Putting engineering data at the centre?

The alphabet soup continues, with users confronted by a heady mix of acronyms for software purporting to be critical, different – yet doing similar things! The arrival of EDS PLM Solutions out of UGS and SDRC confirmed PLM (product lifecycle management) as the daddy of all acronyms! But you can’t ignore this. Full PLM may strictly be relevant only to 1,000 companies world-wide in the automotive and aerospace sectors, where traceability is required from cradle to grave – but all companies, large and small, have their own subset of PLM requirements. According to Peter Thorne of analyst Cambashi, “Big users are now asking if PLM will join the existing three pillars underpinning the enterprise, namely ERP (enterprise resource planning), SCM (supply chain management) and CRM (customer relationship management).” But while these latter applications provide clear operational support, he says “the PLM vendors need to make it obvious why there is a need for product data in more detail than ERP/SCM/CRM currently provides.” Fair point, although arguably the most valuable contribution any of these can make is to ensure that operations are visible to management where it matters. According to Alan Griffiths, managing director of PDM (product data management) consultancy QIC Solutions, “There is a fifth technology which could apply anywhere in the organisation or across it: DM/KM (document/knowledge management). This can also include workflow automation which can be very involved with key business processes.” Generally, a company will need all five application classes to a greater or lesser extent (ERP, SCM, CRM, PDM and DM/KM) but will be ‘centric’ on one, depending on its individual business characteristics. Sales-focused companies will be CRM-centric; design and development engineering companies need to be PDM-centric. And indeed there may well be crossover between products, with some ERP systems offering PDM and some PDM including workflow and knowledge management. However, whether companies have properly understood and addressed this, and whether they have chosen and properly applied the appropriate technologies, is another question. Says Griffiths. “It is not meaningful to say that one system is ‘better’ than another; it is more a case of aligning technology to the business characteristics. There is a wealth of suitable technology – careful selection and implementation is what matters.” But there’s more. All round product visibility is the cornerstone of software vendor Agile’s approach to manufacturing. The firm has a technology called product chain management (PCM) which is about minimising product sourcing, manufacturing and service costs, while maximising revenue and profit. “In the current economic climate, in which being the lowest-cost producer or offering the newest, most innovative product, or both, is required to retain customers and take market share, managing the product chain has never been more crucial,” asserts Bryan Stolle, CEO and chairman of Agile. “To CRM and product chain management, add ERP for managing financial transactions with customers and suppliers, and you have the three key mission-critical business systems required to operate a company.” Agile seems to be new ‘middleware’ sitting in between traditional design-centric applications (CAD and PDM) and ERP, and giving greater visibility to the whole of the product data throughout the processes and stages across the whole enterprise via the web. Then again, improving ‘time-to-volume’ is a critical aspect of SmarTeam’s collaborative business solutions, enabling global manufacturers to exchange and collaborate on product information via the Internet, extending accuracy, security and productivity. Turn data into an asset Shannon Soupiset, vice president of engineering for welding and cutting machine manufacturer ESAB says of the system: “Moving to PDM was an easy decision for us, we recovered all our costs in seven to eight months by cancelling our document management service and have generated substantial savings since then. Beyond that, the additional capabilities of the system, such as giving us control over the ECO (engineering change order) process and providing electronic document access to engineering and manufacturing personnel, have provided significant efficiency gains.” In other words, the software helps businesses to turn product data overload, from design, manufacturing and product maintenance, into an information asset by merging with existing ERP systems. Karlheinz Reiber, a project manager at food processing equipment maker Buhler, talks about the benefit of being connected to other enterprise systems. “With SmarTeam the necessary information is available for all involved in the main business process. They have access to information from other departments; therefore they don’t have to look for it – they have it on their desk. They are able to do their job by building up, not having to start from scratch. So we can save time, we can increase the quality, avoid misunderstandings and we have shorter ways to look for documents. Shorter ways to accurate information brings us a shorter development time, cuts the whole time down, and increases the quality.” In light of all this the problem facing users today is that almost all software vendor sales pitches sound plausible! In an ideal world, where companies have the critical mass, a secure financial position, a standard bearer amongst senior management and the requisite design/engineering complexity, the implementation of enterprise-wide PDM and ERP, with all the extras, is the only sane strategy. One such company is Wincor-Nixdorf in Germany, which makes ATM machines, cash dispensers and point of sale devices for supermarkets like Tesco. It went live ‘big bang’ style with enterprise-wide PDM in the shape of Metaphase, as well as full SAP R3 ERP in 1996 (in the very early stages of both products) on top of I-deas Master Series CAD/CAM. It was a brave move indeed, and the firm is still around to tell the tale. In its own words, the company has a very highly integrated IT landscape with the ultimate objective of relying on one single integrated master data set – and with change control restricted to the relevant application. According to Jochen Billerbeck, Wincor-Nixdorf’s PLM and CRM specialist in its Chief Information Office, the fact that it took a big bang approach allowed the firm to do the integration properly. The other crucial point, he says, was the fact that it did extensive planning and took the opportunity to streamline its business processes at the same time. The new systems were not retrofitted onto existing systems, and the planning was done by project teams for the processes, not the technologies themselves (whether CAD, PDM or ERP). All the way out? At present Wincor-Nixdorf does not have any distributed activity over the Internet, but it has been included in its planning. The next phase will be to rope in its development partners in the extended systems. So what’s responsible for what? “PDM is the knowledge backbone for product data and information,” insists Billerbeck. “SAP is the strategic product for logistics, accounting and order management.” There are about 30 interfaces between SAP and Metaphase for ECOs, document classification, routing, prices, product life cycle integration and workflow integration through both systems. There are no other applications around these systems. But Wincor-Nixdorf is a very robust firm. In smaller companies, where the business criteria are not so well established, this kind of approach could be very risky and possibly ‘career limiting’. Huntleigh Healthcare, meanwhile, is not a small company: it has 14 international subsidiaries and distribution partnerships in more than 100 countries world-wide. It makes a range of non-invasive healthcare devices and instrumentation for medical applications, and is recognised as a market leader in manufacturing ‘pressure area care’ support surfaces and hospital bed frames. In the UK the firm needed a PDM system to help it get control of its data and streamline business processes. It was using ‘big CAD’ in I-deas Master Series, but found it difficult to justify the investment required for SDRC’s then PDM. “The issue was complicated further by our requirement to link to our existing manufacturing system,” says Gareth Copping, Huntleigh’s technical manager. “It is not a SAP or a Baan, so integrating it would be difficult, time consuming and potentially expensive. We were not about to implement PDM and change our manufacturing system at the same time!” Justifying the extra mile? Huntleigh Healthcare is typical of many – the firm had invested quite heavily in sophisticated CAD, but when its existing data management systems began to struggle it had problems justifying further expenditure. Especially since any PDM investment should include other departments – and since that expenditure could spiral out of control, with significant consulting days being spent building specific interfaces to existing ‘mature’ systems. The fact is, even in the mid-range CAD market, a complementary PDM solution that you can implement beyond the design office is still quite costly. When the CAD is £5,000 per seat the PDM needs to be about £1,000 per seat or less to encourage smaller users to buy into it and roll it out in the volumes that can make a real difference to their businesses. And it must link to existing systems, which often aren’t the popular flavours of ERP that are the top of the integration list. Biting the bullet for smaller companies requires even more of an engineering ‘leap of faith’ than moving from 2D to 3D. This is not an evolutionary process: it involves serious investment, greater complexity, new systems to learn and an uncertain pay-back. Sadly, there is not a spectrum of solutions: there is high-end and then there is the moderately expensive stuff – with little entry-level PDM or ERP for that matter. What activity there is to address the entry-level PDM issue seems to be in the middle market: IronCAD Innovation Suite and Solid Edge Insight are cases in point. There are also pragmatic collaboration solutions like 3D TeamWorks from SolidWorks that provides collaboration tools and extended enterprise visibility. This is not classical PDM or ERP software. In fact SolidWorks is at pains to point out it is not ePDM (web-enabled PDM), but it is probably the most promising collaboration technology available today, particularly since it is associated with a leading mid-range CAD modelling solution. Here, the collaboration data is very much at the centre of the extended enterprise; it has no vaulting or revisioning that you would expect of a PDM solution, but it is no less useful for that. Meanwhile, popular ERP vendors like SAP and Baan are offering PDM, but as a complement to traditional design-centric ERP. Ultimately, the extent to which you embrace all these technologies has to depend on where you fit into your PLM supply and value chains. Manufacturers generally want something to guarantee the integrity of their data. They also want something that fits their current enterprises – they don’t want to change their religion or their application environment. If you talk to the vendors they’ll tell you that they interface with this, that and the other, but the sad fact is that the majority of user companies aren’t up to half the speed of the vendors in recognising, let alone addressing, the challenges before them. Most have a CAD system and a data management solution that’s good enough for CAD, but generally they don’t have sophisticated ERP or PDM to anything like the level that SAP or the PDM vendors would like to see. And they probably never will. ePDM as a middle way doesn’t really exist as a separate product; it’s a collection of technologies which have to be selected and integrated with care.