Is your PLM effort going to contribute to your business goals?

The first step is critical

The ultimate purpose of any major technology investment such as PLM is to contribute to a company's business goals. While all enterprise IT efforts, including PLM, aim to improve corporate efficiency and decision-making, product development and lifecycle management pose several unique challenges that must be addressed in order for your organisation to achieve its goals. How your company approaches the first critical step in the creation of product information and engineering knowledge can make the difference between achieving a modest improvement in engineering processes alone and a tremendous strategic advantage.

Work how you think

The first thing that differentiates your product development effort from other corporate initiatives is its focus. Most enterprise applications target how a company operates, while PLM specifically focuses on what a company creates. In terms of how companies manage their businesses, there is a great deal of commonality. There is a consensus on terminology and the use of similar business processes. This is why the same software you use for accounting can address the needs of a broad range of manufacturing organisations. Yet in terms of the products companies make, there is a huge variation. The terminology used to achieve an accurate and complete product description differs greatly between products themselves, and can differ even more between the sometimes hundreds of individual parts that make up a single product. And since the true power of PLM lies in your ability to leverage product data and engineering knowledge throughout the product's life cycle, this variation poses a unique challenge and greatly limits the ability of genericPLM solutions to deliver on their full potential.

They say in the journey of a thousand miles, the most important step is the first. The same is true with the product development process. If your engineers aren’t able to express the information about the product (and the rationale behind their decisions) in such a way that captures the meaning from the very beginning, then every subsequent use of that information will require expensive and error-prone manual interpretation. Your ability to effectively leverage engineering information through the rest of the product life cycle will be severely limited.

The key to capturing and preserving the meaning of this valuable information is making sure your system speaks the unique language of your industry and allows your engineers to think and express themselves using familiar terminology—just like an accounting system works in terms of debits and credits. Specialised vocabularies have developed to enable engineers in each domain to completely and accurately describe a product, while communicating efficiently and reducing the errors that result from ambiguous interpretation. If you’re designing an automobile suspension, then there’s a particular language the engineers speak, and not only are they most productive when they are provided tools that work how they think, the entire enterprise can now automatically re-use that valuable information as well.

The value of specialised engineering environments

Consider a contact management tool, for example. It contains databases with specific fields that capture all the information about your contacts and activities, making it easy to use that information at any time to perform searches and generate reports. Imagine instead if you were to use Microsoft Word to track all this data. Every piece of information you need would be in your document, but it would be hard to find all the people that work for a particular company, or even print out mailing labels, for example, because the fact that certain information represents the company or someone’s first and last name has not been captured. The structure and meaning were not preserved. Consequently, using the information later is much more difficult. In an engineering world—in the PLM world—95 percent or more of the product and engineering information is not in databases, and therefore it is not structured or accessible enough to be automatically leveraged for other purposes.

The payoff of using PLM comes when you capture the meaning of your information at the very beginning. The best way to do this is with a specialised engineering environment that speaks the language of the engineer. By extending the engineer’s product development system to provide a place for every piece of information pertinent to the domain, not only can you make your engineers more productive, but you can capture design rationale, provide feedback on decisions, automate rote operations and ultimately make it possible to leverage product information throughout the entire enterprise and supply chain.

The COTS Dilemma

The need to utilise specialised environments to achieve the goals of PLM poses a difficult dilemma, however.  While it may be obvious that a custom-built environment would be more effective, most companies choose to pursue commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) solutions to keep implementation and maintenance costs down while optimising reliability. Traditional PLM tools support the lowest common denominator because they are used to develop a wide range of products. They can be an effective platform to create geometric information and manage processes, but because they’re not focused for any particular industry, product or activity, they cannot capture the meaning of valuable engineering information nor can they enable the efficient re-use of the information throughout the enterprise. 

The solution

We take powerful commercial 3D CAD systems, like NX, Pro/E and CATIA, and we put a commercial specialised application on top, enabling an engineer that might be designing an airframe, for example, to be more productive. It makes sense, because that tool is now designed specifically for that challenge. Just like a contact management solution was designed to do contact management: because it was designed for that particular application, the person using it is able to express himself more easily and clearly.

Because a specialised engineering environment uses terms particular to the creation of airframes, we maintain the meaning of the information. By linking to the appropriate geometry, we preserve the 3D context, making both more valuable. The structured information can now be fed automatically to downstream systems using your existing PLM applications, all without requiring expensive, error-prone manual intervention or interpretation at every step. The vast majority of engineering data, instead of being unstructured and unavailable to improve decisions, is now structured and can be leveraged and mined to improve the overall product development process.

Getting things right from the start

The first step in capturing your engineering information is critical. Once the meaning is lost—or if the information is not captured at all—it is expensive and can be impossible to recover. Using a specialised engineering environment that speaks the language of the domain unlocks the potential of the rest of the PLM system, and how it can feed its information into all of the other systems.

If you think about the downstream process, today you might have people looking at drawings, trying to figure out what various notes mean, then re-entering data in a dozen different systems and spreadsheets. Every time you have a person interpret a piece of information and re-enter it, it takes longer, and increases the chance of errors. Every time someone makes a change, they must remember to update all of those different places where that piece of information resided and re-run the analyses that are dependent on it. If you can capture it the right way in the beginning, all those other problems go away: the information can be automatically fed to those dozen different applications, and every time you make a change it automatically updates and propagates throughout the system.

Your strategic advantage

Change is inevitable in the product development process. Engineering changes, product improvements and updated market specifications all require efficient and error-free updates to the product. Specialised engineering environments, the key elements that make PLM work better the first time through, become even more important with each design iteration. Imagine that an engineer implementing a major change on a part he did not create is able to quickly identify the key elements of the design and the rationale behind the major design decisions.

We've seen time and again that making sure your PLM system has captured all your data, both geometric and non-geometric, in a way that it can be used and re-used is essential to achieving your corporate objectives.

A specialised engineering environment that complements your existing PLM software is the missing link that can make the difference between 1X and 4X ROI on your PLM investment. We have documented savings of 30 to 50 percent in engineering time for first parts, and 80 to 90 percent for changes. That’s a huge improvement over applying the generic tools, and could be your key competitive advantage in your sink or swim industry.

For more information, please see http://www.vistagy.com/

BIOGRAPHY

Steven C. Luby
President & CEO
VISTAGY, Inc.

Steven C. Luby is president and CEO of VISTAGY, Inc. He brings more than 20 years of mechanical engineering, corporate leadership and product development experience to the company and its valued customers. Mr. Luby founded VISTAGY (formerly Composite Design Technologies, Inc.) in 1991 and led the development of FiberSIM software and EnCapta technology. EnCapta powers VISTAGY’s entire line of specialized engineering software, which significantly improves the value of commercial 3D CAD systems.

Prior to founding VISTAGY, Mr Luby led the research and development of new manufacturing processes and complementary software tools at the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory. Earlier in his career, he served as a research analyst for CAD/CAM and engineering data management with D.H. Brown Associates and was the product manager for the Cognition Cost and Manufacturability Guide. He holds a Master of Science and Bachelor of Science in mechanical engineering from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.