PLM now moving beyond engineering up the business agenda
2 mins read
As the financial sector becomes increasingly more concerned about what manufacturers are doing to sustain product development, rather than what they are doing to maximise margins, PLM (product lifecycle management) systems are rising up the business agenda faster than ever.
That was clear at last month’s PLM Summit at the Excel Centre in London, which hosted a noticeably high proportion of CIOs and CEOs, alongside senior operational people. And it’s also confirmed by some of the key system vendors in the industry.
“Finance companies increasingly want to know that they have the systems to generate new products,” says UGS vice president of executive operations David Punter. “And they want the proof that shows, for example, how much revenue came from products developed in the last two years. If I go to Wall Street, those are the questions that are now being asked all the time.”
For him, the remaining issue is: “A lot of execs are still trying to understand where PLM’s traditional engineering role fits in. Speakers at the PLM Summit were concerned that there seems to be no bridge between senior management and the operational divisions.”
He says senior management is increasingly very committed, and that the frustration is further down the hierarchy. A key solution, insists Punter, is senior operational people painting a picture of PLM systems enabling manufacturing companies to “take more money out of lifecycle of their products.”
But issues with that are not only that going this route means substantially changing existing roles and processes, and moving to more automation and collaboration with the design chain – always difficult, but essential for survival anyway.
It’s also about how to measure: “People are implementing pieces of PLM, but those doing it in the divisions don’t understand all the measures for describing ‘innovation rate’,” says Punter.
Henry Seddon, UGS vice president of marketing for EMEA, recommends that would-be PLM users look at the UGS website. “We’ve started publishing a series of best practices looking at the birth to death processes and systems around best companies’ products.”
And he adds: “They’ll also see our innovation assessment tool. Execs can log on and compare themselves with their peers. They may be leaders in innovation but laggards in supply chain or vice versa. The tool also points them to other useful research.”
Meanwhile, UGS is also busy extending its Teamcenter PLM system to new industries, with the latest version aimed at after-market, in-service complex product management. “It now provides MRO [maintenance, repair and overhaul] and in-service BoMs [bills of materials],” says Seddon.
“We acquired the In-Air division of EDS and we integrated that software with the in-service bill for MRO within Teamcenter. So now there’s a continuum of management from the bill encompassing the product requirement, through engineering, through manufacturing processes and simulation, to in-service, as-maintained operational MRO.”
