PLM in China

You could notice I was not writing in here for the past two weeks. The main reason was that I visited our people at China/Taiwan. Our meetings held at Guangzhou in south of China. My visit was very short, but very interesting. Now that China is moving from “Made in China” to “Created in China”, PLM for sure has great potential in a lot of Chinese companies. Even before China moved to engineer the products and not be just the world’s greatest manufacturer the PLM potential in China was promising.

According to Daratech Inc. in Cambridge, Mass from 2005:

China’s manufacturing sector grew 16 percent in 2004, and is expected to grow 15 percent annually over the next five years, according to the report.

Since 1990, PLM software has helped Chinese manufacturing enterprises grow, according to the report.

Daratech estimates that the Chinese PLM market saw sales of approximately $191 million in 2004 with a 30 percent growth in 2005, which would bring the market to almost $250 million.

Compared with the more established American and European markets, the Chinese market is still in its early stages and so far has greater growth potential than established markets have, the report said.

Revenue is lost in China to the illegal use of engineering software, especially 2-D and 3-D CAD. Daratech estimated that illegal users could outnumber legal users by 5 to 1. The report predicted that illegal use will decline.

according to CIMData article:

Dassault Systèmes PLM Solutions Help China’s Industries Go Green

With its digital 3D end-to-end PLM solutions, Dassault Systèmes helps manufacturers use resources more efficiently. Before producing anything in the real world, Chinese companies can design, simulate, test and produce products in 3D. This allows them to optimize a product’s technical, cost and environmental criteria, avoiding wasteful production.

So, with warm wishes to our people in China/Taiwan for great PLM success, here are some pictures from Guangzhou my phone camera captured (unfortunately only on the way to the airport… )

PLM for SMB - I can understand. PLM for a single designer? Do I need that?

PLM for SMB - I can understand

We can understand big enterprises implementing PLM. we have also learned the need and the will to implement PLM in SMB companies. But when we have a single designer working in a CAD system (and even two or three)… why do we need data management for them? they do not really need to collaborate (especially if it is a single designer ).

If we look at software development you will not be able to find any company today where it’s developers working without any software configuration management system (source safe, clear case etc.).

Why is it clear for software development and not clear in design engineering?

Did you knew that ~80% of the CAD users around the world working file based?

 

Design Data Management - I need it NOW

Let’s have a look at the challenges the designer is facing while working file based without design data management system:

Challenge #1. Inefficient manage voluminous Design Data:

• No naming convention for files

• No revision management

• No representation of design structure

• “Reinventing the wheel” – no data reuse
• Duplication of data

The implications of Inefficient manage voluminous Design Data would be:

• No standardization - File names as opposed to company policy
• Time wasted finding the desired design revision
• Working on outdated designs, which leads to errors and delays
• Expends time & resources on redundant work

Challenge #2. Impact Analysis:

• I have no impact analysis when changing a component

 

The implications of not having the ability to analysis impact would be:

• Design errors due to local changes that widely affect the design
• Errors in derived documents (drawings, NC) as a result of the change
• Time wasted on understanding the scope of the change

Challenge #3. Keep data secured:

• Data is not secured - risking in not protecting your IP and in the other hand not be able to share the data easily when needed

The implications of not having your data secured would be:

• Prevent efficient collaborative work
• Unauthorized people access protected data
• Time wasted on handling data in order to share only authorized data with suppliers.

Challenge #4. Multi CAD:

• If the company is working with several different CAD systems, Each one is managed (file based) separately. Having that managed in PLM system enables a single environment to manage all CAD systems

 

Challenge #4. Supply chain:

• Everybody today are working with suppliers or they are suppliers. so when working file based with your designs:
• How do I receive/register data from the OEM, or from your suppliers?
• How do I exchange data?
• How do I reconcile received updated data back into my design?
• How do I control my exchanged data?

 

 

For a quick and easy to use solution for design data management look at Design Express.

PLM 2008 summit in Israel - Summary

 

At 8th July the PLM 2008 summit was held in City Tower hotel, Ramat Gan, Israel.

The summit organizer has publish a summary of all session. You can find it in the following link: PLM2008 Summary

Unfortunately this summary is in Hebrew, so for those of you that do not speak Hebrew here is a translation of the summary for my session:

…”SMB companies share the same challenges as the big companies, in addition they face their unique challenges like Limited information technology (IT) resources, Limited process improvement resources, Demand for low total cost of ownership, Demand for fast business impact, Demand for minimized risk … ENOVIA SmarTeam is the leading PLM solution for the Mid-market. With 12 years in this market and more than 6200 customers world wide … it is the only solution designed especially for the Mid-market …we have taken those best practices from our 6200 customers and implemented them into the latest releases of ENOVIA SmarTeam with the express ‘quick start’ solutions. this gives a unique value to our customers getting real out-of-the-box with complete flexibility and scalability in a single system … our PLM vision includes enabling the collaboration within planning, engineering and throughout the entire organization”…

…”The Concept to Manufacturing process starts from conceptual and requirements definition, through top-down planning and specifications, re-use, change management, standard components engineering, mechanical design, electronic / electrical and software design, outsourced design, design to engineering BOM, product maturity management and release processes, engineering BOM to manufacturing BOM, production planning and release to production with exporting the manufacturing BOM to ERP”…

…”Dassault Systèmes has determine the phrase: “See What You Mean” and based on this we have taken the path from data collaboration based on trees, tables, catalogs into a 3 Dimensional experience, making it life like (as close as we can to the way it is in real life)… why don’t we see and experience things as they are… we have taken the 3D and the video games technology and make it available for PLM - real, live, on-line access to all PLM data by anyone from anywhere”…

…”This innovative interface allows the users to easily find, filter and navigate in all PLM data graphically within 3D live representations of the data…it also enables real time 3D collaboration among several participants using red lining, contextual snapshots and co-reviews… BOMs also been represented in 3D or any PLM data…it also enables innovative decision support with an easy to use compass and color 3D coding”…

 

As part of my session I have presented 3DLive and we also had live working environments in the booth for Engineering Express and 3DLive on a touch screen. you can see more details in my previous post The new PLM paradigm - 3DLive, what is it really about?

The new PLM paradigm - 3DLive, what is it really about?

As we starting to see now great enthusiasm around the world about 3DLive, I thought it will be nice to try an explain what is it really about.

3D equal Design - doesn’t it?

For years the world considered 3D as a design representation, more than that, 3D as a mechanical design only. But we know PLM is much more than just the mechanical design!

You know Dassault Systèmes is talking for years about ‘See what you mean’. Did you knew what they mean? now you should!

3DLive should not considered only as a product but as new paradigm for how we work with PLM data. Actually it is very simple, just need to look at the name:

Life like experience - The future of PLM

I am working within the PLM arena for more than 10 years and what can I say? PLM user interface is boring! Tree representations, tables with data, profile cards and meta data… and we have a viewer!!! so we can have some colors in the UI…

Think about it: what if you could navigate on PLM data as it is in real life (Now you are probably thinking ‘what is he talking about…’). yes, like in real life! let’s look at some examples:

With 3DLive you can represent all PLM data as 3D. Life Like experience! Have On-line (Real time) access to PLM. By anyone From anywhere. It is easy to use and intuitive using Search and navigate on 3D turntables. Also, enables you Live PLM Collaboration with Chats, Redlining, Snapshots and Co-review. All product information Live and In-context. But the thing I think is the killer about 3DLive would be the Decision support capability, enables graphical dashboards using a very nice and easy to use compass.

During the Product lifecycle management 2008 summit in Israel, we have demo 3DLive using a touch screen. Here is part of the scenario presented before, this time live on a touch screen with voice explanations:

3DLive is the first concept delivering PLM 2.0 as I wrote in my previous post: PLM 2.0 - PLM Online for All

Dassault Systemes Honored as 2008 Microsoft Partner of the Year for Global ISV Technology Innovation Special Recognition Award

Yesterday Microsoft award Dassault Systèmes as 2008 Microsoft Partner of the Year for Global ISV Technology Innovation Special Recognition Award.

Here is a short summary:

DS proudly announced it has won the 2008 Microsoft Partner of the Year Award for Global ISV Technology Innovation Partner of the Year Special Recognition Award.  The company was chosen out of an international field of top Microsoft Partners as delivering market-leading customer solutions built on Microsoft technology.

“Dassault Systemes’ ground breaking work in security, online collaboration, and the application of 3D modeling to geo-location distinguishes them as a true software industry innovator. Their solutions take 3D computing to a new level and show the full power of the software-plus-services strategy,” said Walid Abu-Hadba, Microsoft Corporate Vice President, Developer and Platform Evangelism.

The complete press release can be found at: http://www.3ds.com/news-events/press-releases/release/1812/1/?no_cache=1

ENOVIA SmarTeam Engineering Express - The worldwide road show…was close to your door…

2008 has been an interesting start not only for customers who decided to go for ENOVIA SmarTeam Engineering Express (SNE), but also for those who are promoting it all over the world: Naeem Dalal product marketing manager in Dassault Systèmes Israel and the solution manager of SNE, and Gilad Friedman Director of ENOVIA channel Sales, Dassault Systèmes Israel. Both guys have toured the world since February 08, delivering a one-day sales-oriented training dedicated for Sales people and project managers, followed by a 2-days technical training dedicated for Pre-sales and implementers.

The sales training focuses on the knowledge around selling the Express offering for the SMB market while discussing the main PLM challenges of these customers in the past and nowadays around their BOM management (EBOM, MBOM and more). Such experience has been acquired by the VARs who attend the training and are very knowledgeable about SmarTeam implementation.

The 2 days technical training combines a general overview of the solution, and a drill down into the “Concept to Manufacturing” process, through hands on exercises, thus showing how to execute the five major phases of the process easily and quickly using the out-of-the-box offering of ENOVIA SmarTeam Engineering Express.

The road show around the globe started in Stockholm, Sweden, then continued to North America:  Toronto, Cleveland, Detroit and LA. In AP region, the tour started in Singapore, then continued to Taipei, Beijing, Tokyo and ended up in Bangalore and Pune in India.

The tour will soon continue to Latin America, end of July!

The feedbacks so far are very positive, and attendees are very keen on starting new opportunities with SNE in their regions. Many even mentioned that they are interested in adopting some parts of the solution in their existing customer’s implementations.

Here are some of their quotes:

“I love it. We have the best platform to explain to potential customers — a lot of requests from customer will be fulfilled by the functionality of the new product. We think it is very good work; I am really impressed how fast the performance is.”

“I think it is a very good package; can’t wait to see the customers…”

“I think Express will give customers a ready-to-go solution which is quite beneficial; it is really a differentiator comparing to the competition.”

What would happen if Arthur Miller knew about PLM?

When I think about PLM, I wonder what Arthur Miller’s leading character in “All My Sons”, Joe Keller, would have done had he known about PLM systems.  “All My Sons” is an American 1947 classic script that succeeded as a play on Broadway, was made into a film (in 1948 and made-for-TV in 1986) and has been performed and studied all over the world. The story tells of Joe Keller who was cleared after being charged with shipping damaged airplane cylinder heads out of his factory during World War Two, inadvertently causing the deaths of 21 pilots, as well as his son who committed suicide after discovering his father’s guilt. For three and a half years he hid the fact that he knew about the faulty parts all along.

And so I wonder what would have happened Computer Aided Design had existed decades earlier and Joe Keller had installed a PLM system right from the start. He most likely would have detected the errors early in the design process and eliminated errors before they became fatal. He would have been able to manufacture the right cylinder parts at the right cost, and not have to lie about their quality in order to support his family.

With PLM, Arthur Miller might have lost out on an international classic, but Joe Keller would have saved money, lives, and reputation.

Thanks to Ronni Kives, thinking and writing those lines.

BOM management - are you using Excel?

If you needed to take a guess… just a guess.. what is the most common ‘enterprise’ application that is used for managing BOMs in SMB companies?

I am wondering whether this was the first thing you have thought about (I know, you can guess it from this post title )…

The most common ‘enterprise’ application that is used for managing BOMs in SMB companies is Excel

Is it the right way? why not, some of you will say… Excel is a great tool (agreed by the way…) it is easy to use, it is flexible, but is it controlled?

Let’s look at some critical data management aspects concerning BOM management:

• Look at the following picture, How to Identify the “Right” BOM? Can you help me…

• I need to change the screw, where is it used…

• What about increasing data reuse? or standardization of components? or security?

• And then… as always… what happened when I have a change…

 

So yes, using PLM to manage your BOMs will be less flexible as using excel and the reason for that will be that a PLM system will take care of your data consistency and your configuration control.

Because of the fact that BOM management is a major challenge in a lot of SMB companies and is very time consuming (time which most of those companies does not have…), we gave special attention to those challenges within our SNE solution (ENOVIA SmarTeam Engineering Express). I think the 3 most important benefits will be:

• Product/BOM Maturity management (with the configurable, embedded business logic to model your company business maturity process and conditions)
• BOM structures synchronization. to enable concurrent and controlled BOM editing (with the configurable, embedded business logic to model your company roles of moving from Design to E-BOM, from E-BOM to M-BOM, Reuse BOMs…)
• Easy to use BOM editing and compare

 

and in the end… do not forget… COLLABORATION !!!

ENOVIA SmarTeam Engineering Express (SNE) - What do people really think?

As part of my work you can imagine I am meeting a lot of customers, potential customers, resellers and PLM professionals all over the world. it is always nice to hear what they think about what we in ENOVIA SmarTeam delivers to the PLM market. I have already wrote to you about Technicom review of ENOVIA SmarTeam Engineering Express in my previous post ENOVIA SmarTeam Engineering Express Review by TechniCom.

This time I have the opportunity to give you the view of a PLM professional, Jonathan Scott.

Jonathan is a senior PLM consultant from Razorleaf Corp. and has vast experience in PLM, methodology wise and technically.

So, here is Jonathan’s view… this is what people really think…

Dassault Introduces Engineering Express (SNE)

Those of you keeping up with Dassault’s latest announcements related to ENOVIA SmarTeam have certainly heard of SmarTeam Express. This relatively new offering (first introduced on top of V5R16) is a fresh approach to PDM. Several players in the PDM market have tried to offer watered-down versions of their software in an effort to make it easy to adopt PDM. The trouble has generally been that either a) there is no easy way to get from the junior version of the software to the senior version without rip-and-replace, or b) the junior version is missing really critical capabilities (like an API or a database). For their part, Dassault chose to make their offering a streamlined, not crippled, version of ENOVIA SmarTeam. The difference is obvious; you can do anything with the Express offerings that you can do with good old ENOVIA SmarTeam – the Express version just takes some of the distractions out of the way up front.

Dassault’s first installment of the Express lineup was SDE, or SmarTeam Design Express. SDE is targeted at CAD designers and CAD workgroups, in organizations large and small. The offering is a collection of pre-configured ENOVIA SmarTeam elements, including a focused data model, some great customizations, well-designed Profile Cards, and optimized settings. The “streamlined” part of SDE is that users don’t have to think about (or even see) information in the system not related to CAD work. Project tasks, contacts, bills-of-material, and other advanced system capabilities are turned off, allowing users to focus on revision management and relationship management of CAD data. It’s important to note though that “turned off” implies that these other features can be turned on if and when the time comes.

That brings us to SNE. SNE is SmarTeam Engineering Express (SEE is a Dassault designation for another piece of software, so SNE was selected instead). SNE is built on the same data model as SDE, making it easy for new users of the system to add capabilities by removing or applying various Express behaviors and configuration elements. SNE targets the overall engineering process, as a superset of the CAD design process. If I was to offer a slogan for the combined SDE/SNE package, I would say that it, “manages product data from concept through manufacturing”. That includes change processes, BOMs, CAD data, and related documentation.

The Expresses each ship with a methodology guide describing the answers to not just the “how-to” questions, but also the “why” questions. With this, Dassault is providing a powerful tool, a quick-start approach, and best practices built right into the software. What’s really clever about SNE is the way that it incorporates more than just mechanical design. For instance, SNE includes a process for managing ECAD (electrical CAD) files and BOMs side-by-side with MCAD (mechanical CAD) and software design information. The complete product structure can be managed and manipulated in a revision controlled environment (let’s see ERP do that).

SNE contains an even larger set of useful automations and customizations than SDE. Best of all, the latest versions of these Expresses were designed to work together. So what started as a good idea, “provide a streamlined PDM tool with best practices built-in”, has become even stronger in the second addition to the Express line-up. SNE is available on top of V5R18 (at no additional cost, I should mention). Based on the successes and capabilities of SDE and SNE, I am optimistic about the value of the other Express offerings Dassault has in the works.

You can find the article also in Razorleaf web site: http://www.razorleaf.us/dotnetnuke/Newsletter/June2008/tabid/156/Default.aspx#922

PLM for SMB - who are those companies?

PLM for the mid-market

This post is in continuation to my previous post in this subject ‘Do Mid-Market companies need to adopt PLM?‘ and the question in hand is who are those mid-market companies? what are their characteristics?

I will try to specify those companies to maybe share some light on this matter.

Mid-market company in the PLM world

Unlike what we would have think, the mid-market companies develop today very complex products and need to use complex development processes (in the past we could see mid-market companies developing simpler products, but not any more) and they need to do so with fewer people. which means they face essentially the full range of challenges in the PLM world but must be much more efficient in solving those. In addition to that, they face higher competition than in the large OEMs.

Those companies are not anymore local but global (could be even in very small sites) and tend to grow faster. They are usually working across industries (if I am a mold maker for automotive probably I develop molds also for other industries) and they are in most cases part of value chains (need to exchange and collaborate with other companies, do not have responsibility to the end product end to end).

Another interesting characteristic would be the organizational structure. because of the fact that those companies tend to work in more small projects in parallel, they will use in most cases matrix organization instead of hierarchical/program organization.

You will find that the users (the engineers) are integral part of the decision making team and therefor have higher end user influence on decision makers. in general you could say that in those companies you will find more individual view versus corporate process view. This does not reduce those companies’s need to standardize their business processes. 

Those companies usually have fluctuating cash flows & unpredictable revenue stream with limited IT resources. Which leads to the fact that they did not rush to implement the traditional PLM because of low budget and low risk capacity.

Do you have the feeling we are talking about your neighbor carpentry workshop? if yes, you are wrong. We are talking about companies up to around 1 billion $ revenue…

If you find most of the characteristics above fits your company… congratulations! your company is a mid-market company and my guess will be that ENOVIA SmarTeam will fit your company PLM vision.