Product lifecycle management vendors ratchet up integration skills as they vie with ERP vendors to help manufacturers recover.
For the CEO of Novero GmbH — the former Nokia division that makes slick automotive communications gear — product design entails more than fancy modeling and manufacturing mock-ups. Equally important: the ability to integrate information across the three prongs of Novero’s development initiatives, which include software, mechanical, and electrical designs for in-car telematics and voice and entertainment kit.
“We are committed to reducing complexity while emphasizing the essential elements of product design,” CEO Rasvan Olosu said late last year when the Düsseldorf, Germany-based company announced it was implementing Dassault Systèmes’ Enovia V6 PLM collaboration software. Olosu’s hope is that Enovia and its service-oriented architecture will help users across Novero’s global enterprise share information.
He’s not the only manufacturing executive with PLM integration on his mind. Canon Inc. COO Tsuneji Uchida told Manufacturing Executive in Tokyo recently that the company is striving to spread PLM data across the company and its suppliers in order to speed time to market. And an executive at a major German supplier to some of the world’s biggest automakers told ME that his company is outright scrapping its current PLM system precisely because it does not tie in well to the rest of the organization.
“Indeed, the most important feature we are looking for is system integration, especially the integration into our ERP system,” said the executive, who asked that he and his company remain anonymous. “We need more business integration between technical departments — R&D, industrial engineering — and commercial departments like purchasing, sales, finance, and controlling.”
Welcome to product lifecycle management for economic recovery. As the global financial crisis pressures manufacturers more than ever to cut costs and continuously improve operations, they are trying to extract efficiencies through swift, intelligent interaction between IT systems. From a PLM perspective, that means feeding engineering and design information from PLM software to a company’s buyers, sellers, and executive decision makers, who more typically use ERP software. It also means funneling information to the factory floor, where typical users of manufacturing software such as MES can spot design changes and act accordingly.
And in a virtuous loop of action and reaction, ERP, MES, and other systems also feed back to PLM, triggering constant change and updates. A parts buyer learns, say, that the supply of a specified bolt has stopped, and alerts the PLM system so that designers can draw up new plans. Likewise, a shop floor manager realizes that a PLM drawing does not meet toolings or tolerances, and alerts engineering via a link to PLM.
The name of the game is for users across a manufacturing operation to have access to PLM data so that changes can happen on the fly rather than in the long and winding manner that historically has characterized the way information has traveled back to engineering.
PLM vendors are acutely aware of this. As Siemens PLM Software President Helmuth Ludwig says, PLM has to “go up to the enterprise, down the shop floor, go left and go right.”
And Patrick Michel, vice president of industry solutions and marketing for Dassault’s Delmia manufacturing simulation software, says, “We want to close the loop so there’s a virtual representation in PLM of what’s actually happening in manufacturing.”
Rising Tide of Alliances
