An interview with Michael Burkett, vice president of AMR Research.
Q: Are top manufacturing management around the world now becoming more aware of the business benefits of PLM?
Burkett: I think there is already a good recognition of what PLM is and its role in terms of speeding product to market, but there are also other benefits, like value engineering and compliance. I think it has bubbled up to a point where companies are recognising that they’ve made their investments in the operational side of the business and now there’s a lot more acceptance of moving upstream into product development — and really ensuring they get a good return on their design and R&D investment.
Q: So is the role of PLM in a manufacturing organisation now clearer?
Burkett: While the value is certainly being recognised, we tend to see PLM deployed in pockets. There’s still a disconnect — a lack of overall ownership for PLM in an organisation. Bringing a new product to market is a cross-functional process. But when you ask who actually owns that process, it gets a little fuzzy. When you ask who owns the technology strategy to solve that process, it’s even fuzzier. So it either gets executed in product development or in supply chain because they suffer the downstream pain for poor product design. Then, once in a while, you’ll see steering committees with overall responsibility for new product introduction asking for better visibility into the whole process. That seems to be where the most benefits are being recognised.
Q: Are there still major challenges to face?
Burkett: It may be a wild statistic, but I’d say 75% to 80% of the challenge is cultural. The basic technology is there.
Probably the biggest challenge right now is poor implementation. Some companies believe they can just buy a commercial, off-the-shelf product lifecycle management application, put it in, and it works. But they haven’t done a good job of understanding the business process they are trying to apply it to. What ends up happening is that they can add complexity instead of simplifying it. It turns into a multi-year implementation because there’s very little real input from the business.
Q: You’ve talked about integrating business cultures to make PLM effective. What about integrating different technology platforms — ERP, MES, and supply chain systems. Is that something that’s now actively happening — and happening quickly?
Burkett: It’s not happening quickly, but it is absolutely essential. In order to effectively bring a new product to market, you need to have that handoff from the PLM to the ERP system, to a supply chain management system, or to an MES system. And then you want to be able to bring data back from those systems. That gets into a related topic we refer to as master data management, which is an architectural strategy — how do you identify the master data, who owns it, what other systems can subscribe to that data, and then what’s your strategy for dealing with it? That’s an organisational challenge.
It’s an overarching problem for many people in IT, but in PLM I’d say it’s still premature.
