PLM, Social Networks, the Cloud & More
During the next five to 10 years, product lifecycle management (PLM) as an enterprise strategy will undoubtedly become increasingly intertwined in an expanding range of business processes just as enterprise resource planning (ERP) has become. At this point, the use of PLM will be an accepted way of working and woven into the fabric of the company’s daily operations and business processes as companies face a wide range of emerging issues including:
• Enterprise program and project management integration that drives the product lifecycle, with capabilities from the supervisory and executive management down to the task/workflow level.
• Greater numbers of mechatronic products with built-in intelligent software features that must be designed and managed utilizing a total systems engineering approach.
• Management of end-to-end intellectual assets of the product lifecycle starting with conceptual/requirements data capture to BOM structure, sales, order entry, delivery, operations, support, maintenance, and eventual replacement.
• Increased tightly integrated management of product cost and quality.
• Tighter integration of engineering processes with disciplines such as sales, marketing, finance, customer support, and human resources.
One of the major issues PLM helps companies face is the expanding list of increasingly stringent and complex environmental regulations, sustainability issues, and consumer expectations. For companies around the world that are “going green,” failing to comply with these regulations can be extremely costly in terms of fines, penalties, recalls, and negative publicity that can haunt a company for years and damage brand value. The impact to profitability can be staggering and long lasting.
In complying with these requirements, manual operations performed late in development is impractical and risky, so for a growing number of companies PLM is becoming indispensable as their hub in compliance management, enabling organizations to compile, correlate, analyze, and report necessary information throughout the product development process, thus avoiding late-stage hurried activities trying to troubleshoot non-compliance problems, approval bottlenecks, and audit difficulties.
A variety of compliance management solutions have been developed over the years by independent software solution companies. Now the major comprehensive PLM solution suppliers are either establishing working relationships to satisfy these needs or developing solutions of their own. With a specialized PLM solution targeted toward compliance with particular regulations, users can readily check product content against applicable regulation requirements in the early stages of development—making them managed requirements. Analytics and reporting capabilities are often used to determine and help communicate the status of regulatory compliance to appropriate individuals so that corporate risk is minimized.
In this way, companies can take a proactive approach to gain a significant competitive advantage now and in years to come by efficiently speeding products to market, avoiding the oppressive costs of non-compliance, and establishing themselves as leaders in concerns for consumer safety and environmental issues.
Expansion of PLM Capabilities
In dealing with such complex issues, PLM capabilities will undoubtedly expand in a broad range of areas for gathering, storing, utilizing, analyzing, and reporting of huge and complex sets of data:
• Integrated enterprise business analytics for all levels of management, well beyond reporting of individual sets of data.
• Data aging solutions that support decades-long product lifecycles, some of which are more than 100 years.
• Federated databases combining otherwise disparate sources of data.
• Analytical capabilities for identifying and reporting on trends otherwise buried in mountains of structured and unstructured data.
• Automatic notification of potential problems, delays, and bottlenecks that can be addressed early enough to be fixed before business process are negatively impacted.
One of the most intriguing trends in gathering data is emerging from the exploding use of social networking related to wikis, blogs, instant messaging, Tweets, visual conferencing, and chat rooms. Studies have shown that humans are hard-wired to cooperate and share opinions. This means social media has tremendous potential to support product development. In fact, internal and external communities that can collaborate in a flexible yet controlled manner can drive an organization’s ability to define, develop, and deliver innovative products and services to the markets anywhere they are needed. There is no doubt that getting the most out of this new way of working and the social computing technologies offered are yet to be fully understood within the typical product development environment. The challenge is to capture, analyze, and report on relevant information in an understandable and meaningful manner. For this purpose, future data scientists will likely use interactive web pages, language parsing, and data mining tools to search for and find valuable information in internal as well as external sources (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc.) related to product perceptions, purchasing trends, and customer perceptions. The resulting benefits of social networking in the context of product development could be huge in early concept development, expanding the dialog between people, engaging customers on a more interactive basis and eliminating boundaries that often hamper such collaboration.
Two technology trends are helping to drive these new and still emerging approaches to capturing and analyzing data: cloud computing and open-source software. With cloud computing, companies essentially lease Internet-based computing power on demand when they need it instead of buying expensive equipment. In this way, computing power is much more affordable and users are no longer burdened with managing the computing technology infrastructure that they can regard as being “in the cloud.” Essentially, users and the companies they work for do not care where the data or compute power resides, only that they have access to it. Giants such as Amazon, Google, IBM, and Microsoft are some of the most prominent firms making their massive computing infrastructure available to clients. This emerging trend has the potential to significantly impact PLM implementations. Indeed, Siemens PLM recently announced a joint project with Microsoft to create a quality management solution based on cloud computing.
Along with cloud computing come new approaches such as open source technologies for delivering functionality on-line via the Internet through clouds that they help build and manage. In this way, ordinary PCs can analyze huge quantities of data and run software that otherwise would require compute power beyond the means of most users. Three main ways in which software is delivered include: (1) on-premises hosting where companies host the solution at their own location using their own servers, (2) partner-hosted arrangements where partners (including independent software vendors and system integrators) offer hosted applications in their area of expertise, and (3) PLM solution supplier-hosted services hosted in the users own data center. With such tremendous potential, cloud computing and open source technologies are maturing and will certainly be extended in the coming years as companies recognize the benefits and more fully understand the impact of these leading-edge technologies on their PLM implementations.
The future of PLM is bright, with no limits in sight. Indeed, today PLM is even more important in enabling an organization’s ability to become more efficient and innovative, especially as companies need to do more with the same or less resources. There is no doubt that PLM is accepted by many as a critical component of a company’s survival strategy and an enabler of business recovery. PLM’s adoption as a true “enterprise” initiative is becoming more visible, and is driving investments in expanded solutions and developments to make it more valuable.
In many cases, PLM is needed for the re-tooling of companies and perhaps even entire industries. With the emergence of “green” and greater regulatory emphasis, the explosion of social media and resulting data, and the availability of cloud services and open source solutions, many companies have no choice but to define and implement a comprehensive PLM strategy—one that recognizes and enables the creation, management, dissemination, and use of product information throughout their extended enterprise. It is an exciting time for those that take advantage of what PLM offers.
