Gathering and managing data, insights and inspiration can never be reliable without PLM and the digital transformation it enables.
It is an unfortunate fact that in almost every technology discussion the basics are often overlooked, resulting in more than a little confusion.
In this article I’m going back to the basics of product lifecycle management (PLM) by exploring two fundamental questions: Who uses PLM? And what are some of its challenges?
This is my third article on PLM basics for Engineering.com. Previously, I wrote Answering 3 Top PLM Questions and Why Every Enterprise Needs Its Own Digital Twins.
A common thread across all these articles is the importance of collaboration and innovation. PLM supports these vital enterprise processes as no other technology can do. Without a well-defined PLM strategy and associated enabling technologies, the gathering and management of data, insights, and inspiration is never reliable. Only PLM-enabled collaboration and innovation can ensure the long-term sustainability of an enterprise.
Since the first two articles were written, the importance of PLM to enterprise-scale digital transformation and vice versa has become more widely recognized. But PLM’s message is often lost in noisy and cluttered marketplaces that change at ever increasing rates. To keep pace, PLM solution providers come up with elaborate new tools and add-on capabilities that make digital twins more powerful; digital threads more all-encompassing; end-to-end-end connectivity reach further and deeper because both the ends and the beginnings of products’ lifecycles grow hazier amid expanded capabilities. At the same time, PLM is being extended into new areas of the enterprise, some of which have only tenuous links to the everyday understanding of “product.” In these uncertain times, going back to basics has historically proven to be a wise policy.
All three of these back-to-basics articles drew inspiration from Answerthepublic.com, a marketing-focused platform that unearths user questions commonly entered into search engines.
Who Should be Using PLM?
This question addresses why PLM is so widely used and appreciated, even without deeper understanding of it. PLM is probably the most widely implemented among the myriad tools engineers rely on—standalone CAD included. New-product developers in all industries turn to PLM at every stage of their work:
• Creating, redeveloping, and enhancing the enterprise’s products, services, assets, or systems, both physical and digital.
• Creating, developing, and enhancing processes.
• Enhancing and extending enterprise connectivity.
• Delving into supply chain management to cope with the variants in all of the above.
• Everyone, technically trained or not, who supports these engineers.
If you are using PLM, the aim should be extending the use of it from product development throughout the extended enterprise, including the enablement of:
Digital twins, which are virtual representations—digital surrogates—of physical assets (or services, or even manufacturing systems and the organization itself) that exploit data flows into and out of that asset. A digital twin of a product typically holds geometry and representations of materials, components, and behavior through the asset’s multiple iterations—as-designed, as-produced, and as-maintained.
Digital threads, which are webs of decisions and myriad links that reach all the data, decisions, and processes that create, maintain, and leverage digital twins from design engineering through production, sales, service, support, and warranties.
End-to-end (E-2-E) lifecycle connectivity, which reaches and joins everything relevant to each digital twin and its digital threads from initial ideation through end-of-life and disposal or remanufacturing and repurposing.
Digital transformation, which is rendering/converting all the enterprise’s data to get rid of bothersome formats and silos that prevent data and information from being freely accessed, used, shared, and reused; the digital transformation of an organization’s product lifecycle is thus a powerful enabler of collaboration and innovation.
What are some challenges of PLM enablement?
As with any transformational technology, implementers and project managers must overcome multiple challenges. Because PLM’s broad capabilities and toolsets reach deep into the enterprise’s data, these challenges sometimes overwhelm the resources allocated to the implementation; start-up dates are missed, and deadlines are blown.
Like any large-impact technology implementation, some of the challenging aspects of PLM include:
•  Significant investment in money, time, and resources that requires careful monitoring and control.
•  Intensive planning, system-to-system accommodations, and staff retraining across the enterprise.
•  Tightly focused efforts for digital transformation to deal with unformatted data and information while facilitating access to departmental data silos.
• Similarly, a tight focus on dealing with unexpected job complexity that can frustrate new users.
• Persistence during a sometimes tedious implementation with a nonstop focus on priorities.
• Continuous updates for top management so they aren’t tempted to reassign resources and reallocate funds.
• Continuous evaluation and improvement throughout the continued usage of the new digital PLM-enabling technologies, commonly called “staying the course.”
Every marketplace is constantly reconfiguring itself, driven by countless innovations. This can disrupt enterprise-scale collaboration and thwart innovation. Gathering and managing data and insights can become so complicated that their use becomes unreliable—or worse.
Among the consequences of these reconfigurations is the fragmentation of PLM. PLM implementation challenges have motivated a handful of software startups to offer toolkits for digital twins, digital threads, and even enhanced connectivity as stand-alone capabilities. Marketed as sufficient in themselves for everyday user tasks, these toolkits are being tacked on to information technology, operational technology, engineering technology, and other top-of-the-enterprise platforms and systems.
I must caution that none of these narrow offerings have PLM’s powerful and widely used capabilities to foster true innovation and collaboration, or at least not to the extent necessary. And only collaboration and innovation can ensure the long-term sustainability of the enterprise.
The underlying theme running through all three of these articles is enabling and enhancing collaboration with PLM, and, as noted, no other technology can do this. Gathering and managing data, insights, and inspiration can never be reliable without PLM and the digital transformation it enables. In turn, only with the digital enablement of PLM can the long-term sustainability of the enterprise be assured.
And this is why understanding the basics of PLM is so critical.
