Mobility Meets PLM
Data and communication mobility, as with every digital advance, presents a lot of dramatic opportunities plus a few big challenges, and both are sharply defined in product lifecycle management (PLM)—perhaps more so than elsewhere in the enterprise. From a PLM standpoint, mobility can greatly enhance the product definition lifecycle management activities while enriching the underlying intellectual property (IP) created and used throughout it.
PLM, of course, creates and manages the enterprise’s product-related IP and, from an extended enterprise standpoint, the virtual product, on which the new digital mobility is tightly focused. On balance this is good, a significant new opportunity to broaden and deepen the inputs to decision-making, especially with the all-important first choices. Both the opportunities and challenges lie in the potential access to the inner workings of product lifecycle, and the enterprise’s product related IP, by almost anyone with the right passwords.
Mobility of course is the explosion of handheld digital devices—Google Androids, Apple Computer iPads and iPhones and many others; new ones appear weekly.
A few numbers help gauge the amazing impact:
• 500,000 Google Android phones are activated every day
• 40 million Apple iPads are expected to be sold this year, roughly 100,000 a day, seven days week
• 93% of enterprise workforces may be “mobile” by 2015, up from 57% in 2010, according to Forrester Research (forrester.com)
With more diverse inputs, better decisions can be made more quickly. Decisions based on too little information can be minimized. The downside is security as the variety and capability of mobile devices continues to grow exponentially. Equally problematic are version/revision control and configuration management of the product data.
Digital mobility now reaches anywhere and everywhere. Mobility extends digital connectivity to every unit and activity in the enterprise and to nearly every worker, and not just to new-product development and engineering. Outside the organization’s walls, the impact of mobility is even more dramatic, reaching far beyond the major customers who have been connected for decades.
For the first time since the production of goods moved outside the home workshop, virtually anyone can speak up throughout the product lifecycle. Spurred on by fierce global competition, anyone with an interest seems quick to do so, and this is a good thing. Today’s new products are not merely “better/faster/cheaper,” they are more globally competitive. Fewer corporate resources are consumed in production. Learning curves are shorter and steeper. Products get to market sooner and are often maintained much longer and more efficiently.
Equally important are environmental concerns. Mobility helps address these early in the development process, and not at the end when changes are costliest. As a result, the environmental footprints for most new products are shrinking. So are the potential environmental hazards in their disposal. The same is true for workplace safety. The importance of these grows steadily as regulations tighten at every level of government.
In other words, mobility is a completely new way of doing business. As virtually every analyst and commentator has noted, mobility is empowering. The practical, everyday impacts and benefits pop up everywhere in the enterprise—most visibly in the availability of documentation. Documentation includes work/assembly instructions, process plans, user’s manuals, and service manuals for distributors. The strategy of linking mobile devices to PLM is proving to be essential.
Other enterprise units also benefit greatly from PLM-linked mobility. Among them are design reviews, releases to manufacturing, and late-stage engineering changes; test and inspection; maintenance; sales and marketing; customer-support/application engineering; certifications of environmental and regulatory compliance; plus packaging and shipping (in-bound and out-bound).
Mobility means workers with their iPads, Androids, tablet computers, BlackBerries, and a bevy of Internet-empowered smart phones can work from anywhere: hotels, coffee shops, vehicles, airport lounges, customer facilities in other time zones, supplier operations on other continents, and so on. The “anywhere” aspect of mobility also means any time; clocks and “nine-to-five” are becoming artifacts. Mobility also is rapidly eroding business constraints like geography. Widely available bandwidth for video is transforming the meaning of “face-to-face.” This is unprecedented in the developed world’s engineering of new products and their manufacture.
Younger workers and new hires are tuned into this. They insist on unplugging and walking away from desks, computers, servers and now even laptops. These workers insist on using any digital device that will connect over 3G or 4G networks. This marks a radical shift in workers’ expectations. The comfort zones of middle management are being stretched as never before.
In the face of mobility’s data onslaught, info chaos is a real possibility unless mobility’s information flows can be tamed at the enterprise level. That risk of entropy can be minimized with a well-thought-out and well-executed PLM strategy. Of all the lifecycle-focused and product-related parts of the enterprise, only PLM can provide a single point of access that mobility makes more necessary than ever before. Departments and business units can’t provide that; departmental systems cannot ensure timely access to product data in readily re-usable forms for all who need it.
Aside from the digital realities of mobility, mobile devices themselves present new challenges. The biggest conundrum is how the small screens on these handheld devices—designed for things like simple emails or games—can be adapted to structured data: formatted information such as large-format drawings, solid models, filled-in forms, spreadsheets and meta-data. New-product develop-
ment, product data in general, and virtually all product-related IP information is structured. Most graphics files still conform to digital displays measuring 1,280 by 1,024 pixels. That’s far bigger than anything on a tablet computer, let alone on a Droid X or an iPad. Files from CAD systems, solid modelers, simulations, spreadsheets etc.—are even bigger. Arrows for left, right, up, and down just can’t get the job done anymore.
Mobility is driving a top-to-bottom rethink of the ways in which information is presented visually. The rethink is underway by software developers from the enterprise level (including enterprise resource planning or ERP) downward through operations and the hundreds of applications and systems (engineering analysis and simulation, for example, to name just two). Ultimately, the rethink will reach even simple departmental flat-file databases.
Developers are going beyond merely enabling browsers on small devices. Mobility demands taking full advantage of mobility’s new operating systems, not just the touch screens. A dramatic success is in new versions of Windchill from Parametric Technologies Corp (ptc.com). A shake of an iPad displaying an assembly explodes the assembly into its components. Another shake and the assembly pulls itself back together.
This breakthrough aside, small screens of mobile devices, a small fraction of the size of the displays on every engineer’s desk, remain a challenge. One engineering solution is so-called “lightweight” graphics, as opposed to CAD files that contain all the information needed for manufacturing. The difference in file size is three orders of magnitude, a megabyte of data, perhaps, instead of a gigabyte or more. Already in use is the 3D portable document format (3D PDF) from Adobe Systems (abobe.com). 3D PDFs and similar standardized formats present users with simplified geometry, basic GD&T (geometric dimensioning and tolerancing), and minimal meta data. Originally these files were view-only. Now that is changing as lightweight formats rapidly gain acceptance among engineers and other disciplines throughout an organization. For tasks such as documentation, engineering reviews, mark-ups, and sign-offs, users are no longer forced to work with whatever geometry has been sent their way by product developers and production engineers. PLM-linked mobility is the game changer.
