Razorleaf will host a multi-day event for companies interested in understanding the methodologies and capabilities behind the ENOVIA SmarTeam BOM module and Engineering Express package. Product managers from Dassault and solution architects from Razorleaf will present the software’s capabilities, demonstrate detailed methodologies, and facilitate discussions among a uniquely focused peer group. Attendees will present and share their industry-specific BOM needs, further enriching the event.

The event is a follow-up to last year’s successful BOM Summit. One attendee had this to say about BOM Summit 2008:

“I think it [the event] was invaluable, frankly. I would highly recommend that anybody come. I think that the format was extremely appropriate and had a lot of value. The information that you could focus on here without having other interruptions… I would definitely come again.”
- Maureen Murphy
Engineering Services manager at AS&E

http://www.razorleaf.com/events/bom-summit-09/

This demo — from Pattie Maes’ lab at MIT, spearheaded by Pranav Mistry — was the buzz of TED. It’s a wearable device with a projector that paves the way for profound interaction with our environment.

Go ahead and see for your self:

http://www.ted.com/talks/pattie_maes_demos_the_sixth_sense.html

You should watch this revealing video from YouTube: Did You Know?

In a closer look, What does this mean for all of us Today ?

A Student will Enter the Workforce with Virtual Friends, Transforming how we solve work challenges…

A Design Engineer will Embrace Interactivity, Transforming the way we work, entertain and travel…

A Maintenance & Repair Managers will Communicate across borders, Transforming the speed & quality of service…

A Research Scientists will Collaborate in virtual worlds, Transforming the pace of innovation…

Can you think of PLM as Communities of Innovation & Collaboration?

Can you imagine PLM creates a ‘Completely real’ Virtual World?

Can you see PLM helps you embrace the Speed of Change?

This is what PLM 2.0 is really about…

Communities of Innovation & Collaboration, acting in an end-to-end Virtual World, embracing the Speed of Change

Below is the link and full text.

http://sdcexec.com/web/online/In-Depth/PLM-for-the-Mid-market-Supply-Chain/4$11358

PLM for the Mid-market Supply Chain

A better look at a behind-the-scenes catalyst

Posted: May 21st, 2009 03:58 PM EDT

By Miki Lumnitz

In today’s global economic climate, companies around the world — from large OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) to mid-market manufacturers — face enormous challenges. It is easy to write off the problems of mid-market companies as comparatively insignificant. After all, they’re smaller; doesn’t that mean their problems are smaller too?

In reality, today’s mid-market companies’ face the same challenges as large OEMs, and they face them with fewer resources, less money and less ability to absorb risk. In addition, they have to deal with the increased competition in the mid-market, the increasing demand for a shorter product lifecycle, the pressure to develop more complex products than in the past, the management of multiple parallel projects and being part of the supply chain.

The Evolving Role of the OEM

The position of mid-market companies within the supply chain has undergone dramatic changes. OEMs, which may or may not be mid-market companies themselves, require increasingly more value, efficiency and sheer output from mid-market suppliers, and tend to deal with only the highest-level core and competitive competencies internally. For instance, in some industries, approximately 65 percent of final product development is outsourced to mid-market suppliers. Given such increased demands, suppliers need to differentiate themselves competitively by bringing specific knowledge and innovation to their products and to their relationships with the OEMs — it’s a matter of survival. If OEMs don’t see the results they need as quickly as required, they’ll gladly replace one supplier with another, or possibly shrink the supply chain altogether. Add to that the unpredictability of other suppliers’ actions (which affect the entire chain), and it’s clear that PLM isn’t a luxury — it’s a necessity.

The role of the OEM is changing. Ten years ago, the OEM controlled the entire supply chain and maintained all the specifics of product development in-house. Suppliers were part of an indelible hierarchy, with efficiency viewed as happenstance, not as an overarching value. As time went by and technology advanced, OEMs saw the benefit of collaborating with tier-one suppliers who were responsible for major product components. This trend hasn’t slowed — it has progressed from involving the traditional supply chain hierarchy to networks of suppliers.

The consequence of this change is that OEMs can no longer dictate the systems and methodologies used by their suppliers, as they are connected to multiple OEMs and to other companies. In the future we will undoubtedly see more and more networks of suppliers exchanging intellectual property with multiple OEMs across industries and with each other.

PLM Adoption in the Mid-market

For the large OEMs of the world the use of product lifecycle management (PLM) is practically a standard. However, in the mid-market — the segment that contains the vast majority of the world’s manufacturers — the use of PLM is not as prevalent.

In order to succeed and thrive, high-tech/industrial mid-market suppliers have to innovate and develop new products faster (with a target time-to-market projection of three to six months for the high-tech industry) and streamline operations and communications. They need to achieve global development excellence and increase efficiency by leveraging core competencies of the value chain and ensure on-time, on-cost and good-quality product delivery. They must also integrate regulatory compliance into product lifecycle processes to reduce business risk and sell products in global markets.

Adopting PLM isn’t a chore that companies must complete; it is a way to increase innovation and stay competitive. Product lifecycle management helps streamline business and development processes, especially with regard to collaborative engineering, standardization, mechatronics (multi-disciplinary product development integrating mechanical, electrical/electronic and software components that require unified bill-of-materials management — a "single version of the truth"), change management, components engineering and IP reuse. The resulting benefits are substantial:

• Increased product innovation: By adopting new product introduction NPI methodology within a single engineering platform, from concept to manufacturing.
• Global product development excellence: By leveraging streamlined global innovation networks and concurrent multi-disciplinary mechatronics product development.
• Improved profitability: By leveraging existing products/components and creating modular new products that facilitate re-use in multiple applications.
• Shortened time-to-market and improved ROI: By lowering development, manufacturing and purchasing costs while delivering improved product performance.
• Increased control on costs, quality and delivery dates: By integrating quality and change management processes and enabling real-time decision making for all levels.
• Ensured customer satisfaction: By being demand-driven and integrating customer requirements and specifications throughout the engineering process.

The PLM vision is wide and can touch almost every hidden corner of a company. This is why a phased approach is recommended, otherwise known as: "start small and grow as you go." It’s like eating a sandwich: You’re better off taking small bites in an orderly succession, rather than to try to eat the entire thing in one bite and risk choking. Product lifecycle management should undo process clogs, not create them.

Based on past experience, most mid-market companies start preparing themselves for PLM deployment by managing their design environment. They do this by creating a solid PLM foundation with computer-aided design (CAD) data and product data, and then they expand their implementation to cover the process from concept to manufacturing using an "item-centric" approach (including collaboration around the bill of materials (BOM) and process/change management), based on the same modular PLM platform. After making sure these elements are in place, PLM can be integrated with other enterprise processes through global collaboration and effective decision-making processes.

The greater the scale of the deployment, the greater the benefits are and, hopefully, the greater the adoption/acceptance by end-users. Starting the deployment from concept to manufacturing will attract the most end-users to the process (who will see the value of collaboration) and will spur user acceptance. Even if for each business process you initially choose to deploy the most simple and intuitive solution, and not necessarily the most advanced one available, you’ll succeed and grow as you go within the same PLM platform. Your initial focus should be on managing the process and getting people on board. Once you’ve completely taken care of that, then go ahead and gradually bring more advanced, complex solutions into the fold.

Real-world Example

As an example, let’s review Pentair Water, a company that opted to create a collaborative PLM global environment using ENOVIA SmarTeam’s solution. The major motivating factor for Pentair’s decision to deploy PLM was the need for the company to unite its many worldwide branches — especially in China and India — and to create synergies among its largely autonomous divisions. Up to that point Pentair had been distributing product data by express shipping CDs, e-mailing massive files or uploading information to non-secure FTP servers. All three of these methods posed an extreme risk to security, data consistency and speed. Pentair decided to implement PLM to reduce business risks and lower the overhead involved in meeting product quality standards.

Ultimately, Pentair executives used the PLM solution to address four needs: a common 3D design system, a single centralized data repository with a common model, a collaborative platform capable of supporting multiple locations, and a common approach to business process management.

The results the company has seen have been positive. Having a single source of data and a consistent data model with revision and version management allows multiple Pentair designers to simultaneously collaborate on a project, cutting design cycles in half while improving quality. Because PLM allows the company to avoid redundancy in its designs, Pentair has seen fewer mistakes overall and a decrease in the number of changes made at the tooling stage — when they’re the most expensive. Product lifecycle management has also cut down on wasted time searching through databases for information that may not exist and has improved collaboration between U.S. offices and manufacturing centers in China and India. PLM has become Pentair’s main solution for supply chain management, customer service, quality, production and purchasing.

PLM and Emerging Industries

The benefits from adopting PLM are tangible across all industries, but not all companies in all industries are currently mature enough in how they view PLM to effectively adopt it. When we look at the PLM market (especially in the mid-market), analyzing it within a technology wave, it’s rather difficult to determine whether it’s in a "growth" phase or "maturity" phase. A closer look at segmentation is necessary to make that call. Companies from some of the manufacturing sector’s "traditional" industries (automotive, aerospace & defense, industrial equipment, high-tech, energy & process, shipbuilding, consumer goods) tend to be ready to adopt PLM, while other manufacturing industries (consumer packaged goods, construction, medical devices) aren’t so easy to read.

The markets that many would define as being emerging industries (including apparel, pharmaceuticals and business services) are still in their respective "growth" phases. This means that most of those companies in the mid-market will be ready to adopt PLM only after several years. This puts the pressure on the aforementioned "traditional" manufacturing companies to adopt PLM as they already face competitors that have implemented PLM and thus have an advantage over them.

Companies within the emerging industries, on the other hand, should understand that if they can successfully adopt PLM before their competition, they can jump ahead in their market, bringing more innovative products to the forefront in shorter amounts of time, using quicker development strategies and making better use and reuse of their company’s intellectual property.

Obviously, deploying PLM will require a culture change within the company. The challenges involved in implementing PLM will be minimal, provided that the selected solution delivers industry best practices and modular out-of-the-box packages; offers the flexibility and openness required to fine-tune the out-of-the-box packages in accordance with existing company process; and most importantly, ensures a low total cost of ownership. After all, streamlining your mid-market company’s product lifecycle management should not break the bank.

As final note, the current economic situation in the global market is indeed a momentous challenge, but it is also a huge opportunity. By the time it ends, some companies will have disappeared, but others will be there, armed with dedication to innovation and a willingness to evolve. Product lifecycle management can help your company see future opportunities that transcend current challenges.

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:

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

PLM isn’t just for big companies anymore

By Ed Miller, president, CIMdata Inc. — Manufacturing Business Technology,02/24/2009

Historically, product life-cycle management (PLM) was practical mostly for large, distributed enterprises with the extensive resources needed to invest in and deploy the systems, understand the approach, improve the technologies, validate benefits, and establish organizational practices to make PLM effective. Companies that originally invested in PLM often were the big OEMs in industries such as automotive and aerospace, with complex global facilities and far-reaching supply chains.
For the most part, PLM solutions for these large organizations are all-encompassing enterprise systems focused on issues that affect multiple domains such as program management, engineering, manufacturing, purchasing, asset management, and quality. Typical functionality includes program management; CAD file management, CAD integrations, bill-of-material (BOM) and bill-of-information (BOI) creation and management, document management, visualization, strategic sourcing, and extensive workflow management capabilities to automate various complex processes.
Recognizing a tremendous market potential, PLM suppliers have and are continuing to adapt these same capabilities for small and midsize companies that aren’t content to let PLM remain the domain of industry behemoths. These smaller companies desire the same support for global collaboration and creation of innovative approaches to their own product development problems.
Although these companies have many of the same requirements for PLM as their larger counterparts, they also have these differing characteristics:
• Limited information technology (IT) resources;
• Limited process improvement resources;
• Demand for low total cost of ownership;
• Demand for fast business impact; and
• Demand for minimized risk.
As a result, PLM for small and midsize companies must be provided in the form of:
• Cost-effective solutions (software and services) with low initial cost, and low ongoing costs;
• Limited installation/implementation support requirements to reach production operation; and
• Packaged solutions with pre-configured processes to provide templates and guidance in achieving best practices with the solutions.
For small and mid-sized companies that design or engineer simple parts or components, configuration management support typically isn’t a critical PLM requirement. As a result, with these types of companies PLM solutions are implemented to support data vault management, workflow automation, and applications that sustain specific needs in the engineering or manufacturing process—e.g., change management, engineering release and quality assurance.
For companies that design or engineer medium to highly complex products such as engines, turbines or machine tools, these capabilities often are supplemented with configuration management support.
PLM solutions for small and midsize companies are delivered to such companies from various suppliers. Major PLM players all have such systems, generally licensed and supported by networks of value added resellers (VAR). In addition, smaller niche PLM providers and regional suppliers often are aimed primarily at small and midsize companies, frequently in certain industries.
Key factors for small and midsize enterprises to consider include the ability to deliver out-of-the-box applications and easily tailored solutions based on best practices that support the organization’s product and process related information creation and management requirements.
Above all, the PLM solution must be simple enough to be clearly and easily understood. If not, companies should keep looking for a solution that meets their basic requirements. Such a search takes time and effort, but the work soon pays off in benefits that give competitive advantage to forward-looking companies of all sizes that implement PLM.

www.mbtmag.com/plmblog

Jim Brown

One-to-One: SmarTeam and the Small to Midsize Manufacturer
January 9, 2009

I had the chance to talk with … some of my friends at SmarTeam the other day about their support of small to midsize businesses (SMB). To be proper, these are my friends from Dassault Systemes ENOVIA SmarTeam which is a part of the ENOVIA set of solutions. But to me, it will always be SmarTeam. They laid out a very well thought through approach to helping smaller manufacturing companies achieve PLM benefits despite some of the inherent challenges of the SMB. Given this continued strategy, I expect that SmarTeam will have continued success in the SMB market, and more importantly their customers will have more successes with their PLM strategies.
What’s Special about SMB?
SmarTeam understands the challenges that smaller businesses face when they approach an initiative like PLM. In fact, they quoted some of my benchmark work from Aberdeen Group back to me in helping describe, which is always interesting when you see how companies use your research in practice. Some of the key points that SmarTeam recognizes about SMB are: 

• Differences in Organizational Structure – for example, individuals tend to wear more hats and operate in much flatter organization structures
• Finance and Risk – clearly, these companies don’t have the same resources that their larger competitors do, and are willing to accept much less risk in their initiatives
• Processes – these companies frequently do not have the same enforcement of standardized processes that larger companies do, and tend to be more dynamic by nature

What do They Offer the SMB?
Why is it important that SmarTeam understands the environment SMBs work in? It’s not, unless SmarTeam is willing to tailor their solutions to help companies overcome these barriers to implementing PLM. SmarTeam’s "Express" offerings are designed to do just that. These Express offerings are designed to offer: 

• Out-of-the-box functionality – standard best practices and engineering methodologies 
• Modularity and Scalability – the ability to implement only the functionality needed, with the ability to add in new capabilities readily in the future 
• Low TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) – low cost to procure the software, but also to implement and maintain it

The approach that SmarTeam takes fits very well with the concept of the PLM Program approach to Implementing PLM. For any company, but particularly for a smaller company, it is important to pick and choose the right sequence of PLM initiatives based on company strategy. Companies have seen the most success, according to my benchmark research at Aberdeen and my personal experience, when they develop a PLM strategy but then implement it in smaller, incremental steps. This is exactly the approach that SmarTeam is trying to support by providing a scalable solution that incorporates best practices for common processes like change management or design collaboration, and provides an infrastructure that can be leveraged to add in new capabilities over time. This helps to reduce project risk and to allow smaller investments with shorter payback, so the PLM Program can pay for itself as it progresses through a series of reasonably sized, predictable projects. Couple that with a Microsoft-centric architecture to reduce risk and total cost, and it sounds like a very good option for smaller companies.

The Challenge…

In the Ideal World you would expect companies to invest today for future profitability and growth.

But today’s economic arena is not ideal… with the current global crisis you can see business slowdown – decrease in incoming orders and projects, decrease in credit and funding – Where to spend the next $ and companies are saving Money – Projects stopped? Layoffs?

When a company experiencing layoffs, it has critical impact on the company soundness. People layoffs cause losing of IP (Intellectual Property) and delivering less innovation. In time… this causes losing the company competitive edge.

So…

Is it all bad? All we can do is just wait?

At 2002 The The McKinsey Quarterly published a research called: Learning to love recessions written by Richard F. Dobbs, Tomas Karakolev and Francis Malige.

“To see how recessions can be used to advantage, we studied nearly 1,000 mainly industrial US companies over an 18-year period (1982–99) that included the US recession of 1990 to 1991.

1. We identified companies that either remained industry leaders … or became successful challengers…

2. We then investigated the attributes of successful companies, both during the recession and in healthier economic times.”

Look at what they have found out:

“Most companies battened down the hatches during the recession of the early ’90s. But the more successful competitors pressed their advantages.”

“…successful leaders, seeking to extend their position through innovation…”

The Opportunity… PLM

The recommended strategy for those days would be…

Invest today in whatever will bring you the biggest value to maintain your competitive edge and drive you to sustainable revenue growth once the uncertain times have past

Here is a news flash!!! – The crisis will end!!!

It will take 1-2-3 years but the crisis will end. The question that each company should ask itself should be: Where will I be when the crisis will be over?

Some companies will not be there when the crisis will be over. Some will still be there but will not be able to revive. and some… will be there… with a competitive edge that will make them rise over all the competitors. Those that will use the hard times to be prepared for the day it will end. Those will be the new leaders.

PLM gives you just that. in those tough times, PLM is the enabler for you to make it happened:

• Manage and capture IP !

• Streamline processes !

• Increase innovation while reducing costs !

… and… manage your risk during the crisis

Be there… ready… with a competitive edge

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):