The Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) application landscape available today, for engineering and manufacturing organizations, has evolved from the traditional CAx and PDM centric applications, extending to manufacturing, and enabling enterprise level collaboration and key cross functional processes. In most of the industries today, very significant business needs are global engineering -- teams involved in different stages of the product development are dispersed across the globe; regulatory compliance with large number of product variants; management of complex mix of mechanical, electrical and electronics elements; and standardization of manufacturing processes.
The way major PLM product companies have architected their new generation PLM suites, and the fact that these companies now work closely with the specialist PLM services providers and system integrators, presents a lot of interesting opportunities for both the CTO of the user enterprises as well as for the CIO, whose mandate is to provide an efficient and cost effective IT backbone. Let's look at the key aspects for the CTO in this article.
What PLM means to the CTO today?
Basic Engineering Data Management
Product R&D and design occurs in multiple countries, with teams spread across the time zones adopting concurrent engineering. To build a differentiation, organizations need to capture, manage, and leverage their global engineering data as intellectual assets. Much of these data repositories are deployed in the country of origin, where the other global teams find it difficult to effectively leverage due to synchronization issues, latency and from being unsure. The new age PLM systems bring in much needed maturity to enable consistent Engineering Data Management, collaboration and visualization of different CAD formats. This leads to a detailed examination of the way the enterprise is organized to work with engineering assets, and because it addresses data structures, it leads to questions about product structures. This in many ways is good, as it makes the enterprise address a series of complex, cross-functional and inter-related issues about products, processes, data, systems, workflows, procedures, and organizational structures. We have worked with CTO organizations to contain the complexity of PLM implementations, and see benefits in shorter cycles, by focusing on the Engineering Data Management requirements in the global scenario, with a view on the roadmap to leverage the PLM system for more process coverage.
Cross Functional Processes
New age PLM solutions today provide capabilities extending from the core functions of engineering data management, to process management applications, to cross functional process solutions. These enable the CTO organization to effectively leverage all domain teams and supply chain partners for both engineering and operational efficiency. The key cross functional process enablement through new age PLM that has the highest attention today from all stakeholders -- user enterprises, PLM product providers and system integrators, are probably quality management, systems engineering, and manufacturing process planning. These functionalities are available in leading PLM suites out-of-the-box or are enabled by the framework that the PLM platform provides.
Product Quality Management across global supply chains is clearly a key cross functional process and involves steps like QFD, FMEA, PPAP, CAPA and more that need to align with the new product development lifecycle, for diverse markets. So, we are talking about multiple functions -- marketing, requirements, product definition, product engineering, quality and manufacturing engineering.
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