True product data integration remains elusive, yet users stay committed
By Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 4/1/2005 12:00:00 AM
A decade after the concept was introduced, product life-cycle management (PLM) has momentum and maturity. Since 2001, publicly traded PLM vendors have outperformed the NASDAQ. Two vendors—UGS Systems and Dassault Systemes—broke $1 billion in revenues in 2004.
Yet, says Dr. Trac Tang, IS corporate director for product creation at Volkswagen AG, Wolfsburg, Germany, "We need more integration and less pure technology, more solutions and fewer releases, and more listening and less talking from vendors."
At Daratech's recent Summit 2005, a range of automotive industry voices spoke of benefits gained and challenges outstanding.
The promise of PLM is that product-related data can be shared throughout the enterprise regardless of computing or software platform, for ease of collaboration in design, manufacturing, and services.
"PLM is about creating integration for strategic reasons," says Daratech's Charles Foundyller, CEO of the Cambridge, Mass.-based research and technology firm. "Integration and interoperability are the underlying fundamentals without which PLM cannot work."
Making PLM work is a worthy cause, says Alfred Katzenbach, director of IT processes and standards for Mercedes Benz. His company devotes "15 persons per year, per car program"—a third of its engineering effort—to ensuring integration amongst CAD/CAE and product-data management applications.
Despite the challenges, says Dr. Tang, "PLM works, or we wouldn't invest tens of millions of dollars in it every year."
A case-in-point, General Motors(GM) realized in the late 1990s that "our vehicle development process was broken," says Diane Jurgens, director of global product development, process, and systems integration for GM. "Our development cycle was four years. Toyota's was 36 months, going to 24 months. We weren't competitive."
In response, GM nixed its tradition of independent model development and invested $50 million in process and systems reengineering. Instead of serial design of vehicles and manufacturing processes, it did those things concurrently and in parallel, trimming the development cycle to 18 months. By converting to all digital processes, it saved tens of millions of dollars in material costs in model prototyping alone.
"The biggest single payoff was to standardize on one CAD system," Jurgens says, replacing multiple systems with UGS's Teamcenter suite and design systems in support of 15,000 users. The biggest cultural challenge was "getting engineering to share the data" across the enterprise. The result: GM doubled the number of vehicles in development while reducing its engineering headcount.
Challenges in achieving true system interoperability remain.
"We're making investments in open systems because we know we can't supply it all to our customers," says Tony Affuso, CEO, UGS.
Much, however, remains in the hands of the user. Concludes Foundyller, "Integration and interoperability will ultimately be resolved by middleware and the customer."
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