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What I Learned: Tracking Product Contents
October 6, 2008
What I learned this week ... came from a presentation I was preparing for a keynote presentation
this morning. As I am preparing for the talk, a couple of things strike me. The first is something I am sure all of you reading this know - regulations and pubic scrutiny on product compliance and safety are getting tougher all the time. The second is that the solution to this problem spans typical software application boundaries, which makes it hard for most companies to tackle.
Lifecycle of Product Traceability
I am going to skip the business impact of poor track and trace. If you like, I will send you a copy of the presentation. Most companies recognize the threat to their customer relationships, their brand and their business. Let's leave it there for now.
Product tracking is hard, with are a number of challenges. But what struck me recently is the product lifecycle challenge of track and trace:
Design: We need design our products for compliance with a multitude of regulations, as well as internal and market requirements such as green. Further, we have to document compliance and understand how / when decisions were made.
Process Design: We also need to ensure our manufacturing processes are compliant, and built to ensure products meet requirements of all kinds.
Procure: When we procure materials, we have to ensure they comply - this is part getting the spec right, part getting the supplier right, and part validation of supplier conformance.
Produce: When we produce, we need to ensure conformance and quality. When things go differently (substitute materials or suppliers for example) we need to capture that information.
Production Process: Beyond the product contents, we need to understand the manufacturing process. What happened on the plant floor? Were machine settings the same? Did we deviate from the process? Did we have different operators working?
Warehouse and Deliver: The other missing part in many cases is the supply chain aspect. What happened after it left our dock? Part of this is knowing where the items are in case of recall. But part is also for tracking down quality or warranty issues. How was the product handled in shipment? Is temperature important? Was it dropped?
Where do you Track it All?
So here is the ultimate question. Assuming you have systems in place to capture all of this data (a big assumption for a lot of companies) - how do you access it? If something goes wrong, how do you troubleshoot? How do you find the root cause? How do you know what to repair or recall?
I know some would say ERP should have all of the information - but I haven't seen that implementation. I know others will say PLM, and that a strong configuration management (CM) process will handle all of this. Maybe for some companies this is true, potentially in the A&D industry? But even there, much of the information might be outside PLM, outside enterprise systems in general, or even outside of the enterprise (at suppliers, customers, third party logistics companies, etc.)
What's the Answer?
I have to admit, I don't know. I can see PLM being the place this information is kept, but it will take continued expansion and integration of PLM into manufacturing and into the supply chain. Unless there is an entire separate solution layer built to pull this together, I think PLM has the best chance to address it. After all, it is a lifecycle issue.
So that is what I learned this week, I hope you found it interesting. Who knows the solution? I don't, if you do let us know about it.
Posted by Jim Brown on October 6, 2008 | Comments (2)
