I had a chance to sit down with Nina Dar (pictured below) from Cheeky Monkey recently.  You can find Nina's Linked In profile here http://uk.linkedin.com/in/ninadar.  Nina and her team (by the way if the name of her company elicited a smile...it was supposed to) are very experienced when it comes to implementing PLM in the CPG space.

They have finished implementing a very well known PLM solution at PZ Cussons a large UK CPG company with business units in Australia, Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, Greece, Poland, Indonesia and Thailand.

Nina explained that Cheeky Monkey is not a company of PLM technology experts (although the experience they have gained gives them an opinion).  What they do is deliver business change projects for companies in very different industries and sectors.  But all these companies share a common goal of focusing on achieving business results through product or service development.

With regard to the PLM implementation at PZ, Nina is frank about the fact that there have been ups and downs as you might expect and I was keen to find out from Nina what she has learned during this project.

I also wanted to understand from Nina what it is that makes PLM implementations in CPG special compared with perhaps the traditional engineering experience of PLM. 

Q: What kind of products belong in CPG?

Nina: The Consumer Packaged Goods sector covers a huge range of products.  You’ve cosmetics all the way to electronics and it encompasses those other acronyms FMCG, F&B as well.  And at the end of the day, we are all consumers of packaged goods, unless you have turned professional forager.  So this is an industry we all know a lot about at least from the eyes of the consumer.

Q: What’s going on in CPG companies at a business level? What do insiders talk about?

Nina: There’s a lot of change and there’s a fast & furious turnaround in products.  You may not realise it but in 2009 alone 14,000 new CPG products hit the food and drink sector just in the US market.  That’s a lot of new products. 

Q: Why the large volume and fast turnaround in products?

Nina: This is driven by ever increasing consumer demand.  This demand is stoked up through branding, advertising and promotion.  It is a self perpetuating cycle; the more we see, the more we look, the more we desire, the more we need to see. 

Our desire is insatiable.  And the market continues to get bigger as we convince the emerging economies world that this is life as they should want it.

But there’s also a huge amount of competition.

Q: What/Who drives the CPG sector?

Nina: You and me!  The consumer still has the final say, we have to hand over our hard earned money for these products.  But the retailers are the people who stand between the manufacturer and the consumer and they are the power house.

These retailers whether supermarket chains or on-line retailers like Amazon are the key customer and as everybody knows they’ve really changed the way we shop.   And continue to do so!  But they have also had a big impact on how the CPG industry delivers the products we want to buy...

There is a really disciplined cycle of range review dates as well as criteria that must be met if you want your products to reach the shelve (real or virtual). 

Q: What differentiates the leaders from the laggards in CPG from a new product introduction perspective?

Nina:  There are a number of factors.  Here are my top 10...

1. Innovation -with and without the consumer – what I mean by that is the impact of social media...There is a time and a place for all of this and you need to figure out how to link it all together without just adding unnecessary work
2. Product development is the responsibility of everyone in the business.  If products or services are the lifeblood of your business then every employee should know how their contribution links to that goal
3. Developing the right ideas for your business, it’s not as obvious as it sounds!  You may come up with a winning idea but it’s not right for your company.  Knowing when to sell your IP and when to develop it is crucial when resources as scarce
4. Working on the right ideas at the right time – have you got the resource to deliver this now? (be honest, don’t plan for people working round the clock)
5. Agile execution of the chosen idea.  Give the right people the right tools and accountability to deliver, don’t tie them up in reporting mechanisms that add waste – be clear about what you want and let them figure it out
6. Management of product data; formulations, specifications and product design.  A solid Specifications Management system saves a lot of heartache down the road
7. Process automation and digital asset management (the supply chain we were talking about earlier)
8. Measurement against the definition of right – what does success look like?
9. Review cycles – what went well and why?  More importantly what didn’t go well and why?
10. Celebration of success and failure that creates a foundation for future success!

Q: You mentioned emerging markets.  How important are overseas and emerging markets to CPGs and why?

Nina:  Hugely important.  Rightly or wrongly, consumers in developing countries and emerging economies tend to follow a lead set in western economies.  Local brands are often not aspired to by consumers.

This factor is bolstered by the internet and social media.  Nowadays, the lead could come from any number of directions.  It might be triggered from something spotted when watching a premiership football match.  It might come from a music video posted to YouTube.  The point is that CPG companies need to react fast. 

At the same time, import barriers often prevent the wholesale import of commodities.  This has pulled producers to manufacture in emerging economies.  Then when CPGs spot the opportunity they are really interested in transferring market leadership from one geography to another.  They want to transfer product knowledge and information lock stock and barrel to their local producer where it can be quickly turned into physical product.  They don’t want to re-invent the wheel.  They want to ‘Clone the Perfect Product’ as I like to put it.  This is where PLM comes in.

Q: What’s special about the new product introduction (NPI) process in CPG?

Nina: The new product introduction process is quite simple but needs to be executed fast. 

When you build an NPI project plan in CPG, it is usually scheduled backwards from a retailer range review date.  So you really need to understand your critical path and harness the company’s resources effectively along that path.  Also, if that critical path starts to stretch you need to know about it early because delays could mean you miss that crucial deadline or at best force you to deviate valuable resources from other projects.  So the irony is that even if you hit the deadline on one product another suffers because it gets starved of resource.  So you’re just moving the problem around and not really solving it.

Of course all this means that there is still a high rate of project failure; defined as not in the market at the right time, not delivered at the expected margin, failure to satisfy the consumer First Moment of Truth (FMOT).

There are also big challenges around compliance and knowing where your ingredients are being sourced from, being  ignorant about what is happening in your supply chain is not bliss and could lead to seriously bad PR or worse.

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) have made companies look at what their values are and what they are and aren’t prepared to do.  Being able to track and trace is critical.

Q: What are the best performers doing to address these risks?

Nina: They are looking at their ideas to market process, how they deliver projects in the business, dipping a toe in social media, different types of technology and software implementations.  There are generally a large number of change projects on the go at the same time.

Of course, those who have realised that they need to join dots between these projects are looking to implement programmes like PLM.

Q: What do you know now that you wish you’d known then when you first embarked on the PLM journey with PZ

Nina: Will the technology really be an enabler to your process or are you going to have to change your process to work with the technology?  I have had this debate with a couple of PLM software providers; configuration v customisation...

I am not in favour of going back to the days of heavy customisation that are hard to upgrade.  It doesn’t help anyone.  But I do think that if you think about your delivery process first, you have a chance at getting the software that matches that need and not the reverse.  And some software is easier to align to your processes than others.  So watch out!

Also, PLM is a business process change project.  One element is the implementation of software.  Software vendors will supply a piece of software; say for Project Management, as part of the package.  But it’s only one component of all the things you need to deliver the wider goal.

It’s also really important that the project is designed so that tangible deliverables are experienced during the life of the project.  So that people can see and feel the difference the project is making early & during the journey.  Not just at the end.  FD’s are impatient and want to see ROI.
 
Q: Are the people who work in CPG different than in other sectors?

Nina:  I have a feeling that people that work in CPG would perceive themselves as more creative than some other sectors.  Let’s face it, they have to generate new ideas on an almost daily basis.  It’s not like in automotive or aerospace where products take years to bring to market.

The speed of change and churn in product is awesome.  It’s not for the fainthearted!

Also CPG organisations encompass peoples from different cultures and backgrounds throughout the global supply chain.  So an understanding of this is essential.

Q: How does this influence how you roll out a business change initiative like PLM?

Nina: It’s not one size fits all. Our implementation covered 9 different territories – people with very different backgrounds and cultures.  It was the same information and the same goal but the way we delivered was tuned to take into account these factors and it was an amazing experience because of that.

Q: What’s PLM Made Simple all about?

Nina: I haven’t met anyone who doesn’t agree that a PLM implementation is complicated!  Even getting the business case delivered can be a task spanning months.  We just don’t think it needs to be that way and should be that way; it needs to be simplified. That’s what PLM Made Simple is all about

1. Agree the business deliverable
2. Audit the current processes and technology
3. Map the new process around projects you need to deliver now
4. Agree how to join the dots between people, process and technology
5. Implement in bite size chunks using the people who have to do the work today
6. Review success and failure and celebrate both
7. Map into next project
8. See the difference!

Q: How does PLM technology help in CPG?

Nina: In a way it’s the usual stuff.  PLM provides a platform that allows us CPG folk to share information across geographic locations.  It supports a common language, a common process and way of working.

It helps us to clone the perfect product and replicate or take the learning and amend, either way it means we don’t re-inventing the wheel.  Lean.

It helps us harness resources and co-ordinate tasks during the NPI process so that we hit those crucial deadlines.

Because a large proportion of the work is outsourced in CPG companies, not all the smart people are inside the company.  But PLM let’s them participate in the process almost as if they were.

Q: Which PLM technologies are going meet the needs of CPG best in the future?

Nina: Still early days but Enterprise Open Source & Cloud PLM are the exciting developments I have seen recently.  I had an opportunity to look at the Aras PLM technology (www.aras.com) recently and I was blown away by how flexible it was.  I think these new technologies provide a level of flexibility and deployment speed that I would have really liked for PZ Cussons.

But each of the PLM Vendors has something exciting and significant at the moment.  The ability of the large players like Siemens to bring new solutions into PLM CPG space will no doubt be important going forward. 

I believe the next stage is all about collaboration.  We need to see more integration of Sales & Operations Planning (S&OP), ERP, Innovation, Specifications Management, Social Media, etc for this area to really blossom and be taken seriously as the backbone of all businesses.

Q: What’s next for Cheeky Monkey?

Nina: Well, I’m also looking forward to working with AESSiS and showing CPG companies the benefits of working with exciting new PLM technologies like Aras.

The PLM Made Simple initiative is also really important for us.  This is the banner under which we will continue to make strides with PLM in the CPG space.

The following 2 graphics (illustrative and not to scale) show sample productivity & ROI profiles for PLM implementations.  The first is for PLM software which has been traditionally licensed.  The saw tooth pattern investment profile is illustrative of those occaisional investment in a new PLM module which tends to rachet up background level maintenance cost. 

The second graphic is for PLM software which follows the Enterprise Open Source/Subscription approach exemplified by Aras.

Note: The productivity line is shows how productivity gain is hardly ever linear.  It might even be negative in the very early days before taking on a kind of rounded stair step profile as improvements come on stream followed by regular plateaux.

I think there are 2 key benefits for the purchaser in the second Enterprise Open Source/Subscription approach  (illustrated by callouts 1 & 2 in the second graphic)

1. Financial risk is reduced because the investment profile more closely aligns to productivity gain.  This has another beneficial effect articulated in the next point.

2. Time to Value (the point at which one can start to expect the financial value of productivity gains to have paid down the investment and gone positive) is moved to the left.  In other words, earlier payback.

Of course, this has to be predicated on an assumption that any new PLM technology is also top notch (I am persuaded of that fact in the case of Aras but people should make their own minds up..  For a more detailed discussion read our free white paper; Why UK engineering firms should take a serious look at Enterprise Open Source PLM software.

Probably not.  But have you ever been slightly bemused at the sight of PLM ROIs that seem just too good to be true both in terms of their size and accuracy?

Most people know that many of the benefits of PLM are intangible at best and realisation of those benefits subject to risk factors that can turn that ROI completely on its head.  And anyway few companies collect the ongoing metrics that are needed to validate the original prediction. 

Of course it’s in the interest of some PLM vendors, with the traditionally licensed PLM software solutions, to pump up their value proposition to justify what is likely to be a large upfront investment in software.  But surely it’s not in the interests of a company’s shareholders, for insiders to collude with them in propagating ROI myths.

So why bother?  Why engage in this ritual?  Well because we have to and because it is important.  Rightly, the accountants and MBAs running most companies would not let a capital investment go through without an economic rationale for taking action. 

But there must be a better way.  And having bemoaned the all too common PLM ROI approach of inflated benefits and sky high value discovered combined with unconvincing certainties... what should you do?

The first thing to acknowledge is that this is not an exact science.  I think it is a waste time going to the nth degree in pursuit of a definitive ROI number.   As we’ve said, many PLM benefits are intangible and evidence of them anecdotal.  Overly ambitious claims of accuracy are almost never credible and can actually undermine acceptance of the need to take action.  But for all their frustrating intangibility, benefits are still real and can be captured.

So start by articulating business challenges in simple and non-technical terms by describing PLM related problems from a number of perspectives (as experienced by people across the organisation) and then by spelling out what the impact of the problem is on the business in very broad financial terms.

Here's the important bit.  Pay special attention to the many risk factors that will influence the size of any savings, including the sensitivity of the organisation to those factors.  This way you can establish credible upper and lower boundaries for any return on investment figures you later produce. 

It’s much better if senior executives buy-in to a broad brush economic rationale and have a good understanding of the order of financial benefits, with upper and lower boundaries, that could be achieved over time. 

Crucially, and more important than anything else, they should also understand any risks that may intervene to prevent those benefits being realised.  In this way, they can be tackled and mitigated early.

If you want to learn what we think the most common PLM risks are you can download and read our free white paper on Key Product Lifecycle Management Implementation Project Risks (and how to mitigate them).

You can also read our blog on PLM cost of ownership here.  Cost of course being the other side of the ROI equation.

Wave goodbye to the pie in the sky ROI (I can feel a poem coming on).  Bring on some down to earth ROI pragmatism.   What do you think?  What are your experiences with PLM ROIs.

I thought it might be a good idea to examine why quite a few people don’t like PLM.

I mean on the face of it the case for PLM is pretty clear.  After all, engineers, designers and product developers (in fact anybody involved in product development) spend maybe 50-60% of their time on ‘information management’ and a much smaller percentage creating products.  So why the push back? 

I’ve heard lots of complaints about PLM.  ‘It’s too expensive’ (I’ve got some sympathy with this line but costs are falling thanks to new technologies and business models like Aras), ‘It’s too complicated’ (yep, some solutions are indeed bizarrely complicated...way too many buttons...but again they’re getting better).  ‘It will stop me being creative’ which is the idea being that PLM puts you on railway tracks and you can’t deviate from them therefore you will be less innovative (indeed with some older PLM technologies where you can’t get good alignment between a rapidly evolving process and the PLM technology this might be true..)

But I think most of the above complaints are increasingly invalid.  I think the bottom line is that PLM requires people to change their behaviours.  This is hard to do.  Just look around you.  People continue to do all kinds of things that are bad for themselves and others.  And managing information poorly, not sharing it, not organising it etc...seems pretty benign compared with some things I could mention... and yet it costs organisations billions.   

People don’t want to change despite obvious benefits to the wider organisation.  Why?

So I’m thinking it all boils down to incentives.  The incentives for the organisation to get a better handle on product information are huge (and well documented...elsewhere).  But the incentives for one person, a cog in the machine, to change their behaviour?  Well they might be pretty low.  Indeed if you are a highly experienced engineer or technician you might derive much of your soft power by ‘bargaining’ with the information you hold.  In that context, why would you spend that extra time codifying information for PLM and then giving it away and giving away power at the same time.  The negative effects of this hoarding are not felt by you.  It’s one of those negative externalities economists talk about...the costs of your actions are picked up by others.

So any really successful PLM initiative must change behaviour (perhaps the hardest thing of all to do) probably by creating incentives that work.  And by incentives I don’t mean education.  This is different.  Worthwhile for sure...but much less effective.

So I’m interested in finding out what incentives work in the context of a PLM initiative.  Real hard edged incentives.  What’s your experience?

Just some quick thoughts (a bit tongue in cheek) on some tactics to get the biggest discount.  Do you owe it to your company’s shareholders to go for the biggest software discount and the lowest cost of ownership you can get?  Probably..  Also, the PLM vendors owe it to their shareholders to charge the maximum amount they can for their software and to give away the least discount possible on those software licenses. 

In that vein, I’ve heard people say that ‘they don’t want to push too hard’ because they don’t want to upset anybody and after all ‘they’ve got to work with the selected vendor after the sale’.  Well that’s nice but the odds are the team that did the sale will be onto the next sales opportunity about 5 seconds after closing you and you’ll be getting to know a bunch of different people who probably couldn’t care less what discount you got because they’ll be technical folk who are more interested in trying to figure out how to deliver on all those promises made by the pre-sales team.

And this stuff matters.  If you do things right, discounts of 50% and beyond off list are definitely possible which can make a huge difference to the ROI.  Also, any money you save off the software, you can spend on the services.  And people often underestimate the services needed.  The other thing of course is that SOX rules often means that discounts on software also get applied to maintenance so it’s well worth squeezing until the pips squeak.

Anyway, here’s some tips to help you get the best deal. 

Develop a PLM Roadmap to articulate major phases of process and where, when and how specific areas of the business are to be transformed and enabled by specific generic PLM technologies.  Put all this into a formal Request for Proposal (RFP) and distribute this.

Think hard about getting too cosy with the vendors during the ‘discovery’ phase.  Although vendors may be willing to support this kind of activity, and sometimes free of charge, they are likely (understandably) to want to use the exercise to tip the playing field in their favour.  Where more than one solution is under consideration it may be better to hold off engaging with vendors until a completely objective set of requirements have been developed.

Get educated.  Find out as much as you can about the product modules and licensing arrangements for your short listed solutions.  A common mistake is not to not build a deployment roadmap that covers all the processes you need to automate.  That means you won’t get a full picture of software costs required to deliver your vision.  Because many of the traditionally licensed solutions have quite granular price lists (lots of separately licensed products) the full price tag can be bigger than you think.

Talk to external experts if you need to.  There are plenty of people around who have a pretty good idea of what all the modules are from all the vendors, which ones you actually need versus the ‘nice to haves’ and roughly what they cost.  How do you know what discount you should be aiming for if you don’t know more or less what the starting point is?

Pull together the right team to do the technology evaluation and tell them on pain of a very grizzly death to keep their mouths shut.  Loose lips cost lives (or at least discount).  You don’t want your preferred vendor knowing they are preferred.  In fact you probably want them to think exactly the opposite.  Sales people will be looking for someone on the inside to steer them.  Make sure nobody is doing this except you.  You want the right messages going out that will help you achieve your commercial goals.

Do a benchmark.  Even if you already know the solution you want... do a benchmark.  Tell everybody the result was a draw (even if it wasn’t) and that the selection criteria have shifted so that cost of ownership is now the main criteria.

Include Enterprise Open Source & subscription offerings in the benchmark and cost of ownership comparison.  They have very different cost of ownership profiles to traditionally licensed solutions (see related post http://www.aessis.com/Blog/post/Cost-of-ownership-comparison-between-Aras-and-other-PLM-solutions.aspx)..

Tell the preferred vendor they have the most expensive cost of ownership (whether it’s true or not), take it to the wire and don’t believe the vendor when they say an offer is time limited.  Also, don’t buy all the software up front when you’re probably not going to need some of it for a year or more.  Or, at least if you do buy everything up front make sure you trade this for even more discount.  And then don’t start paying maintenance on a licence until its activated.  Or, at least if you do start paying maintenance up front trade this for even more discount.  You get the idea.

When you’ve got the right deal..then you can start getting warm and cuddly..at least until the implementation starts!

Anyway, just some thoughts..  By no means a definitive list...what were your experiences.  What worked for you?

This is a quick cost of ownership comparison between Aras and the other traditionally licensed PLM solutions out there.  Total cost of ownership comes up again and again so I thought it would be interesting to do the analysis between what is a very different approach from Aras and the old school... I’ve actually compared Aras to kind of a composite PLM solution that’s based on lots of conversations with people about what it costs to buy and implement these other solutions.  Let's call this composite solution ‘WindCenter One” (well it made me smile). I make no claims to absolute accuracy here...but I think these numbers are in the right ball-park...probably under-estimate the cost of traditionally licensed solutions if anything... but maybe I’m way out.. let me know what you think..It’s all about the discussion after all... we’ve based it on a mythical 100 user size company and currency is in UK pounds..but you can do the maths if you are interested in a different scenario..

Cost of Ownership Drivers

1.       Software License Cost

Most of the traditional CAD/PLM vendors have now shifted to a named-user licensing model.  There is considerable variation in the content of core licenses but generally the cost of the software per user depends on the number of applications or modules that need to be purchased.  So the cost will increase as the company goes beyond using PLM to manage only CAD data towards change & program management capabilities, collaboration tools, procurement tools, quality & compliance tools...etc.  All told, purchasing a comprehensive PLM capability will cost a lot more than buying a CAD data management capability with this traditional licensing approach.

So for example, with a traditionally licenced PLM solution, for any user that needs to save a document to the system you normally need a so-called heavy or author license.  Any user that just needs to view data needs a light or consumer license.  In practise, most contributors to the product development process are heavy users or authors even if they don’t create CAD data.  Traditionally licenced PLM solutions also often come with a large number of separate product modules (some solutions more than others) for things like classification & project management etc each and again each is often licensed separately.  

Therefore it’s not unusual for a typical a traditionally licenced PLM solution procurement for a company with around 100 users (where perhaps around a third are CAD users) and incorporating comprehensive PLM capabilities to come in at between £150-175K.

With Aras, there are no equivalent upfront software license costs because Aras operates enterprise open source approach with subscription.

2.       Annual Maintenance

The second traditional cost element is the annual software maintenance or recurring licence cost.  This payment typically provides access to customer support as well as any software upgrades (interim patches and major upgrades).  Annual maintenance does not cover the cost of the upgrade itself for which additional consultancy fees are levied.  Annual maintenance generally costs around 20% of the original purchase price of the software therefore the total annual outlay depends on the number of PLM modules purchased.  

For a 100 user a traditionally licenced PLM solution implementation involving software procurement costs of between £150-175K therefore you would expect the annual maintenance costs to be in the region of £30-35K.

With Aras, there are no Annual Maintenance costs because Aras operates a subscription model.  Subscription contains some of the elements you would expect to see in a traditional annual maintenance contract such as security updates and upgrades but it also contains some additional elements not normally seen the most significant of which perhaps is an inclusive PLM upgrade service between service packs and major releases which is free to subscribers and also covers system customisations.

Because Aras subscription and traditional annual maintenance are not exactly the same thing we’re treating it separately in point 4.

3.       Upgrade Costs (Typically Annual)

The third significant cost element to consider is the cost of services to upgrade the chosen PLM solution between patches and major PLM software releases.  These costs vary but are widely considered to be in the region £20-25K per year.  Sometimes they can be a lot more when there is a major architectural change in the PLM solution requiring a data base migration.  And if there’s been a lot of customisation of the solution it can cost as much to upgrade as it cost to buy the product in the first place.

With Aras Innovator, these costs do not exist as a separate line item because they are included in the annual subscription cost.  .  Aras also commit to upgrading customised systems.  This is possible because of the way Aras is architected.  You can read more about this here http://www.aras.com/technology/

4.       Annual Subscription

Aras subscription delivers access for all users to the full suite of PLM capabilities including BOM management, CAD integration & product visualisation, configuration management & engineering change, quality management and ERP integration.  You don’t have to buy lots of separate licences.

As we’ve already discussed, active subscribers also have access to an inclusive software upgrade service (performed by Aras) which means that service packs, including the latest security updates, hot fixes, and enhancements which are available to subscribers only, will be installed with no additional consulting service costs.  Aras also commit to upgrading customised systems.  .  You can read more about Aras subscription here http://www.aras.com/services/Support.aspx

For a 100 user Aras implementation where about a third of the users are CAD designers you would expect the annual subscription cost to be in the region of £55K.

With a traditionally licenced PLM solution, these costs do not exist because they are usually not available on a subscription basis.

5.       Implementation Costs

The third significant cost element to consider is the cost of services to deploy the chosen PLM solution.  Here direct numerical comparisons are harder to make because every customer deployment is slightly different.

Nevertheless, you would normally expect consultancy costs associated with deploying an older & traditionally licenced PLM solution to a company with 100 users to be in the order of £100-150K.  

We reckon that with Aras you should be able to cut deployment time in half over and be much less dependent on external consultants for ongoing data model enhancements.  Why the difference?

Some of the older systems have been around quite a while now and it can be a bit more complicated both from an installation and maintenance point of view. Configuring these systems is also not always that easy (admittedly some are easier than others).  Nevertheless, you often need to be quite an expert to make changes to things like forms, lifecycles or workflows.  As a result, to get a solution that’s reasonably well tailored to your process can take a lot of consulting services.

Things are different with Aras.    First of all the Aras solution is built on a very modern model-based SOA technology on the Microsoft platform.  This delivers a very scalable, flexible and secure PLM solution suite.  

It also comes with extensive out-of-the-box functionality and modern Web architecture which means you can deploy quickly.  Then graphical configuration tools allow you to continuously enhance your PLM environment in a fraction of the time normally associated with conventional PLM systems.  And you can do a lot of stuff yourself without bring consultants in.

Conclusions

In general, we would expect the total cost of ownership of Aras over a five year period and assuming a reasonably comprehensive PLM capability to be at least 40% less than a traditionally licensed PLM capability..

Contact us at info@aessis.com if you want to find out more about our Aras related services.  You can also visit our Aras projects page here

We've been looking at the issue of part proliferation.  Part proliferation is a big problem.  Many manufacturing operations maintain, make and purchase a huge number of similar and identical parts when in many cases a common part could have been specified.  This costs businesses millions.
 
During one recent study at a medium-sized manufacturing company, it was found that out of around 40,000 parts, as many as 7,500 (18%) were duplicates and a further 4,000 (10%) were near-duplicates. 
 
We think that advanced 3D geometric search technology, integrated into a companys PLM landscape and strategy, can make a big impact on this problem.  You can download the full free article here or by clicking on the image below.  Feedback and comments welcome.

As with any strategic IT initiative, the potential benefits from PLM are substantial but managing PLM initiatives effectively is of course vital to success.  We wanted to try to capture what it is that means some PLM initiatives add tremendous value to organisations, while others fail to deliver the expected benefits and some even destroy value.

So far we've put together 7 risks..

1. Disconnect between the PLM initiative & the organisation’s strategy and business issues
2. Poorly defined PLM process & technology roadmap
3. Poor understanding of the total software procurement budget required to deliver the full PLM technology roadmap
4. Poor PLM process-technology alignment
5. Poor understanding of implementation services costs required to deliver the full PLM technology roadmap
6. Underestimating cultural change factors
7. Inadequate User Methods Development & User Education

The following paper details each in turn...

http://www.aessis.com/MediaCentre/download.aspx?id=22