CAD Management

In an industry where three letter acronyms have become the norm and to remain technically informed you need a constantly updating glossary of terminology on your palm pilot, Product Lifecycle Mamagement has become a term, which is banded around with greater frequency than ever before. There is no doubt that a greater number of people have become informed of the existence of PLM and that there are individuals in larger organisations who speak of active PLM initiatives being used to support their corporate strategies. But what significance does PLM have to the small medium enterprise?

When speaking in engineering circles, the discreet areas of Computer Aided Design and manufacturing, Computer Aided Engineering and Product Data Management are readily understood as necessary tool. It is when we speak of these technologies collectively and introduce aspects such as enterpise wide PDM, visualisation, collaboration, configuration management change management and release to manufacture that the situation becomes more complex. Indeed if you speak to half a dozen different people, they will all have different views of what is and what isn’t included under the PLM banner.

In the literal sense of the phrase Product Lifecycle Management concerns the managing of the information required to generate, manufacture and support the product through it’s entire life. This necessitates the involvement of numerous individuals, departments and processes within and external to an organisation and is intended to better control the fundamental objective of the business – to produce quality products for their customers to budget and on time.

The SME differs little to the large enterprise in terms of it’s objective to supply it’s customers with quality products, what does differ, however, is the amount of resources (both financial and human) the organisation has available to be able to embark on the introduction of new processes and technologies and also the complexity of the processes they have developed to achieve it’s aim.

A complete PLM project will touch almost every part of an organisation in one way or another, since the intention is to control and distribute information to the individuals who require it. Consider the number of disciplines which need to be involved in introducing a new product, from initial marketing concepts through engineering, supply chain and on to after sales support.

To this end it is incredibly difficult, if not impossible to introduce PLM at this highest level in a ‘big bang’ type of approach since the introduction of the technologies involved and the process re-engineering and capture would be too disruptive. Consider how disruptive changing a CAD system alone is to the engineering function and the knock on effect to suppliers and manufacturing.

Consider that what you are trying to achieve is to effectively integrate your engineering data and processes with other data and processes in such a way as to supply the product development stakeholders with accurate, timely information in order that they can perform their jobs in an efficient manner and to a high quality and on time.

Sounds straight forward enough! - but in order to achieve this there will typically be a number of critical functional areas required to provide a solution. These include a CAD tool to create a digital model, a management tool for control of the digital model and supporting product related information, a visualisation capability for users who don’t have access to the CAD application, a change management process, process automation or workflow tools, capability for configuration management, collaboration tools and a means to release the bill of materials to the ERP/MRP system.

It is easy to see that in any organisation it would be, to say the least, impractical to attempt to role out all the above simultaneously. One of the advantages of PLM is that since it covers such a broad focus that it can be successfully achieved by phased implementation over time.

So, should an SME build a strategy to capitalise on the benefits that PLM has to offer?

Some SME’s may have little choice as since they form part of a supply chain the OEM will dictate that the default working method is to use specific tools in order for the supplier to tightly integrate with the OEM’s processes. This greatly influences the route the supplier will take to work with that specific customer, they will even have different tools and processes for each major OEM, particularly in markets such as the automotive sector.

But what about the benefits to the SME in adopting their own strategy?

The key is to approach PLM with a roadmap, which will take you step by step to your ultimate goal. Many of the aspects of PLM can be implemented one at a time, but it is crucial that the technologies and processes for each step are compatible. Many organisations have already taken their first steps to complete PLM by the nature of the fact that they have implemented a CAD system and are using some form of data management, though initially only to manage the files form the CAD system itself. The next steps may be as simple as to manage other product development documentation or to open up the visibility of CAD data to a wider audience across the enterprise through the use of a lightweight viewer.

Once these fundamental phases of getting the product data under control (traditional PDM) have been established, you can then start to automate tasks such as approvals through the use of workflows and subsequently move on to capture your change management process and integrate it with the data / documents that the change relates to.

Now that your products are captured in a controlled “as designed” manner, configurations of these can be created for the “as manufactured” state or “as serviced” state. These structures can now be used to drive other processes and would typically be fed to the ERP/MRP application, knowing that the information is current and correct. The benefits in this alone are valuable since much of the repetitive, manual data entry usually associated with entering BOM’s is eliminated.

It is imperative that the technologies used in architecting your PLM system are compatible. This is especially so for SME’s since they are unlikely to have resources available to support bespoke integrations. Wherever possible use the functionality “out of the box”, it may prove to be easier to modify your process to suit the technology rather than vice versa thus recognising the benefits in a much shorter time frame. Base your solution on an architecture that is easily scaleable and enables you to take a modular approach to implementation and so phase the steps over time.

Critically, get sound advice both in terms of your long-term strategy and in the short term in order to be able to define the roadmap and the logical steps. Prioritise your product development initiatives and make them clear so that the entire organisation can align with what is required. This will then provide the focus and the driver for implementing the technology and shaping the processes to suit.

In summary, although PLM is a complex, involved subject, there are clear benefits to be had for SME’s by adopting the right technology and taking a phased approach to implementing as part of a well planned strategy, but seek good advice and acquire technology from a solution provider that focuses on and understands the challenges faced by a smaller organisation.

There is a way to eat an elephant - one piece at a time!