a module of Autodesk’s PLM360 to support quality control, which allows the employees to flag concerns in engi-neering, manufacturing, customer care and purchasing, and record on a single system how each alert is resolved.
It is also mapping and re-engi-neering many of its processes on to the platform, using workflows to share data collected by salespeople to ensure that engineers design to customer specifications.
Ȗ The economic recovery is sus-taining a strong pace in UK manufacturing. The bellwether purchasing managers index hit a 33-month high in November 2013, while in December expan-sion in production and new orders reached their highest point in the 22-year survey, according to research group Markit.
As companies emerge from recession, they are investing in product lifecycle management (PLM) software to meet demand for innovation in products and ser-vices, says James Wright, manufac-turing expert with PA Consulting.
“Post-recession an awful lot of large organisations are looking to use new products and innovation as a source of competitive advan-tage and growth,” says Mr Wright. “Company annual reports show this is one of two key things they’re focusing on.”
PLM tools can boost innovation by creating better design, bring-ing new products to market more rapidly and improving service offerings, he says.
“Many larger firms have been updating and upgrading their PLM software because they see it as a way of accelerating new product development and demonstrating shareholder value. Companies are doubling R&D and product launches, but do not want the headcount to match. PLM can help them to be more efficient.”
As such, PLM has become embedded in the manufacturing processes of some of the world’s most innovative companies.
In 2013, the prestigious Amer-
ica’s Cup yacht race saw a leap forward in sailing performance with the AC72 catamaran design. Winners Oracle Team USA use PLM technologies to help gain an advantage over the other teams. They use the 3DExperience Plat-form from Dassault Systèmes, which allows engineers around the world to work on the same design data.
Collaboration in design is one of the major benefits of PLM, says Mr Wright. “PLM helps break down functional boundaries in and outside the organisation. That is key to innovation. Individual or cross-functional teams can work more effectively.”
Global aerospace company Rolls-Royce uses Dassault Systèmes’ Catia tool to integrate design and testing in the product lifecycle. The programme simulates the performance of carbon fibre lami-nates as they are being built into a design.
Darren James, Rolls-Royce com-posite design technologist, says: “Very often we need to investigate the properties of new materials, new types of construction and new manufacturing processes in poten-tial applications. This involves devel-oping digital 3D software models of components and whole systems.”
The software helps complete more design iterations and more digital testing in less time. “We can now optimise structural models for impact, weight, aerodynamics and manufacturability,” says Mr James.
PLM specialist research group CIMdata says the market for
INNOVATION
More than just another class of business IT, product lifecycle management is helping companies benefit from ideas across the whole organisation and stimulate innovation, writes Lindsay Clark
JOINING UP THE DOTS CAN SPARK INNOVATION...
High-definition, photo-realistic immersive virtual reality
Cloud-based supercomputing
Graphics processing unit-powered desktop simulation
Parallel-processing algorithms
Web-enabled collaborative simulation and analysis
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TOP FIVE FUTURE PLM TECHNOLOGIES
product only, not in the approach to the customer. Now innovation is customer centric. This approach is going to continue and shape inno-vation coming forward.
“The fact that PLM is about join-ing up various parts of the lifecycle is really important for the services industry because innovation is being driven from a customer perspective.”
Social media can be used to ensure businesses get a consumer viewpoint. It can help innovation by bringing valuable data into the product lifecycle, says Simon Ward, chief executive for Europe at Holmes & Marchant, a brand and innovation consultancy.
In the games industry, for exam-ple, social communities influence product development. After a game is released, monitoring social channels can help pick up faults, helping to amend the next release. “Interacting with the customer in digital and social media channels can directly link back into the product lifecycle,” says Mr Ward.
While the economy is growing, competition intensifies as markets globalise and the internet lowers barriers to entry. PA Consulting’s Mr Wright says PLM can help boost the innovation necessary to compete by supporting collabora-tion, cutting administration and helping businesses focus on cus-tomer needs. But, he warns, while software can provide the tools, firms must manage the necessary change in processes to exploit the opportunities offered by PLM.
Saoirse Colgan, Suretank’s PLM project co-ordinator, says efficien-cies, including avoiding duplicated effort, will save engineers nine hours a week or around 5,000 hours across the company each year.
“We feel the process we have designed is innovative in the way that we are supporting our custom-ers,” she says. “It involves custom-ers in the workflows. But it is also cutting down administrative time, so we are allowing engineers to spend more time on R&D projects.”
During 2014, Suretank will be rolling out a new product introduc-tion application to help manage “stage gates”, which ensure the safe and controlled launch of new products in a more efficient way. This is expected to help speed up the introduction of new products, Ms Colgan says.
While the application of PLM is often synonymous with manu-facturing or engineering, other sectors can use the approach to support innovation.
In the financial services sector, innovation is being driven by changing consumer markets and legislation introduced since the financial crisis, says Capgemini UK’s head of innovation Rick Freeman.
“Classic engineering companies understand PLM because it is at the heart of the way they build new products. Service firms do not have a clue about PLM and what it can offer them,” he says.
“The financial services sector was beaten up massively for too much product innovation, making prod-ucts which nobody really under-stood. That was innovation in
PLAIN SAILING WITH PLM
CASE STUDY
With the America’s Cup focus on space-age tech-nology, it’s easy to forget that sailors remain at the heart of the sport – but 2013 winners, Oracle Team USA, did not. Following every sailing session, designers would take the crew’s feedback, make changes to compo-nents and start production immediately.Jimmy Spithill, Oracle Team USA’s helmsman and skipper, says: “The sailors are the end-users so they have to be involved in this process. One of the most important parts of the game is the relationship between the designers and the sailors.” Collaboration like this is at the core of the team’s design and build philosophy. Using the 3DExpe-rience Platform, from PLM software supplier Dassault Systèmes, the team was able to create 3D product designs, test simulations and collabo-rate using shared database and design processes across team sites in New Zealand, Europe and the United States.“The America’s Cup teams are typically spread across multiple locations,” says Christoph Erbeld-ing, Oracle’s senior structural engineer. “We have people working in different time zones on different projects that are often overlapping. Without the integrated design platform, it would be a big challenge to keep all the data synchronised and make sure everybody is working off the latest set of data.” For the 34th America’s Cup, organisers classified two new boats: the AC45, a smaller, wing-sailed multihull boat for the America’s Cup World Series regattas leading up to the 2013 America’s Cup; and the AC72 catamarans, with a hull length of 72 feet, for the Louis Vuitton Cup challenger series and America’s Cup finals in 2013.Teams were allowed to build two versions of the AC72, based on what they learnt from sailing the smaller AC45, which Oracle Team USA designed on behalf of the America’s Cup community. As well as 3D design, the integrated PLM suite offered the Oracle team virtual testing with the Sim-ulia package, which captures problems within the 3D design prior to build.“The America’s Cup allows such a small timeframe to design and build that you really can’t afford to do any real hardware testing on a large scale,” Mr Erbelding emphasises. The design software, Catia, helps manufacturing
engineers to map out both finished parts and the layout in one step, which accelerated production.
The 3D design software also releases data to benefit the team later in the product life-
cycle, during promotion and advertising, design engineer Aaron Perry adds: “It not
only helps us in modelling concepts for the boat that we’re building, but we
use it on our website, for market-ing applications to show the fans
what they are going to see in the race.”
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Firms using My Collection uniformly report big gains, both in lowered costs and timeframes, and in improved productivity and creativity
Find out what My Collection by Dassault Systèmes can do for your company, please visit our website at www.3ds.com/consumer-goods
Managing a product line can be a daunting task. From concep-tion and initial research, through to manufacturing and gathering consumer response, there can be tens of thousands of variables to be shared with umpteen teams based in a variety of locations.
It is, therefore, curious that so many firms still attempt the job with a hotchpotch of unsuitable software systems. Communication is split through e-mail, phone calls and the sort of instant messenger apps that teenagers once used. Spreadsheets are pinged back and forth. It’s a ramshackle approach.
The logical answer is to embrace a modern collaborative system; one which not only unifies communica-tion and documentation to provide a “single source of the truth” for all staff in all locations, but which adds new functionalities and values to every stage of the process.
My Collection industry solu-tion experience, encompassing the product lifecycle management (PLM) package produced by Das-sault Systèmes, is used by multi-nationals such as Benetton, Guess and adidas. It offers the best col-laborative environment for manag-ing product lifecycle, connecting people, innovation and knowledge. Fashion brands and retailers can easily manage their collection development from sketch to shelf and deliver products that enhance their brand identity.
The advantages are significant. Guess cut time from design to shelf by up to 16 per cent from an already sharp timeline. Other brands have estimated gains of up to 50 per cent. Benetton uses My Collection to han-dle four brands comprised of 9,000 styles in 6,400 stores. Benetton director Andrea Piras says My Col-lection is “one of the most important initiatives included in the company’s strategic and industrial plan for the next three years”.
Why? Take product development. My Collection allows teams in mul-tiple locations to work together on areas, such as selecting materials, styling, artwork and sample man-agement. Approval processes can be tracked against a seasonal cal-endar. My Collection allows teams to circulate tasks, projects, and files for analysis and approval. All team members can subscribe, view and comment on discussion topics or
any of the responses.The system is built to handle even
the most complicated collection plans. Teams can define multiple seasonal schedules for multiple product hierarchies. And because each component in My Collection is integrated, the product lifecycle flows smoothly from stage to stage. Products can be sourced, labelled and tracked from start to finish. Art-work can be captured and managed across seasons.
The voice of the customer mat-ters too. So the solution offers a range of tools, running on one sin-gle platform, such as dashboards to monitor and share the conver-sations consumers have on social networks; something not possible using the old-school tools of e-mail and spreadsheets.
Firms using My Collection uni-formly report big gains, both in low-ered costs and timeframes, and in improved productivity and creativity. These firms have been able to grow their business volumes by 40 to 60 per cent without having to add head-count just to manage the product information. Technical design pro-ductivity can grow by 200 per cent. A sportswear brand reports slash-ing design time from 42 to 28 weeks, with a target of 18 weeks.
The alternative, of using old-school generic software, seems almost masochistic. The risk of allowing teams to work on rival documents or to lose track of mate-rials and approvals are unaccept-ably high. A modern collabora-tive system offers improvements almost too numerous to list. Is it worth the effort to switch? Guess chief operating officer Michael Rel-ich puts it this way: “Retail in apparel is a very competitive industry and the ones who are going to win are the ones who adopt technology.”
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Fashioning new lines for retailComplicated product development should flow smoothly from stage to stage and incorporate customer feedback on social media, says Dassault Systèmes
My Collection industry solution experience enables users to
collect consumer feedback from social networks
A brand reduced their design time from 42 to 28 weeks
My Collection allows teams in multiple locations to work together
on areas, such as selecting materials and styling
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PRODUCT LIFECYCLE MANAGEMENT PRODUCT LIFECYCLE MANAGEMENT
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SIMULATION
Ȗ At Swansea-based Calon Car-dio-Technology, work is underway to develop the next generation of smaller and more efficient blood pumps – surgically implantable arti-ficial hearts – used as an alternative to heart transplants in patients with chronic cardiac failure.
In designing such blood pumps, it’s obviously crucial to ensure that the pump operates as efficiently as possible. But it’s also vital to avoid damage to red blood cells as they circulate through the pump: broken-down blood cells can cause a condition called haemolysis, leading to kidney failure.
Accordingly, Calon carries out highly complex computer simula-tions of the flow of blood through a
pump design, using a mathematical technique known as computational fluid dynamics. Working with Swansea University’s Advanced Sustainable Manufacturing Tech-nologies centre, the operation of each new design is simulated on a supercomputer cluster operated
use of 3D product simulation and visualisation within product lifecycle management (PLM) and product design generally.
How? By not only making it easier to apply ever-more refined mathematical techniques, but also making the results accessible to non-specialists, such as designers, who happen to be engineers and not physicists.
“It’s about using real physics, real mathematics and real chem-istry, in order to see real outcomes on screen, in a virtual world,” says Stephen Chadwick, managing director for northern Europe at simulation software firm Dassault Systèmes. “This makes it much easier for people who haven’t got a PhD to visualise the outcome of a design decision.”
Better still, such simulations deliver answers faster and more cheaply than would be possible with physical models, says Barry Christensen, director of product management at simulation soft-ware specialists ANSYS. Moreover, he notes, simulation can highlight issues that might otherwise not become apparent until products are on the market.
And building such digital proto-typing technology into commonly used computer-aided design tools helps the use of simulation to become much more widespread, adds Wasim Younis, simulation solutions manager at Symetri, a firm specialising in digital design training and consultancy using Autodesk design software.
In the process, he points out, the dividing line between design and product simulation is blur-ring, bringing advanced simula-tion techniques into the realms of the everyday.
“Should I be using 2mm thick plate or 3mm thick plate? Design-ers often face choices like that and with simpler user interfaces built into everyday tools, finding the answer is easier than ever,” he says. “Design engineers are
head-mounted computer displays, not unlike binoculars, to explore high-definition visual render-ings of complete virtual vehicles, “walking around” them, exploring their interiors and even going for a virtual drive.
The use of such high-definition, photo-realistic immersive envi-ronments allows engineers to examine aspects of vehicle design that are difficult explore in the physical world.
“We’re getting a better picture of what our designers are producing for our customers, under different lighting conditions, and can itera-tively look at all the build combi-nations that can be produced, all in a very short time,” says Eliza-beth Baron, virtual reality and advanced visualisation technical specialist at Ford. “Without it, we just couldn’t check all the issues that we check now.”
Virtual reality and advanced visualisation, using high-powered computers, is revolutionising product development, writes Malcolm Wheatley
TAKE A WALK ONTHE VIRTUAL SIDE
designing the product and working with finite element analysis at the same time.”
Even so, some simulation prob-lems remain out of reach for ordinary businesses with ordinary computers. But perhaps not for much longer.
“There’s a class of computational fluid dynamics problems that are currently intractable at an indus-trial level,” says Peter Vincent, lecturer in aerospace aeronautics at Imperial College London. “They can be solved by supercomputers in national laboratories, but not at an industrial level.”
However, in partnership with graphics computing firm Nvidia, manufacturers of the graphics processing units (GPUs) power-ing many desktop computers, Imperial College is looking to see if Nvidia’s latest-generation Tesla chips, each with more than 2,500 compute “cores” com-pared to just two to four in a desktop computer, can be harnessed to the task. Emerald, the UK’s most powerful GPU-powered supercom-puter, housed at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, contains 372 such Tesla GPUs.
“With the right computer algo-rithm and the right kind of simulation problem, there can be a five-to-tenfold increase in speed for a given expenditure on computing power,” says Dr Vincent. “That can bring many more problems within reach.”
Increasingly, too, virtual reality and advanced visualisation tech-nology are adding to the armoury of simulation technologies. At the Ford Motor Company’s product development cen-tre in Dearborn, Michigan, for instance, engineers don
$4bn
$7bn
$1bn
15
global simulation and analysis market
global simulation and analysis market
forecast by 2017
major suppliers in the simulation
marketplace, excluding virtual reality vendors
Source: CIMdata
Source: IBM
investment by IBM to create a supercomputer cloud service
for hire
Ȗ Products and services must meet an increasingly wide range of requirements simultaneously. The additional requirements bring additional stakeholders, other than the purchaser or user whose needs must be addressed. With more criteria to meet, it makes sense to consider them as early in the development process as pos-sible. The notion of concurrent engineering attempted to address many of those needs. Although in
OPINION
COLLABORATION
Peter A. Bilello is president of CIMdata Inc, the US-based product lifecycle management consulting and research firm
The PLM opportunity is to embed end-of-useful-life retrieval, refurbishment and upgrading into creating innovative new products and their supporting lifecycle processes
Ȗ Product development is a group effort that calls for ideas, plans, data, documents and drawings to flow efficiently between the people involved, wherever they are.
And in a business climate in which time to market is all impor-tant, it is imperative that commu-nication systems deliver this infor-mation in a timely, convenient fashion so that team members can review plans and make changes as quickly as possible.
Delays can have dire conse-quences for innovation. A recent
study by Forrester Research revealed that 75 per cent of manu-facturing organisations regularly see delays in product development projects due to an inability to reach managers to sign-off work.
“A slow response to changing market conditions in today’s hyper-competitive environment places companies at a distinct disadvan-tage relative to competitors,” warns the business advisory company.
With teams working together in locations that may be scattered around the world, in different time
zones, with different languages and cultures, lack of collaboration can become a big obstacle.
Even though mobile commu-nication devices are much more integrated than they were, incom-patible systems can result in costly delays and may prevent people from following company processes or from complying with industry regulations.
Not surprisingly, most major software vendors have introduced product lifecycle solutions that specialise in linking members of
MOVING TOWARDS SUPPORTING THE CIRCULAR ECONOMY
The infinite remanufacturing of everything taken from the ground or created is but one notion of the “circular economy”, says CIMdata’s Peter A. Bilello
SINGING FROM THESAME HYMN SHEETSuccessful product lifecycle management depends on close collaboration, often on a global scale, as John Lamb reports
sharp contrast to the more com-monly used waterfall product development approach, it too lacks the depth and breadth required in a complex global economy.
Over the last two decades, prod-uct lifecycle management (PLM) emerged as a strategy to support end-to-end product development; a more comprehensive approach to product development. Ideally, companies manage products from concept to retirement as part of their PLM strategy, with the objec-tive to reduce environmental impact making sustainability a focus for most manufacturers. Unfortunately, many landfills are used at capacity, and many natural resources and tox-ins in products cannot be reused or recycled profitably and are wasted.
Many companies made great strides in design for disassembly and recycling of materials from many common products. PLM strategies and enabling solutions play a sig-nificant role in these successes. But what if we could have zero impact? What if everything taken from the ground or created could be infinitely reused, remanufactured and repur-posed? This is but one notion of the “circular economy”, a radically new
approach to thinking about most of what we do, build and use. Meeting this more stringent need will require new PLM enabling solutions and supporting services.
A fundamental principle of the circular economy is that products will be returned to manufacturers rather than going to landfills and scrap yards. This creates new flows of recyclables with extremely high values. A radically new dimension – the endless lifecycle – is emerging.
Many manufacturers are partly there already. They are under regulatory pressure to comply with the demands of RoHS (Restriction of Hazardous Substances), WEEE (Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment), REACH (Registra-tion, Evaluation, Authorisation and
Market analysis
Page 08
collaborative teams. Cisco’s Col-laborative PLM Solution with PTC, for example, boasts text-to-speech conversion of engineering changes that will work with a variety of phones and handheld devices.
Cisco’s “presence” feature allows users to see which team members are available, what medium they would like to use – e-mail, mobile phone, landline – and to set up ad hoc conference calls. The solution also includes web conferenc-ing tools, such as WebEx and MeetingPlace.
Companies, including aircraft maker Lockheed Martin, have built complex collaborative net-works to manage product lifecy-cles. To support development of its F-35 fighter plane, Lockheed Mar-tin has linked more than 11,000 people, both inside and outside the organisation, in a collaboration network that spans 130 sites.
The company’s collaboration effort is backed up by a storage area network containing more than five terabytes of product information. Units involved with the network store data locally, which means that 70,000 data items have to be replicated each day.
Not everyone needs such heavy-
duty computing. Many companies can just as easily collaborate with the aid of free or low-cost social media. Developers of social media software are beginning to wake up to the fact that businesses want to use their offerings to collaborate on projects.
So, for example, Google recently added extra security to Google+ with the idea that workers can create closed communities within organisations or among trusted partners. Microsoft is developing similar features for its SharePoint software.
Effective communication not only ensures everyone is singing from the same hymn sheet when it comes to product lifecycle man-agement, but that increasingly they can do it with the minimum of fuss and the maximum of output within a private community.
restriction of CHemicals), ELV (End of Life Vehicles) and other similar regulations. This is a start; however, the circular economy requires pushing beyond compliance to lifecycle stewardship to let manu-facturers retain effective control of rare earths and other high-value resources. Necessary processes and systems need PLM enablement at an enterprise level. No manufac-turer is there yet.
Capabilities for product stew-ardship mostly exist in engineer-ing departments, but according to prospective norms of the circular economy, much of this capability is rudimentary. To develop next-gener-ation products, their manufacturing, support and extended life processes, the emerging systems engineering approach will be indispensable.
In the circular economy, systems engineering evolves to tightly link everyone in every part of the prod-uct’s lifecycle. With rare excep-tions, these linkages have yet to be achieved throughout extended enterprises.
Circular economy manufacturers will pay for return shipments of end-of-life products, increasing their concern with waste. Aside from the
obvious – weight and durability – manufacturers will need to design products for modularity to simplify refurbishing and upgrading.
With the circular economy, manufacturers can benefit from recapturing a significant part of their products’ residual value. Reclaiming rare earths and other valuable product components present a unique opportunity to significantly reduce decapitalisa-tion in scrap processing.
Tracking residual values, manag-ing their intellectual property and enabling complete lifecycle-focused systems engineering are among the core capabilities of PLM. The PLM opportunity in the circular economy is to embed end-of-useful-life retrieval, refurbishment and upgrading into the tasks of creating innovative new products simulta-neously with all their supporting lifecycle processes.
As this happens, PLM will again change the thinking of engineers, business leaders and individuals, regardless of where they work in the lifecycle. The levers of success in the circular economy can only be grasped in terms of the real, true and complete PLM.
by HPC Wales, a high performance computing facility part-funded by the European Union.
On a conventional high-pow-ered desktop computer, each 3D simulation, involving a “mesh” of around two million elements, would take two to three days, explains Calon’s chief technology officer Graham Foster. The use of a supercomputer slashes that time significantly.
“We need to model about a dozen scenarios for each pump design, after which we tweak and refine it,” he says. “With a supercomputer, a scenario takes two to three hours, not two to three days, and we can send the dozen scenarios as a single batch. We’re saving time and also cost.”
W h i l e s u p e r c o m p u t e r s aren’t mandatory for simulat-ing the workings of products under development, there’s no doubt that the combination of high-powered computers and advanced visualisation technol-ogy is rapidly transforming the
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PRODUCT LIFECYCLE MANAGEMENT PRODUCT LIFECYCLE MANAGEMENT
Ȗ With industry increasingly interested in managing processes across the entire lifecycle of the design, creation and sale of a prod-uct or service, product lifecycle management (PLM) is in demand.
Professor Alain Bernard, an expert on the subject at the Ecole Centrale de Nantes, describes PLM as the “nervous system” of a company. “It is as essential to a business as enterprise resource planning,” he says.
Spending on PLM in Europe, the Middle East and Africa hit $8 bil-lion (£4.9 billion) in 2012, accord-ing to analysts at CIMdata, 10 per cent growth on the previous year. Globally, vehicle manufacturing is the largest area of spending, at $5.2 billion, followed closely by general manufacturing and assembly, then telecoms and high-tech manufac-turing, and aerospace and defence.
Traditionally, manufacturing industries, particularly car pro-duction, have used the software to align the design and production of all elements of a product. In the mid-1980s, Jeep manufacturer American Motors Corporation became one of the first to apply PLM, involving computer-aided design and engineering collabora-tion systems.
Overall, manufacturing for trans-port, communication, aerospace, electrical and battery goods has the highest compound annual growth rate in PLM spending over the last five years, each category standing at more than 7 per cent, according to researchers Cambashi. In the most recent year of measurement, 2012, the strongest increase came from the aerospace sector, at 8.4 per cent.
Now, other industries from finance to retail are becoming involved. Chad Jackson, princi-pal analyst at Lifecycle Insights, explains that these industries can use the approach “to bolster top-line growth by accelerating time to market or developing innovative products”, as well as “to curb costs or enforce compliance”. PLM will become a standard part of the life-cycle management “of anything
instead of merely products”, he says. Construction is among the
more recent industries to take up a form of PLM, called building information modelling (BIM), with Cambashi data showing more than a 5 per cent compound annual growth rate in spending over the last five years.
“When a building is being con-structed, there are often many different companies involved with a competitive, rather than a col-
laborative, mindset,” says Roger Tempest, co-founder of the PLM Interest Group. “PLM helps bring them together.” Balfour Beatty and Carillion, among the world’s largest construction firms, use BIM to improve processes and collaboration with contractors. A good example of a BIM-compliant infrastructure project is London’s £16-billion Crossrail project.
High-tech manufacturing will be increasingly dependent on the technique, according to Oleg Shilovitsky, author of the Beyond PLM blog. “Products today are very software dependent. A mod-ern car has more than 100 million lines of code,” he says, adding that PLM can help manage the linking of software and mechanical parts for a seamless item.
Manufacturers of medical devices regularly use PLM to improve standards. But concerns over protecting patents and design are slowing inter-company discus-sion in this industry. “A company here often won’t share ideas, except with a business in a com-pletely different industry, if there are some similar parameters,” says Mr Tempest.
Clothing companies apply the methodology to help design and use new materials. Sports goods firm Adidas has implemented PLM in recent years to create a single database for all its product information and materials man-agement, improving efficiency and aiding collaboration with partners. The new model gives it the ability to speed up design and production.
Furthermore, PLM helps with the globalisation of production,
Meanwhile, in the health sector PLM allows providers to shape treatment. “Organisations are looking at the management of patients’ lifecycles, how they react to drugs and when they come in for an appointment,” says Ecole Cen-trale de Nantes’ Professor Bernard. “It is also relevant for the whole process of prosthetic limbs, from imaging and design, to manufac-turing, personalising and fitting.”
In pharmaceuticals, Bayer HealthCare implemented the technique to improve its global visibility of product, packaging and ingredient data, so it meets regula-
tory compliance, works better with suppliers and cuts production costs. The company now has clear global visibility of data.
In the energy sector, PLM helps with long-term knowledge reten-tion. “When energy companies design a nuclear plant, they are looking at its lifecycle,” says Professor Bernard. “With older plants, companies are using PLM to revisit the construction and to define carefully how to disman-tle them when they reach their end of life.”
Services firms are also recognis-ing PLM’s potential. Stan Przyby-
linski, a vice president of research at CIMdata, explains: “While these companies may not need com-puter-aided design tools, they do have the same issues of configuring their services correctly. Telecoms companies use PLM to configure mobile phone plans, and financial services firms use it to help them design and sell products.”
This kind of planning can help with maximising the profit margins of services, as well as ensuring their suitability, and the finance sector alone has experienced a near 6 per cent compound annual growth rate in spending over the last five years,
according to Cambashi.Small and medium-sized enter-
prises (SMEs) are moving in increasing numbers to adopt the approach. But PLM Interest Group’s Mr Tempest says there is a significant “dividing line” at the mark where companies have 500 or more employees, with many smaller firms having trouble visualising the benefits of PLM. Mr Przybylinski adds: “As companies start to develop more complex products, that’s when they tend to adopt PLM, so that they have a bet-ter understanding and analysis.”
Sometimes SMEs are enticed
by the potential of smaller, cloud computing-based deployments. Richard Tinsdeall, a direc-tor of PLM at software supplier Autodesk, explains that SMEs are “investing tens of thousands of pounds in PLM and seeing a return in three to four months, which wasn’t possible before”.
Whatever the size of business, when PLM is executed properly, it can link all parts of an organisation from first ideas to manufacturing, human resources, sales, market-ing and quality. “It brings together everyone in a company,” Mr Tem-pest concludes.
The sheer volume of data – production of a car involves more than100 million lines of computer code – is driving businesses across sectors towards a system of managing product lifecycle, as Leo King discovers
CONQUERING WORLDOF PRODUCT DATA
says Reid Paquin, a senior research associate at Aberdeen Group. “With 90 per cent of the manufac-turing for footwear done in Asia, while the design is done locally in the United States and Europe, PLM is needed to keep intellec-
tual property safe, while allowing a global supply network to col-laborate and run effectively,” he says. Since 2010, Asia-Pacific has experienced the largest growth in overall spending on PLM, though it slowed to 14 per cent last year, according to CIMdata.
The growth in retail is equally notable. Grocery chains Tesco and 7-Eleven use PLM to control and manage product data, and work better with product suppliers and designers. Brian Marsden, Europe, Middle East and Africa president at specialist provider TradeStone Software, says retailers of all types
are using the technique in a vola-tile sales environment to ensure products are relevant and competi-tive. He says: “A retailer’s season can be as short as three weeks and it is not uncommon to be working on three or four seasons simulta-neously, making the entire process incredibly complex.”
Store chains are also developing three-dimensional models “to help improve the layout of their products and streamline foot traf-fic”, Mr Paquin adds. “And they are using heat maps of consumer eye patterns to detect which product designs are the most appealing.”
MARKET ANALYSIS
Telecoms companies use PLM to configure mobile phone plans, and financial services firms use it to help them design and sell products
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8% CAGR 7.6% CAGR 9.8% CAGR
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
2016
2017
12,000
10,000
8,000
6,000
4,000
2,000
0
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
$16,709.68
$14,990.74
$16,494.45
$18,911.77
$21,075.50
$22,842.18
$24,718.67
$26,812.62
$29,067.43
$31,514.17
TOTAL $22,578.98 TOTAL $24,438.62
$5,0000 $10,000 $15,000 $20,000 $25,000 $30,000 $35,000 TOTAL
GROWTH OF PLM
AMERICAS
TODAY
2013 2014
EMEA
IN THREE YEARS
ASIA-PACIFIC EST
SPENDING BY INDUSTRY
GEOGRAPHIC DISTRIBUTION 2008 - 2017
Source: Manufacturing Transformation, Oxford Economics/PTC
Source: 2013 PLM Market Analysis Report, CIMdata
WHICH OF THE FOLLOWING CREATE THE MOST VALUE FOR YOUR FIRM ?
Aerospace and defence
Automotive and other transport
Electronics/telecomms/ high-tech
Fabrication and assembly
CPG/F&B/pharmaceutical
Petrochemical Utilities Construction/infrastructure/shipbuilding
Other
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$5,613.81
$6,065.92
$4,595.03
$4,953.64
$5,448.50
$5,877.98
$1,064.19
$1,165.42
$596.07
$657.08
$3,750.38
$4,072.91
$318.18
$351.50
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PRODUCT LIFECYCLE MANAGEMENTPRODUCT LIFECYCLE MANAGEMENT
10 11
The servitisation of manufacturing, when companies supply services as well as products, provides firms with more revenue streams and a hedge against a downturn, writes Professor Tim Baines
BRINGING PRODUCTION AND SERVICE TOGETHER
TOP SERVICE STRATEGIES
Ȗ The world once seemed sim-ple; manufacturers made things and other companies provided services. But now more and more manufacturers are competing through a portfolio of integrated products and services that deliver business capability for their cus-tomers, rather than simply sales transactions. This is the process of servitisation.
Celebrated icons of such strate-gies in action include aero engine manufacturer Rolls-Royce, printer giant Xerox and French industrial group Alstom, and in all cases various aspects of product life-cycle management (PLM) have been implemented. The role, and
potential and ultimate limita-tions of PLM become apparent once the servitisation concept is understood.
Manufacturers can deliver vari-ous forms of services. These can range from spare parts, help desk, maintenance, repair and overhaul, through to availability contracting, performance contracting, man-aged services and solutions. It is these advanced services that are most inspiring.
Xerox’s Managed Print Services is one example. Rather than simply selling printing equipment, the company offers “document solu-tions” to customers such as British Airways and British Telecom. The
outcome of these contracts can be thought of as a capability for a customer to perform a business function or process. Often these contracts are based on pay-for-use, over two years or more, with risks managed by the manufacturer, and a commitment to providing rolling process improvement and cost-savings.
These advanced services can benefit both manufacturers and their customers. For manufac-turers, benefits include growth through improved customer inti-macy brought about by closer and stronger relationships. This often results in new market opportuni-ties. For example, Rolls-Royce
services such as TotalCare have supported the creation of low-cost airline operators.
Consequently, original equip-ment manufacturers (OEMs) have reported a growth in services reve-nue in the region of 5 to 10 per cent a year, significant in an otherwise generally slow-moving economy. The relationship with profit is more complex. Many factors affect this relationship, in particular the through-life management of costs and risks. However, in some instances, profits can be two to three times greater than those on product sales alone.
Customers benefit principally through cost reductions that can be as high as 25 to 30 per cent, and service quality can also improve. Alstom Transport has described how improved standards of rail travel on the West Coast mainline led to an increase in passenger numbers, with current figures up to 32 million passengers a year.
Such customers of these “manu-services” also experience improve-ments in safety and environmental
sustainability. MAN Truck and Bus UK reported that the services it provided improved customers’ fuel consumption by at least 10 per cent and reduced CO2 emissions by 10 to 15 per cent.
Servitisation is not simply a new phenomenon brought about by the recent recession. The origins of power-by-the-hour lie in the practices of aircraft manufacturer Bristol Siddeley in the 1960s. Rather, the benefits of servitisation are simply more apparent during a recession. Economic resilience is facilitated through diversification and increased customer intimacy,
which creates high-entry barriers for competitors.
Perhaps what is new, however, is our willingness as a business com-munity to recognise that “manu-facturing” is not just about product innovation, process technologies and production.
Industry is abandoning a produc-tion-centric paradigm to embrace a broader view of manufactur-ing. Servitisation challenges our perception that manufacturers can only compete through faster, cheaper or better products.
Instead, it is about seeing the manufacturer as a service provider
that, far from focusing only on production, sets out to improve the processes of its customers through a business model, rather than product-based, innovation. The manufacturer then exploits its design and production-based competences to give widespread improvements in efficiency and effectiveness to its customer.
Manufacturers in developed Western economies face intense competition from emerging econo-mies who gain advantage by low labour rates and rapidly growing local markets. Yet, from a ser-vice perspective, these Western manufacturers are themselves advantaged by the relatively large installed base – products already in the field – in their own economies.
This is often vast, for example the installed base for civil aircraft is about 150 times average annual sales volumes. Such economies also tend to have strong environ-mental and sustainability agen-das, which are complemented by the dematerialisation (reducing embodied energy and materials) of servitisation.
Moreover, while desires for increased ownership, hyper-con-sumption and the disposable soci-ety can challenge some services businesses, such as laundrettes and TV repair shops, products can also create platforms and great opportunities for new services, for example Apple’s iPad, iTunes and apps.
Early adopters of servitisation have tended to be large organisa-tions offering complex and expen-sive products. Yet the concept can be applied to companies both large and small, and from aerospace and medical through to materials handling.
The demand for advanced ser-vices is anticipated to grow. Accord-ing to Oxford Economics’ Manu-facturing Transformation Report, produced in June 2013 with PTC, by 2015 the use of performance-based service contracts among manufac-turers globally will leap to 65 per cent. Indeed, their survey suggests that in this period 71 per cent of manufacturers will use services to differentiate their products.
In Europe, 82 per cent of manu-facturers will focus on services, which is more than in the United
States (67 per cent) or Asia (66 per cent). Of these, 65 per cent will use performance-based service con-tracts (advanced services), led by aerospace (74 per cent) and medi-cal devices (70 per cent). Moreo-ver, 56 per cent of manufacturers will establish service-as-a-profit centres within their business.
Information and communication technologies (ICTs) are among those increasingly unlocking the potential of servitisation.
The successful delivery of advanced services is enabled by ICTs that capture in real-time the location of products, their condi-tion and how they are being used. Such data is then integrated with business processes to inform deci-sions on the use, maintenance, repair, and ultimately design of products and contracts. Servitisa-tion emphasises the importance of products being designed for service and so PLM-style pro-cesses provide one backbone for the delivery of advanced services.
Paradoxically, PLM rarely fea-tures in debates about servitisa-tion. There is little doubt that PLM helps product manufacturers man-age complex, cross-functional pro-cesses, co-ordinating the efforts of distributed teams to consistently and efficiently create the best pos-sible products.
And here lies the issue. The focus moves away from the product to the lifecycle of the services contract and the delivery of this with the minimum of products. The notion of a through-life (product) service becomes defunct. As a conse-quence, PLM has become extended to service lifecycle management (SLM). This optimises the system of people, processes and technology to enable greater service performance and improvement.
There is no doubt that the plan-ning for products, services and manufacturing are top success factors for servitisation. Manufac-turers will innovate more across the organisation, while in product design, supply chain and service, the emphasis on innovation will continue to rise. The principles and processes of PLM will con-tinue to evolve, with the emphasis moving away from the product itself, and instead to the complete customer experience.
It is about seeing the manufacturer as a service provider that, far from focusing only on production, sets out to improve the processes of its customers
SERVITISATION
Roundtable experts
Page 12
REMOTE DIAGNOSTICS
BRING SERVICE IN-HOUSE
SERVICE AS A PROFIT CENTRE
PERFORMANCE-BASED SERVICE CONTRACTS
Source: Oxford Economics Research
NOW
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IN THREE YEARS
22
Engineering for the future
Most PLM systems were never designed to handle constant change. That’s why Aras exists
If you’re at a global company that is completely satisfied with your prod-uct lifecycle management (PLM) system, you can stop reading right now. If you’re still reading, it’s prob-ably because your PLM experience has been less than promised.
I’ve been in product development and manufacturing for over 30 years, and during that time I’ve met thou-sands of engineers, managers and executives. If there’s one thing they all have in common, it’s that each one of their companies is different.
We’re all different because we’re constantly changing to grow and improve. Being different is how we compete. And it’s why every company has different products and processes.
Today’s PLM systems were never designed to handle this constant change. In my opinion that’s a seri-ous problem.
It’s clear that the rate of change is only going to accelerate and that complex-ity will continue to increase with it.
My founding vision for Aras came from the fact that every company has unique and complex data and pro-cess models, and that PLM software should be adapted to fit those models, rather than the business compro-
mised to fit the software. At Aras eve-rything we do builds on this premise.
Our PLM platform is designed for global companies that have compli-cated products and systems where PLM is a necessity not an option; for businesses that must constantly change to compete in tomorrow’s world markets.
We understand the complexity of designing the next generation of aircraft, vehicles and electron-ics. We know how to assure regula-tory compliance and protect critical intellectual property. We know how important PLM performance is when thousands of suppliers are working in the system at the same time.
And we know you’re going to need to change everything tomorrow.
That’s why we built Aras Innova-tor: to provide global companies like yours with the advanced technology for PLM that will be necessary for the next ten years of complexity and change. Because you can’t engineer the future with yesterday’s PLM.
If your company develops products on more than three continents, if you design systems that integrate electronics and software, if your supply chain is taking on greater design authority, then you’ve got real PLM challenges.
Moving forward you’ll need to con-trol MCAD/EDA and ALM [mechani-cal computer-aided design/elec-tronic design automation and application lifecycle management] processes, manage more complex bills of material, bring together data from numerous enterprise systems, securely enable global supply chain access, provide systems engineering functionality, make mobile a reality and probably provide some form of cloud or hybrid cloud capabilities.
Find out what Xerox, Motorola, Honda, Boeing and thousands of other companies around the world already know. Aras is Different.
We encourage you to Be Different.
Discover your next generation PLM at aras.com
CO
MM
ERC
IAL FE
ATUR
E You can’t engineer the future with yesterday’s PLM, says Peter Schroer, chief executive and founder of Aras
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PRODUCT LIFECYCLE MANAGEMENTPRODUCT LIFECYCLE MANAGEMENT
12 13
ARE YOU EXPERIENCED?HERE’S THE EXPERTS’ VIEWFour executives share their experience of introducing product lifecycle management into their company. John Lamb leads the discussion
Ȗ Companies employ product life-cycle management (PLM) faced with a wide range of often dif-ficult challenges. Implemented correctly, PLM can help achieve strategic business objectives, and increase revenue and profits.
But what was the panel’s experience and what processes did their companies most need to change by adopting PLM?
Roger Duckworth says Integral Powertrain uses many leading engineering software tools. “We like to push them to their limits,” he says. “This can lead to a web of complex inter-file relationships which need careful control.
“Another problem is secur-ing the dataset and controlling change. For single files this is easy, but when there are dependencies and files at different stages of maturity with different owners it gets very tricky.”
Barb Samardzich says Ford of Europe’s priority is to bring cars to market faster. “These products also needed to satisfy regional customer requirements while, at the same time, leverage the power of scale represented by global plat-forms and technologies,” she says.
“Integrating technologies that allow us to simulate our prod-uct proposals ahead of having traditional prototypes available was key. These technologies became the focus of our advanced research teams.”
Phil McVan, who has experi-ence of PLM in the energy sector, says his company had to change processes continually. “Real-life experiences will help you hone the accuracy of your assumptions,” he says. “I spent ten years in the mili-tary and the reality is that no plan survives contact with the enemy; you create a plan and then you have to be prepared to change it.”
Sanmina’s Sundar Kamath adds: “We work with our OEM customers [original equipment manufacturers] on a collaborative basis, so the most significant change is that we have had to evolve a joint PLM approach where both teams work together to ensure a successful product launch.
“It would be missing the point of PLM to restrict the scope to just the design office. Again, we benefitted from the advice of our deployment partner, Intrinsys, who have a wealth of experience from previous deployments.”
Ms Samardzich says Ford of Europe uses a global product development system, a cross-functional process, to develop and deliver new products. “This disci-
plined milestone process ensures alignment of all regions and func-tions throughout the execution of the product design to deliver world-class products,” she says.
“Our One Ford plan allows us to take advantage of global shared technologies and vehicle plat-forms. By leveraging the power of One Ford, we are able to respond quickly to changes in the mar-ketplace. An example is the new EcoSport which has already seen success in Asia and South America, and is now launched in Europe.”
What have been the most positive and negative outcomes of adopting PLM?
“Outcomes have been mixed and vary depending on the product,” says Mr Kamath. “The positive outcome is that PLM brings disci-pline to the development team and makes them think about issues or areas they may not rank high on the list of priorities, such as market readiness, competitive analysis and supply chain development.
“The negative outcome is that decision-making can get slowed down pending availability of data for phase exits. As a result, the overall development cycle time may sometimes seem slower.”
According to Mr Duckworth, product information is now instantly available to everyone in the business, and there is confi-dence that it’s secure, traceable
and correct. “Previously, there was an invisible wall around the design function, created by the need for expensive software to view engi-neering data, as well as a degree of uncertainty surrounding version control,” he says.
“The most disappointing out-comes post deployment have arisen because of heightened expectation among our more enthusiastic users, who could
see ways of using the new system beyond the original scope. They wanted to continue with more customisation work which the PLM team decided against until the system had been in operation for a few months.”
Ms Samardzich says: “The most positive outcome has been our ability to accelerate our new vehi-cle introductions; for example, in Europe alone we will introduce at least 25 new vehicles within five years, benefitting from our One Ford approach.
“I can't really point to any spe-cific negatives. Like all changes in business practices, there is a learning curve for the teams asso-ciated with the integration of new processes and technologies into the fabric of the corporate culture, which takes time.”
Mr McVan adds: “I spent a lot of days with one foot in the entre-preneurial world and the other in the corporate world. So far as PLM is concerned, the textbook is the guide and experience is the teacher. Many people misunder-stand it – it is all about behaviour and is very much a people skill.”
What challenges do they foresee in continuing to support a PLM strategy for the future?
“Rather than a challenge, I would call it a mission for our engineering teams operating
around the globe to continue to fully understand and meet the requirements and expectations of our global customers, and to deliver desirable products that exceed their expectations,” says Ms Samardzich. “Diverse global regulatory requirements and development of sustainable and affordable mobility solu-tions for all customers provides the challenge.”
Mr McVan, who utilised PLM at Inenco, says he is not using PLM in Urban Wind at present. “But we are ambitious and at some point I can see there will be a requirement to bring it in,” he says. “Over and again, I have used PLM’s data feed-back technology to take a start-up business into the corporate world. The challenge is to bring everyone with you.”
Integral Powertrain’s Mr Duck-worth is emphatic: “In our branch of engineering, we believe a PLM approach will be mandatory in the very near future. It’s now an integral part of our business and most people would dread a return to the old ways.
“There are likely to be changes though, especially as software develops and new enabling tech-nologies, such as fibre-optic broadband, cloud services and touch-screen tablets, become more widespread and accepted. Our PLM strategy is a cornerstone of our business and vital in mak-ing sure we stay competitive in a very technology-driven industry.”
Mr Kamath concludes: “The selective use of PLM for the right projects will yield more effective results than an across-the-board blanket adoption of PLM in all development projects The challenge is in applying PLM principles and PLM disci-pline to achieve faster develop-ment cycle times.”
I spent ten years in the military and the reality is that no plan survives contact with the enemy; you create a plan and then you have to be prepared to change it
In our branch of engineering, we believe a PLM approach will be mandatory in the very near future
ROUNDTABLE
“Success in PLM implementa-tion requires a few basic steps – clear definition of the PLM process which everyone under-stands, selection of the right PLM tool to meet an organisa-tion’s business needs, training of those involved in product development, and monitoring to ensure PLM is carried out consistently.”
Did their company adapt to the technology or did the technology adapt to them?
“Any changes required to a PLM system, beyond basic configura-tion, will cost money, so it makes sense to understand how the sys-tem works before deciding where changes should be made,” says Mr Duckworth.
“We use the 3D Experience Platform from Dassault Systèmes which, although relatively new, has opened up significant oppor-tunities for improved working methods and gives a degree of future-proofing.”
Mr Kamath says no single PLM methodology fitted his company’s exact needs. “We had to adapt PLM to our design-manufacturing envi-ronment,” he says. “Likewise, we had to modify our design process to incorporate PLM.
“Before project execution, and usually as part of the kick-off process, both teams need to fully understand each other’s PLM approach, terminology and imple-mentation practices as well as defining a common way of work-ing; this helps prevent delays and execution issues later on.”
Mr McVan says he is curious about what people are trying to achieve with software. “There are
a lot of variables that are behav-ioural and cultural that effect PLM,” he says. “To my mind, PLM is a bit of an art rather than a sci-ence. Culturally a lot of functions don’t get what PLM is all about.
“The creativity involved in developing a new product oppor-tunity is entrepreneurial rather than following rules and being efficient. I remember some of the battles we had in boardrooms over these issues.”
Was this a collaborative commitment from all affected business units?
“Herding cats springs to mind,” says Mr McVan. “The principals who run businesses, which may be cash cows, dogs, rising stars and so on, have to start feeding new products in every time. If the head of the unit doesn’t believe in that, then the techie guys aren’t going to give you the time of day. All the software in the world isn’t going to change that.”
Mr Kamath agrees: “Absolutely, the key to success in PLM is cross-functional collaboration across all the main functions and business units: sales and marketing, product development, manufacturing, sup-ply chain, operations and finance. Once the objectives and motiva-tion are clearly understood by the various functions, getting them to collaborate is not a major issue.”
Integral Powertrain’s projects usually involve several functions – electrical, mechanical and software design – then procurement, manu-facture, assembly, test and in-service maintenance, says Mr Duckworth. “Most data originates in the design departments, but passes through other business units,” he says.
ROGER DUCKWORTH is engineering director of Integral Powertrain, a consultancy that designs and develops engines for automotive companies
SUNDAR KAMATH is senior vice president of corporate technology for Fortune 500 electronics manufacturing company Sanmina, which supplies original equipment manufacturers worldwide
PHIL McVAN, who has 30 years’ experience of product lifecycle management at Inenco in the energy sector, is now managing director of renewable energy company Urban Wind
BARB SAMARDZICH is the recently appointed vice president and chief operating officer at Ford of Europe, where she is responsible for manufacturing and engineering operations
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PRODUCT LIFECYCLE MANAGEMENT
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Sufficiently competent IT infra-structure and management processes to enable successful implementation of sophisticated PLM software; and
Agile systems to diagnose and enhance PLM compatibility fol-lowing mergers and acquisitions.
Tata Technologies helps companies to realise maximum value from their PLM investment by offering an inte-grated enterprise-wide approach to PLM. This combines a unique blend of engineering, design and IT imple-mentation expertise, with their PLM Scan methodology, and partnerships with leading PLM software provid-ers, including Dassault Systèmes, Siemens and PTC. A commitment to being a fi rst adopter of the latest IT advances is one reason why Tata Technologies has been recognised as one of “Asia’s IP Elite” by Intellec-tual Asset Management magazine, alongside companies like Toyota, Honda, LG, Samsung and Sony.
Tata Technologies’ PLM Scan meth-odology draws upon more than 18 million man-hours of PLM experi-ence, and over 250 unique cases to provide a top-to-bottom assessment of processes and IT usage patterns. It involves understanding business driv-ers and objectives, assessing PLM maturity, analysing impacts and help-ing to prioritise investment, as well as delivery of a comprehensive blueprint and roadmap to successful imple-mentation, starting from the solu-tion benchmark, through to end-user support and deep implementation.
Combined with Tata Technolo-gies’ capabilities in engineering and design, project management, knowl-edge-based engineering, knowl-edge management, and training and competency enhancement, PLM Scan has helped to deliver significant improvements in R&D productivity, time to market, development costs and engineering processes.
Meanwhile, with competing pres-sures and priorities being a factor in PLM failure, and skills short-ages increasing, the effective use
Globalisation, combined with increasingly mature and sophisti-cated product lifecycle management (PLM) technologies and knowledge of best practices, offers manufac-turers unprecedented opportunities to profi t from products.
The downside of the more com-plex landscape, however, is a greater risk of unrealised PLM value. Research from CIMdata sug-gests that as little as 10 per cent of PLM initiatives fully achieve their objectives, while a staggering 75 per cent fail to realise their full potential.
What’s more, over 80 per cent of responses attributed this shortfall in return on investment to inadequa-cies in three key areas: collaboration outside the engineering function; planning and competing priorities; and executive sponsorship. Only 10
Maximising value from investmentsThe potential of product lifecycle management is well known, but most initiatives fail to deliver the anticipated benefi ts. Those that do, realise value from their investments shows fi ve common characteristics, says Jacky Frankreich, Tata Technologies’ PLM solutions director
per cent of responses suggested that the choice of PLM system was the problem. In other words, effec-tive business integration is the key issue and PLM software alone will not improve business outcomes.
We can gain insight into best prac-tice by understanding what the minority of companies that do make the most of what PLM can offer have in common. These market leaders share fi ve key characteristics:
Standardisation of PLM and product data management (PDM) solutions across functions and geographies, down to version level;
Rigorous processes to evaluate and capture benefits of continu-ous improvement and exploita-tion of version upgrades;
Robust integration with the enter-prise systems and processes (enterprise resource planning, supply chain management and customer relationship manage-ment), and with suppliers;
of in-house resources may also be critical to success. Tata Technolo-gies’ offshore capability means that through “intelligent outsourcing” or iSOURCING, companies can free up capability and focus on value-maximising activity, while minimising cost. Rather than simply augmenting headcount and creating manage-ment overheads, iSOURCING consid-ers a number of influencing criteria, such as geographical dependency,
process-to-process dependency, business criticality and the level of required experience before out-sourcing models are suggested.
With the rate of technological progress and the global economy continuing to grow, the impera-tive for manufacturing companies is clear: act now to integrate PLM and business processes – and gain competitive advantage.
BETTER PLM TODAYBETTER PROFITS TOMORROW
Email [email protected] and quote TIMESPLM to arrange a free consultation and fi nd out how you could maximise your PLM investments. For more information, visit www.tatatechnologies.co.uk/timesplm/
THE TATA TECHNOLOGIES DIFFERENCE
BENEFITS REALISED BY PLM PROJECTS*
CREATE A ONE-STOP SHOP FOR ALL YOUR PLM NEEDS
*BASED ON RESULTS FROM TATA TECHNOLOGIES PLM PROJECTS
INCREASE R&D PRODUCTIVITY BY 10-20% ON NEW PRODUCT LAUNCHES
10-20%+
15-30%
REDUCE TIME TO MARKET BY 15-30%
25-40%
REDUCE DEVELOPMENT COSTS BY 25-40%
15-40%
REDUCE ENGINEERING CHANGE PROCESS BY 15-40%
2
3
4
5
Tata Technologies’ PLM Scan methodology draws upon more than 18 million man-hours of experience
THERE’S ONLY ONEVERSION OF THE TRUTHLinking software systems to make better use of disparate data pays dividends, as Malcolm Wheatley reports
Ȗ In a flat market, touring cara-van and motor home manufac-turer Eldiss has seen its share of sales grow. The reason? Innova-tive products, delivered through a long-term investment in specialist design software.
And now the company is upgrad-ing its design technology to a broader system of product life-cycle management (PLM). 3D computer-aided design (CAD) tools, digital prototyping, product visualisation and performance simulation – taken together, the goal is a complete transformation of the Eldiss design and develop-ment workflow, delivering a fully integrated and seamless design-to-manufacture capability.
“We’re aiming to reduce our time to market to weeks or months rather than taking up to a year,” says Eldiss project manager David Styles.
And key to the eventual success of the project is the objective of linking the emerging PLM system to Eldiss’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, in other words, the company’s transactional backbone, which handles its sales, purchasing, accounting and inven-tory control functions. In particu-lar, says Mr Styles, there’s a need to build links between the design system and the bill of materials held in the ERP system.
“It’s more of a necessity than an aim,” he says. “We want a com-pletely integrated process, con-necting the weight of a product, for example, with cost data, in order to test a design’s commercial validity and to produce a bill of materials for the supply chain.”
And such integration is increas-ingly something that manufactur-ers aspire to achieve.
“PLM’s strong suit is collabora-tion and design, but other enter-prise systems have their own, very different, strong suits,” says Tom Shoemaker, vice-president for PLM at CAD and PLM software firm PTC. “The strong suit of ERP, for instance, is around how prod-ucts are built, where the parts are sourced from, and how much it
costs to source the parts and build the products. So it makes sense for engineers and designers to be able to see and access that information.”
If a component, such as a pump, fastener or valve, is already in use within the business, for example, then it makes sense to design that same component into other products, says Dan Burrows, account director for manufac-turing industry at management consultants Waterstons.
Pooling volumes in this way not only reduces the burden on buyers, he adds, but also offers opportuni-ties to exert greater price leverage on suppliers. Likewise, armed with the information that certain suppli-ers have a poor delivery reliability
or quality performance, designers can make a conscious decision to prefer the offerings of other, more reliable, suppliers.
Likewise, it makes sense to link PLM systems with data held in field service management, mainte-nance and customer relationship management systems, says Profes-sor Rajkumar Roy, director of the EPSRC [Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council] Centre in Through-Life Engineering Ser-vices at Cranfield University.
These systems capture a huge amount of data about how, why and when products break down or require maintenance, data which is not normally visible to designers sitting at their desks.
“If you can inform design deci-sions with operational service data, you can reduce maintenance costs by making products more reliable, and prolong product and compo-nent life,” says Professor Roy. The result is products which are easier to maintain, longer lasting and more reliable.
And attention is increasingly focusing on getting data not just from maintenance and field ser-vice administration systems, but directly from products and devices themselves using the so-called Internet of Things.
PLM vendor PTC, for instance, has just announced the $112-mil-
DATA INTEGRATION
lion acquisition of ThingWorx, a developer of technology to enable such connections.
“In the Internet of Things era, streams of real time operational data are captured, analysed and shared to deepen a company’s understanding of its products’ performance, use, and reliability,” says PTC.
But the benefits of PLM integration go further than simply better inform-ing design choices, say experts.
“True integration is when some-thing changes within the ERP sys-tem and it instantly changes within PLM as well,” says Andy Hadley, PLM solutions manager at Symetri, a firm specialising in digital design training and consultancy using Autodesk design software, and which has been closely involved in the implementation at Eldiss. “It’s about having a ‘single version of the truth’, without the costs of data duplication and manually re-keying information.”
Better still, adds Neil Ferguson-Lee, solutions architect at Micro-soft Dynamics enterprise appli-cations gold partner eBECS, true two-way integration improves data quality. “Without proper integration, data gets re-entered manually, giving rise not only to the possibility of simple keying errors, but also errors of interpre-tation,” he says. “The result: two or more versions of the truth and a damaging debate about whose version is correct.”
FUTURE PLM TECHNOLOGIES
$6.2trn
Source: McKinsey Global Institute
in new economic value could be
unleashed by the Internet of Things
by 2025
of all manufacturing
companies could be using Internet of Things applications
by 2025
80%+
INTERNET OF THINGS
CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT
MAINTENANCE
FIELD SERVICE MANAGEMENT
ENTERPRISE RESOURCE PLANNING
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