ENOVIA SmarTeam Express PLM Solutions Help Mid-Market Companies Innovate During Economic Downturn

In one of my latest posts I have wrote about the current economic downturn and Today’s Dilemma… Where and how to invest the next $…

Few day ago a new white paper was published by Tech-Clarity, offers action plan and insight for Manufacturers to achieve efficiencies and productivity Gains… entitled: ‘Innovating Through an Economic Downturn: A PLM Action Plan for Small to Mid-Size Manufacturers Facing Difficult Times.‘ Following interviews with several DS ENOVIA SmarTeam customers, this paper provides a set of recommended guidelines for small-to-mid-sized companies, including investment in a well-planned, step-by-step approach to Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) that will enable organizations to achieve efficiencies and productivity gains during the downturn and prepare them to rapidly respond to new opportunities as they arise in the recovering economy.

Here is a summary presentation of this subject:

The Smart Angle – Your PLM Strategy in Facing Today’s Economic Challenges

and here is a quick summary of the Tech-Clarity white paper ‘Innovating Through an Economic Downturn: A PLM Action Plan for Small to Mid-Size Manufacturers Facing Difficult Times.‘:

In today’s climate of reduced budgets, experience has shown that when companies invest in product innovation, product development and engineering process improvement, they are building the foundation for future success. ENOVIA SmarTeam, a leading provider of PLM to the mid-market with over 7000 customers worldwide, has packaged its PLM expertise and experience into quick-to-deploy, preconfigured best practice Express offerings that give small and mid-sized manufacturers maximum value for their PLM investment.

Small and mid-sized manufacturers that have embraced this approach have cut a clear path to ensuring their continued operations and strength due to the improvements they achieved with their PLM strategy. Industrial equipment and consumer goods manufacturer Werner Company, consumer goods and industrial electronics company SEC Lighting and aerospace industry supplier Weaver Manufacturing indicate in the paper how by implementing modular, affordable and phased ENOVIA SmarTeam PLM solutions they have made internal process improvements during downturns in their business cycles that have prepared them for the current economic downturn as well as for future opportunities.

Illustrating the efficiencies gained through adopting ENOVIA SmarTeam‘s PLM solutions, Roman Vachal, marketing manager for SEC Lighting remarked, ‘Our product development speed is much faster, and we found time and cost savings because we need fewer people for product-related documents and data. Improving our data management eliminated defective products, production errors and claims caused by human errors during development and production stages.’

‘For manufacturers, a normal reaction to an economic contraction is to scale back operations, invest less on process improvement and cut product development and innovation, yet my research and ENOVIA SmarTeam customers’ practical experience has shown that a continued investment in product and process innovation pays off in the short and long term,’ said Jim Brown, founder and president of Tech-Clarity.

In a webcast to be hosted by ‘Managing Automation’ on 3 June, Jim Brown of Tech-Clarity will discuss the paper’s findings and share his recommendations to small and mid-sized manufacturers on how to thrive despite the economic downturn. Weaver Manufacturing will be on-hand to relate to their experiences as recounted in the paper.

The Tech-Clarity white paper ‘Innovating through an Economic Downturn: A PLM Action Plan for Small to Mid-Size Manufacturers Facing Difficult Times‘ is available for download and web cast registration from:

http://www.tech-clarity.com/overviews/innovate_economy.htm

NPI and PLM

When we talk about PLM we usually talk about Concept to Manufacturing or even Concept to Service / Retire business process. so how do NPI fits in? is it part of PLM implementation.

What is NPI?

NPI – New Product Introduction or NPD – New Product Development or even NPDI – New Product Development & Introduction as defined in Wikipedia:

The complete process of bringing a new product or service to market. There are two parallel paths involved in the NPD process: one involves the idea generation, product design, and detail engineering; the other involves market research and marketing analysis. Companies typically see new product development as the first stage in generating and commercializing new products within the overall strategic process of product life cycle management used to maintain or grow their market share.

So what is the difference between PLM process and NPI process? Is NPI part of PLM?

NPI deliver methodology of how to control the PLM process, from Concept to Manufacturing. Not from the individual item view, but from the high level project view.

NPI is a Phase-Gate approach: for each PLM phase I have a GATE, in order to pass a GATE I need to meet several predecessors.

 

Usually companies will create a procedure and a check list of the predecessors needs to be met in order to pass each gate, then a manual control process is been implemented to manually signoff each gate checklist form.

As we believe your PLM system should offer you a simple way to manage complex processes and enabling you to grow with your PLM implementation based on your maturity and schedule, we believe your PLM system should offer you 2 solution levels to meet NPI:

• The basic solution aim to replace the manual procedure with an electronic one:

A project plan has a GATE control business process, in order to approve a GATE you need to complete checklist of tasks (replacing the manual GATE checklists)

NPI Phase-Gate Workflow within ENOVIA SmarTeam demo:

 

• The more advanced approach will be to manage the complete NPI process with all tasks, predecessors, successors, dependences and due-dates.

This will be managed within a NPI program management approach. like in every complex process implementation, end-users acceptance is critical. This is why we believe each user should work from within his native user environment. The project manager should control the NPI program from within MS project and the team members (the engineers) need to work from within the PLM system. This enables full control of the user tasks, deliverables and attachments for each task. this will also enables connecting item release processes and ECOs into the NPI program tasks

NPI program management within ENOVIA SmarTeam demo (part 1):

NPI program management within ENOVIA SmarTeam demo (part 2):

Which industries would benefit more from adopting PLM?

The benefits from adopting PLM are touchable across all industries, but not all companies in all industries are currently mature enough in how they view PLM in order to adopt it. When we look at the PLM market (especially in the Mid-market), analyzing it within a technology wave. You will find that it is very hard to determine whether it is in ‘Growth’ phase or ‘Maturity’ phase. It is clear that a closer look and segmentation is needed in order to determine maturity of the market. When analyzing that you will find that companies from the manufacturing traditional industries (Automotive, Aerospace & Defense, Industrial equipment, High-tech, Energy & process, Shipbuilding, Consumer goods) are more mature to adopt PLM, next are the rest of the manufacturing industries (consumer packaged goods, Construction, Medical devices). The industries which we name as the emerging industries (Apparel, Pharma, Business services) are still in ‘Growth’ phase, and it means most of them in the Mid-market will be mature to adopt PLM only in several years. So, companies in the manufacturing industries must adopt PLM, their competition already doing that!. Companies within the emerging industries should understand that ‘The sooner the better’, adopt PLM before the competition and gain advantage in the market – more innovative products to the market, shorter time to market, shorter development process, better usage of the company IP (Intellectual Property) and the ability to reuse it while innovating.

PLM at high-tech/industrial mid-market companies

When looking at high-tech/industrial mid-market companies, in order to succeed in this market Those companies have to innovate new products faster (time to market of 3-6 months in high-tech), streamline operations and collaboration. They need to achieve global development excellence and efficiency by leveraging core competencies of the value chain to ensure on-time, on-cost and quality product delivery. Integrate regulatory compliance into product lifecycle processes to reduce business risk and sell products in global markets.

In order to achieve that, adopting PLM will streamline their processes especially across the following areas:

• Requirements & Specifications
• Collaborative Engineering
• Standardization  & IP Reuse
• Mechatronics – Multi-disciplinary product development integrating mechanical, electrical/electronic and software components
• Business Processes & Change Management
• Standard components Engineering
• Linkage between product development and Project Management
• Real-time Collaboration & IP exchange internally and across the value chain and the eco-system

The main benefits those companies will see are:

• Increase product innovation – By adopting NPI methodology within a single engineering platform, from concept to manufacturing
• Encourage global product development excellence – By leveraging streamlined global Innovation Networks and concurrent multi-disciplinary mechatronics product development
• Improve profitability – By leveraging existing products/components and creating modular new products that facilitate re-use in multiple applications
• Shorten time to market and improve return on investment – By lowering development, manufacturing and purchasing costs while delivering improved product performance
• Increase control on costs, quality and delivery dates – By integrating quality and change management processes and enable real-time decision making for all levels
• Ensure 100 percent customer satisfaction – By operate demand-driven and Integrate customer requirements and specifications throughout the engineering process

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 !!!

Manufacturing in PLM

PLM has a role in manufacturing?

We all know and understand the strategic role PLM is playing in design and engineering, during the development process from concept to manufacturing (up to manufacturing, not included). Manufacturing sounds to most of us as an ERP arena. Is it true? does PLM ends when a product development is released from engineering?

Before we talk more about the PLM role in the manufacturing world we should agree on the main role PLM and ERP are playing in our organizations. In my days as a customer (working at ELTA systems Ltd.), implementing PLM, I had a lot of visits from other companies wanted to learn about a successful PLM implementation. One of the main questions always were (especially from companies already have ERP implemented) what are the differences, where is the line between PLM and ERP?

The line between PLM and ERP

To my perspective this line is very clear. PLM is about managing the knowledge! ERP is about execution!

ERP is about maximize profits while PLM is about increasing innovation.

I will end this section with a quote from another post by Laila Hirr, The Key Differences between PLM and ERP in meeting corporate objectives:

“…it is a myth to believe that the systems designed to manage your physical inventory with rigor and structure, could be manipulated to become the flexible systems needed to foster innovation. The PLM vendors don’t even pretend to do the business of ERP systems – why is it that ERP systems believe they know how innovation in design should be managed?”

When understanding this, it is clear that also the knowledge of the manufacturing process itself needs to be managed in PLM. The execution of the manufacturing process will be in ERP.

Manufacturing in PLM scope

So, what is the scope of manufacturing support that needed in PLM?

1. Production engineering ‘Release to Manufacturing’

• Manufacturing BOM management
• from Engineering BOM to Manufacturing BOM
• Maturity management
• BOP – Bill of Process management
• Tooling
• Assembling Instructions
• Maintenance Instructions
• Work Instructions (Root Card)
• CAM data management
• NC Management
• FT&A
• Part & Assembly Management
• Operational Sequence (Instance BOM)
• Plant, Station, Operations management
• Resources and Tools management

2. Digital Manufacturing & Production

3. Prototyping

3. “As Shipped” BOM – Packaging BOM

4. “As Build” BOM – Serialized structures

ENOVIA SmarTeam Engineering Express Review by TechniCom

TechniCom has published at 19/06/2008 a software review for ENOVIA SmarTeam Engineering Express the report was written by Ray Kurland. This report was published in ‘CAD-PORTAL for engineering professionals’:

Here is a short summary from the report, you can find in the end the link to the full report.

Enjoy :

“In my opinion, SmarTeam Engineering Express delivers an economical, robust, quick-start scenario for item-centric PLM, including workflow processes, quickly extending collaborative benefits across engineering disciplines. It is part of a family offering from ENOVIA SmarTeam that includes Design Express, as well as the full SmarTeam offerings.”

“Taking a data management product to the step beyond design management is difficult. While design data includes the necessary parts and assemblies of the product, the design is often discipline dependent and not knowledgeable about the manufacturing processes required. Discipline dependent means that the designs from other than mechanical systems need to be incorporated into the final product. These typically include control systems and logic, electronics, and software. In my opinion, SmarTeam Engineering Express delivers on these needs with an economical, robust, quick-start scenario for item-centric PLM, including workflow processes, quickly extending collaborative benefits across engineering disciplines. It is part of a family offering from ENOVIA SmarTeam that includes Design Express, as well as the full SmarTeam offerings.
For the mid-size customer, SmarTeam has a unique position in the industry. It supports multiCAD systems from the major vendors. SmarTeam Engineering Express was specifically designed for mid-size customers, is highly CAD centric, supports collaboration both inside and outside an enterprise, manages items and BOMs particularly well, uses pre-defined best practices workflows, requires easy administration, easily expands to more PLM capabilities, such as standard compliance, supply chain management, implementation for multi-site organizations and more, can be rapidly installed, and can easily interface to any ERP system, such as SAP, Oracle, and others. Its primary competitors, Teamcenter Express and Windchill, both began life as large scale PLM systems and both retain some of their large scale heritage, meaning they are more difficult to install and operate than SmarTeam, are more difficult to customize, do not support the same level of out-of-the-box offering, EBOM synchronization, MBOM synchronization and more.”

for the full report:

http://www.cad-portal.com/articles/article_images/90/SmarteamEngXprs_article.pdf

Components Engineering

I have recently visited several companies (in the E&E industry, but I think this post will be relevant not only for those). Each one of them sees in standard components management a big challenge. The amazing thing is that most of the PLM vendors in the market do not take this issue seriously (otherwise each one of them would have been already delivered a ready to use, best practice for this challenge…)

Do not worry… I know one vendor that does take it seriously…

So, first what is the issue: In order to streamline work between the engineering department (working with PLM) and the purchasing department (working mainly with the ERP system) and in order to control the standard components that are approved for the engineers to use, it is important to manage the manufacturer assignments within the engineering environment (PLM). Companies should not depend on a single manufacturer to supply the standard items as such a
dependency will not allow the company to negotiate over the item’s cost price. More than one manufacturer may supply the same item to the company with different prices and levels of quality levels.

For electronic components, the same manufacturer may produce the same functional item in different qualities. In such a case, the same manufacturer can supply more than one item to the company. These “external” items are referred to as “Manufacturer items”, and the company needs to decide how to manage them internally.
The list of manufacturers that are approved to supply a certain item is known as “Approved Manufacturer
List” or “AML”. This list is proposed by the engineers and defined by the components engineers, as they can decide on the functional data of their internal items.
The importance of such a definition is that the purchaser now is able to review the AML without the need of the engineer, and the engineer has the correct and valid data to decide on the standard components he will use in the product structure.

In fact, you can find several best practices to manage components engineering:

1. Manufacturer items directly linked to the BOM
   In this approach, the manufacturer item numbers are the only ones managed for standard/purchased components. The manufacturer item number is manually defined in the item data. The manufacturer will be defined for the item as part of the item definition.
2. Manufacturer items as a link between the company standard item and the manufacturer
   This case is similar to the previous one, but the manufacturer information is defined on the relation between the item and its manufacturer(s).
   The manufacturer item number will be stored on the relation between the company item and the manufacturer.
3. The company standard items are linked in the BOM, Manufacturer items are linked to them
   In this approach, the manufacturer item is defined with its own data and relevant attachments
   such as data sheets, drawings etc.
   This approach enables various manufacturer items to be linked to the company standard item (with the different priority) for the same manufacturer. This approach also enables much robust methodology when you need to change/replace manufacturer item because of obsolesces for example.

If you ask me, the best approach is #3, but any of those are OK and valid.

You can have a look at an example how this is been solved within the PLM system. Obviously from the only one takes it seriously…