Why Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) is Important
“Where was that file again?” “I thought I already told you about that issue.” “I made the changes to REV B, I didn’t know there was a REV C.” If any of these situations sound familiar, then you can benefit from product lifecycle management (PLM). By providing you with the tools that facilitate proper practices, you’ll save time, money, and hair, all while getting your product to market faster.
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Product Lifecycle Management, also known as PLM, is a system that helps organizations keep track and control all their products and processes. This generally combines the power of various other processes such as product data management (PDM), quality management, project collaboration, and more. The benefits of PLM can be seen in all aspects of an organization; from engineering and manufacturing to purchasing, suppliers, and beyond.
There are numerous advantages to using a product lifecycle management, but some of the top benefits to a PLM system are increased productivity and quality, centralization through a single source of truth, reduction of your product’s time to market, and ease of scaling your organization.
According to a study carried out by Tech-Clarity, Engineers spend approximately 32% of their time on non-value-added work. This includes activities such as searching for information, collecting data for others, recreating lost data, and incorporating changes made by others. PLM systems help account for these issues by providing advanced search capabilities, protecting data from accidental deletion, providing everyone with controlled access to the needed data, and so much more.
There are a couple different aspects to improving quality. First, some PLM systems will allow you to tag data with issues. This helps prevent something from being swept under the rug, only to be rediscovered during production, or even worse, post production. The second aspect is reduced errors due to overall improved collaboration. A good PLM system helps facilitate collaboration between multiple branches of an organization, allowing issues to be discovered earlier in the product development process.
The concept of a single source of truth (SSOT) is when all aspects of an organization are carrying out decisions on the same data. Any secondary operations are referenced back to the original data. For example, a product is generated in a CAD program, an FEA study is then set up using that model, next the NC programmer uses that to program their CNC for manufacturing, lastly, the marketing team uses it for creating renderings. Now the CAD model changes. Without a single source of truth, all those processes downstream would now have an out-of-date copy. By using a single source of truth, they would all be referencing the original, flagged as out of date, and allow for a quick update. This is beneficial for both time savings and quality assurance. For some organizations, they can branch out to several additional teams than those mentioned, further extending the benefits.
A good PLM system will have all the tools needed to facilitate the centralization of your data to allow for this single source of truth. With the advancement of cloud PLM options, it’s easier than ever to set this up for your organization, even if you have people in multiple locations!
The combined effort of the previous benefits ultimately results in an accelerated lifecycle and reduced time to market. Cutting out non-value-added activities, such as searching for or recreating data, and preventing setbacks by avoiding quality issues provides significant time savings on a per user basis. Uniting everyone in the organization with the single source of truth helps improve collaboration and resolve issues earlier while preventing lost time working on out-of-date data. Reducing your time to market means you get to spend more time innovating new products, resulting in higher revenue.
With all the time available to innovate, and increased revenue, your organization will soon have a need to scale. You’ll have increased staff, increased production, and an ever-growing number of innovations to manage. Once you add people to your team, you can provide them controlled access to the data they need in your PLM system. As production increases and you began to expand with suppliers, you can provide direct controlled access to the desired data to help collaborate and prevent delays due to back and forth communications or requests for data. Lastly, as your product line begins to expand, PLM systems are designed to help facilitate the reuse of your existing data.
Conclusion
Oftentimes, organizations tend to delay moving forward with a PDM or PLM system out of fear of change or because they’re too busy. Both the time and monetary investment of a proper PLM system can quickly make up for itself. A cloud PLM system can address some of these concerns by reducing the upfront costs of server hardware and maintenance and accelerate implementation times. Plus, it expands on some of the benefits discussed by being extremely flexible, allowing you to give new users instant access to the desired data and provide collaboration abilities regardless of a user’s location. 3DEXPERIENCE provides a cloud PLM solution powered by ENOVIA tools, making enterprise level capabilities available to everyone. Plus, it’s an out of the box solution, meaning you’ll have the tools to get started with industry standard practices on day one and configure it your needs.
Contact us today to discuss the benefits that PLM can provide to your organization.