Deploy Change Management to Get More from PLM

Over the last several months we’ve been exploring various aspects of PLM process management and execution. We’ve talked about various aspects of product development process management and program and project management, including an exploration of enterprise project management. I’d like to focus this discussion on product change management. In my last article, we discussed how you can leverage change management processes to enable part reuse. Now I’d like to explore how change management can help you get more from your PLM investment.

Strategists and investors generally don’t agree on the right measures of organizational competitive success.While the strategists prefer ROIC (Return on Invested Capital), investors have their bias towards growth, return on sales and stock price.Everyone, though agrees that there are two ways an organization can make money.

• • First, provide unique value to the customer and capture some of the value for itself.

• • Second, control cost by running effective and efficient internal operations so that you do what you do at a lower cost.

Everyone has jumped into the bandwagon to deliver value to the customer. Nothing wrong with it. You manufacture cars/machinery/devices which are connected and IoT enabled and can do all sorts of data analytics about your customers/suppliers/competition… But do your BOM management and change management applications talk to each other seamlessly? Can your designers and analysts get a consolidated view of the impact of design change on the bill of material, implementation schedule, manufacturing planning, mechatronics and after sales? Can a change be automatically communicated, reviewed and approved across domains?

One of the major challenges facing organizations, even the ones using a PLM product, is that in most cases they have confined the PLM product to address the problems of one silo of the organization – for solving the design problem or BOM problem or change management problem. Getting started with PLM with a limited scope helps to ensure that deployment can be fast and results are there for everyone to see.However, to derive the full benefit, organizations need to adopt PLM with consistent change management across all domains and departments.

In a recent survey, Tech-Clarity found that in top performing organizations, PLM usage is not limited to Design and Engineering departments.

PLM solutions that are rich in change and workflow management capabilities can help organizations develop a highly configurable and integrated processes across domains and departments and reap more substantial benefits. If you are using only a BOM management solution within PLM, someone in the organization will have to open a custom change management application to type in the BOM changes resulting in lost time and opportunities for the organization.

How does your organization leverage PLM? I’d like to hear how change management fits into your PLM strategy!