One of the main themes from the PLM Road Map and PDT North America event was just how much we still have to learn about going digital.
In the breakneck pace of digital transformation, is comprehension being left behind? Do we need a rethink? No one at PLM Road Map and PDT North America, a collaboration with BAE Systems’ Eurostep organization—a leading gathering of product lifecycle management (PLM) professionals—said that, at least not in so many words, but presentations by one user after another raised the issue.
In my opening presentation, I confronted these issues by positioning PLM as a strategic business approach, thereby joining it to digital transformation, which has been CIMdata’s focus for more than four decades. And in the conference’s thought leadership vignettes, multiple PLM solution providers stressed connectivity and new tools to aid understanding and comprehension; in these vignettes, many supported my positioning of PLM.
The issues of comprehension were presented to conference attendees from several points of view. Many presenters delved into data and information quality—accuracy, completeness, structure, ownership, possible corruption, its exploding volume, and the steady growth of regulation.
Some numbers that made many attendees uncomfortable:
• There are hundreds of engineering software tools and new ones appear every week. Every engineering organization uses dozens of tools, systems, solutions, “apps,” and platforms; their constant updates are often disruptive to users
• About 800 standards apply to engineering information and its connections to the rest of the enterprise, said Kenneth Swope, The Boeing Co.’s Senior Manager for Enterprise Interoperability Standards and Supply Chain Collaboration
• 30 terabytes of data are generated in CAD and manufacturing for each of the hundreds of engines produced by Rolls-Royce PLC every year, reported Christopher Hinds, Head of Enterprise Architecture. Some output files from CFD analyses exceed 650 GB per part, he added.
Speakers also discussed how digital transformation is revealing the shortfalls in comprehension of data and information. “If we can’t agree on what data is, we can’t use it,” observed Swope. These shortfalls are caused by accelerated product development, shorter product lifecycles, and an explosion of product modifications and differentiations thanks to the software now embedded in every product.
In my conference-opening presentation, “PLM’s Integral Role in Digital Transformation,” I stressed that companies need to think beyond digitizing data, that merely converting analog data to digital isn’t enough. Yes, digitalization is at the core of an organization’s digital transformation … but moving to a digital business requires rethinking many organizational structures and business processes as well as understanding the growing value of data.
So how does PLM fit into this? Only by seeing PLM as a strategic business approach can its depth and breadth in the reach of digital transformation can be comprehended. PLM concentrates the organization’s focus on the collaborative creation, use, management, and dissemination of product related intellectual assets—a company’s core asset. This makes PLM the platform for integrating external entities into lifecycle processes—thereby enabling end-to-end (E2E) connectivity … and the optimization of associated business functions and entities throughout the lifecycle.
Don’t forget, I cautioned, that the data generated from your products and services often becomes more valuable than the products themselves. Why? Because product data touches all phases of a product’s life, these digital assets play a central role in an enterprise’s digital transformation. Hence I warned that digital transformation will collapse without the implementation of the right set of data governance policies, procedures, structure, roles, and responsibilities.
Many presenters also noted how PLM and digital transformation are helping them deal with the challenges of stiffer competition, rising costs, downward pressure on pricing, customer demands for more functionality and longer service lives, data-hungry Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Product as a Service (PaaS) business models
And while all these factors aggravate the issues I addressed, speakers expressed confidence that they will eventually reap the benefits of PLM and digital transformation—starting with getting better products to market sooner and at lower cost.
Another challenge with digital transformation and comprehension is the multitude of ways that presenting companies organize and identify their engineering systems and functions. All these manufacturers use basically same processes to develop and produce a new product or system but these tasks are divided up in countless ways; no two companies’ product-development nomenclature are the same.
Sorting this out is crucial to the understanding and comprehension of the enterprise’s data and information. Gaining access to departmental “silos” of data is increasingly seen as just the beginning of digging information out of obsolete “legacy” systems and outdated formats.
In the conference’s Day One keynote presentation, Martin Eigner of Eigner Engineering Consult, Baden-Baden, Germany, spoke on “Reflecting on 40 Years of PDM/PLM: Are We Where We Wanted to Be?” The answer, of course, is both yes and no.
Dr. Eigner expressed his frustration in PLM’s fragmented landscape. We are still tied to legacy systems (ERP, MES, SCM, CRM) that depend on flawed interfaces reminiscent of outdated monolithic software, he pointed out. As digitalization demands and technologies like IoT, AI, knowledge graphs, and cloud solutions continue to grow, the key question is: Can the next generation of PLM solutions meet the challenges of digital transformation with the advanced, modern software technologies available?
“The vision of PLM till exists,” Dr. Eigner continued, “but the term was hijacked in the late 1990s while the PLM vision was still being discussed. Vendors of product data management (PDM) solutions applied the term for their PDM offerings” which “mutated from PDM to PLM virtually overnight.”
“Ultimately,” he noted, “business opportunities and ROI will be significantly boosted by the overarching Digital Thread on Premise or as a Service,” leveraged with “knowledge graphs connected with the Digital Twin.” Applying “generative AI can optionally create an Omniverse with enhanced data connectivity and traceability.”
This stage of digital transformation, he summarized, “will improve decision making and support AI application development.” In turn, these “will revolutionize product development, optimize processes, reduce costs, and position the companies implementing this at the forefront of their industries. And we are coming back to our original PLM vision as the Single Source of Truth.”
The challenges of getting this done were addressed by Michael Carlton, Director, Digital Technology PLM Growth at GE Aerospace, Evendale, Ohio, using what he termed as “developing a best-in-class Enterprise PLM platform to increase productivity and capacity amid rising demands for digital thread capabilities, technology transformation, automation, and AI.” His remedies included “leveraging AI, cloud acceleration, observability, analytics, and automation techniques.”
“Uncomfortably ambitious productivity improvements,” Carlton continued, include “reduction in PLM environment build cycle time, parallel development programs on different timelines, shifting testing left (i.e., sooner), improved quality throughout, automated data security tests, and growing development capacity.”
The issue of PLM and the boardroom was raised in a presentation, by John Snow, Research Director, Product Innovation Strategies, at International Data Corp. (IDC), Needham, Mass. In his data-packed Day 2 keynote, Snow detailed how complex this issue is and the “disconnect between corporate concerns and engineering priorities.”
PLM, observed Snow, “maintains the digital threads that define the product ecosystem: weaving together product development, manufacturing, the supply chain, and service to balance cost, time, and quality.”
The opportunity for engineering in the boardroom is that “80% of product costs is locked in during design,” however, the Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) is 10X to 15X higher than Cost of R&D (CR&D), Snow explained.
“Poor product design,” Snow continued, “has an outsized impact on COGS, but good design does,” too. Thus, “increasing the engineering budget can have a big impact on profits (if properly allocated).” Current efforts to leverage design for manufacturing & assembly (DFM/A) are falling short,” he added.
Near the other end of the corporate size scale from GE Aerospace is Hollister Inc., Libertyville, Ill., an employee-owned medical supplies manufacturer of ostomy and continence products. Stacey Burgardt, Hollister’s Senior Program Manager for PLM, addressed PLM implementation challenges in her presentation on “The Role of Executive Sponsorship in PLM Success at Hollister.”
Burgardt, formerly R&D and Quality Leader, outlined Hollister’s PLM vision as three transformations:
• To product data centric from document centric
• To digital models from drawings, and
• To live collaboration and traceability from systems of record.
In her appeal to sponsors, Burgardt estimated total expected benefits through 2030 at $29 million. This sum included significant gains from improved efficiency of associates, smaller software costs, and reduced waste, scrap, and rework.
Unlike every other presenter, Hollister has yet to implement PLM, though not from lack of effort dating back to 2018. Hollister is currently finalizing PLM solution selection and planning. Burgardt focused the need for executive sponsorship and strategies to secure it. “Identify the right executive sponsors in the governance model including the CEO and CFO,” she said, “and the
leaders of the main functions that PLM will impact, and someone who has seen a successful PLM who can advocate.
“Be persistent,” she concluded, “and be adaptable.” Address sponsors’ concerns and “If it’s not the right time, keep the embers burning and try again.”
And this led to my conference summation topic: sponsorship. The fact that PLM and digital transformation are now recognizably tougher and will take longer than once hoped led to my Executive Spotlight panel discussion at the end of Day 2: “The Role of the Executive Sponsor in Driving a PLM Transformation.” My four panelists agreed high-level sponsorships are indispensable … and we discussed how to identify, enlist, and maintain those sponsorships.
To conclude, looking back over the two days’ presentations, I think the answer is “yes” to my questions in the first paragraph. And the sooner this rethink gets going the better.
