PLM: Why product life cycle?

PLM once started as an Engineering Data Management: a tool for engineers. What is the added value of product life cycle management for the engineer? After all the constructor’s task is to design a workable product that complies with the sales requirements. That task ends when releasing the design.

It might have been a long time ago, but the world has changed considerably in the meantime.

Until far into the last century, the economy was mainly based on mass production: By making large numbers of identical products, labor costs could be saved with far-reaching mechanization. A product design often took years.  As soon as a new design went into production, engineering could begin to design the next generation. They had then about 3 years the time. After that, production could still spend one or two years to rework the working design into a workable design and then the cycle was finished.

Under the influence of the rapidly evolving information technology, the speed of change has increased dramatically. While the constructors were based on the first CAD systems, production was in the process of CAM: Computer aided manufacturing. By replacing the control of machines with Cam discs with computer-controlled actuators, the ability to switch to a different product type in the time of a few minutes was created, which used to cost days. Thereby smaller production series became economically attainable and could run more variants side by side on the same line. As a result, the number of variants from which the customer could choose increased and the commercial life cycle became shorter: the number of new designs that had to deliver product development multiplied. Not only it was needed to deliver more, it also had to be faster. The term time-to-market came into vogue. By having a new product on the market faster than the competition, a higher price could be counted. The downside was that the next product generation had to be designed before the previous production was finished. Learning from the feedback was therefore a lot harder and had to be organized specifically by registering customer user experiences and linking it back to development.

Of course, multiplying the number of constructors was not an option, so the design productivity had to rise. Because you can’t keep up working faster, we had to work smarter and 3D-CAD, in combination with PLM, was a great enabler. First of all, CAD made re-use a lot easier: by keeping as many components as possible between variants and generations, the design effort for a new variant or generation could be greatly reduced. In addition, a PLM system proved to be very useful as a logistic system for the design process. After all, each new version and any status change thereof is recorded by the PLM system, which also knows the lifecycle of each type of document and thus always knows who should perform the next action. Just as ERP could shorten the turnaround time of the production process by a factor of 50, PLM should be able to realise that with the design process.

The developments outlined above make product data management a lot more complicated. Not only is the number of models of components and products much larger, also the number of relationships between items greatly increases, due to re-use in multiple product types. More elements and more relationships between them means more complexity. How do you design user experience, if engineering is already working with two generations ahead? Also a certain ‘ standard ‘ component can be modified for a new product generation. Meanwhile the old revision is still in production and must have spare copies from both revisions to remain in production. How do you prevent the wrong delivery? The old rule that to release a new version makes the old one obsolete does not stand anymore. You really need IT to make it run smoothly. In other words, the product data is heavily intertwined with the product life cycle.

You would expect that, given these developments, PLM would be brought up everywhere cheering, but that is quite disappointing. Where ERP is the toy of the CFO, because it gives him visibility into the value streams in the company, PLM seems to be the toy of the IT department. Of course, the introduction of ERP also raises resistance, but the CFO can easily convince the production chef and the production staff will not have a say anyway. For PLM first the engineering manager must be convinced and then the CFO, who does not see an unfinished design as something valuable. Furthermore, PLM makes designing at first glance not more enjoyable, so engineers also need to be motivated one by one.

Conclusion: PLM is indispensable, but who is waiting for it?