Link This | Email this | Blog This | Comments (0)

What I Learned: Approaching PLM Backwards
June 9, 2008

What I learned last week ... is that some people are still looking at technology improvements as an answer looking for a question. I had the opportunity to speak at a software vendors' conference and it was interesting to hear the questions and comments. The thing that struck me? Many of the questions were "backwards" - starting with the technology and looking for value as opposed to identifying a valuable problem to be solved and then applying technology as appropriate.

How Should I Use Collaboration?
One question that I was asked was about whether their company was using enough collaboration
compared to others. Now I am all for benchmarking to see what other companies are doing, but
"collaboration" is a solution looking for a problem to solve. I explained that were a number
of forms of collaboration, including design collaboration, project collaboration, meeting
collaboration to name a few. I gave her my opinion on how much of the different forms of
collaboration are being used in product development and engineering. So that answered the
question, but I don't know that I provided any value. But many of the questions I get are of this type: how should I use this technology?

How Can I Provide more Visibility?
Another question was how another company can provide more visibility to product information
across their supply chain? It was a better question, because it was describing business
capability as opposed to a solution. But visibility is a means to an end. Why was visibility
important to them, and where was the value? I tried to scratch the surface a bit more on that
one, but didn't have time. But it was a question that asked: how can I achieve this capability? I believe that there was a problem that led them to look for the capability, so it was a step in the right direction.

How Can I Improve Engineering Change Management?
The question that many seemed to be struggling with, was "how can I decrease the impact of
frequent engineering changes?" Although the problem wasn't always articulated that way, it
was a topic on the mind of many companies. Some had worked on the problem already, in fact
there was a very good case study presented by an industrial manufacturer. It was a recurring theme during the day. This is where PLM (and any technology questions) should originate, in my humble opinion: how can I solve this problem?

My only point, and maybe it is obvious to those that are reading this, is why aren't we
always starting with the problem? Visibility across the supply chain as a capability and
collaboration as a process and technology are part of the answer to that challenge, but
without knowing what the business problem we are tackling it's hard to know where to start. It's also
hard to measure the impact.

So the lessons learned from enterprise IT projects of the past still apply, and still need
to be reiterated. In this case, start with the problem before finding the answer. I hope you
found it interesting. Or maybe I just needed to get up on my soap box on a Monday morning?
You an make that call.

Posted by Jim Brown on June 9, 2008 | Comments (0)