Communicating product data across an organization is complex. Let’s talk about how to make it easier.
Different departments gather product data from a variety of systems including Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) Systems, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Systems, Manufacturing Execution systems (MES), and Quality Management Systems (QMS) and more, how do we know our organizations are making the most out of all this information?
Just think about it for a second. Our systems speak different languages, AND our departments often aim for different goals.
With an estimated 90% of the world’s data created in the last two years alone (Conner, n.d.), it’s no wonder that companies are having a hard time using it all. The IDC estimates that just 0.5% of the data companies produce is ever used. It’s time to change that.
Here are 9 Ways Your Business Will Benefit From Connecting Your Data systems.
1. Increased Usability
Data experts believe that if Fortune 1,000 companies increased the amount of data they used by just 10%, they could realize over $65 million in additional net income (Marr, 2015). Not only are these numbers huge, they also help make my case about the critical importance of data usability.
The truth is – any one specialized system is often too complex for many non-specialized roles to navigate, find, and transfer the right information. This often leaves separate departments accountable for storing and sharing uncontrolled, out of date versions of product data. It’s not because they don’t WANT to use the right information. It’s because system complexity and interdepartmental gates make it hard to consistently get the right information.
So how do we make product data more usable?
A) Consolidating product data from disparate sources into one single system.
B) Give users a way to access the system using simplified role-specific dashboards.
2. Better Data Access
The most important reason your product data shouldn’t (internally anyway) be kept secret is because product data is your company’s most valuable asset.
Not everyone who needs access to specific product information hosted in your PLM system is from your engineering department, so don’t force them to go through the same vigorous Product Lifecycle system training. Don’t make them navigate an engineer’s world one click at a time.
In order to effectively use data, our departments must have ready access to it. We must make rich product information easy to accessible for a broad set of roles.
By creating an organized system that connects all of our product data, your organization will make information easily accessible to users beyond those who have created it.
Just think of the possibilities that come from connecting multiple systems and delivering information to all departments through a single window.
3. Complete Data
Imagine an entire enterprise with access to real data, at the right time, when it’s needed.
By connecting your product lifecycle management systems with your other enterprise systems, every stakeholder within your organization can impact the value flow of product data through your organization. It also equips team members to consistently drive critical decisions with the latest, most accurate information.
4. Better Insights
Better access to data = Better insights.
Your business teams can and should demand a lot of your PLM processes and solution.
This is one of the reasons why your organization should consider integration technologies and custom front-end solutions – Such as PLM applications.
A data-driven enterprise with insights into how current products and processes can be optimized can drastically improve productivity. Doing this requires teams to have access to up-to-date, accurate product data.
5. Better Decisions
Ready access to information is especially important to any company developing products.
Users without access to the system of record resort to error-prone workarounds that can result in inaccuracies, quality problems, and waste.
Decisions made from out- of- date inaccurate data threaten product quality and delay time to market.
Providing everyone in your organization with broad visibility into the system of record will drive better, more accurate decisions. This will ultimately improve quality, reduce waste, scrap, rework, and help you meet your time to market goals.
The analytical possibilities that come with connecting your data will help users across your organization make accurate product decisions throughout the entire development process.
6. Better Products
Who doesn’t want to create better products faster?
Providing your organization with universal data access will allow your company to drastically accelerate product development.
How so?
By connecting disparate systems, you will have access to real-time data allowing you to make better product decisions.
Because your decisions and actions are now driven by up-to-date information, you will achieve a higher product quality.
7. Increased Productivity
Why waste time manually reading, entering and analyzing data? It could be automatically collected, filtered, and combined.
By collecting your product data in one system and providing a simplified role-based interface, any user within your organization can access contextual, up-to-date, real-time product information anytime they need.
I guarantee your productivity will grow when your organization is able to plan earlier with manufacturing, order materials sooner with purchasing all while your engineering team is spending less time pulling reports.
8. Increased collaboration
Using a system that provides role-based data access to stakeholders throughout your organization provides every role with an ability to quickly understand the status of a part number and how the parts fit together in a design.
This will not only help mobilize and inform the work of teams throughout the organization, but it will also help maximize the success of your product development.
Giving your team the ability to extend and connect your PLM data into the rest of your enterprise will rapidly increase the overall effectiveness of your organization.
9. Real Results
The ultimate benefit your organization will achieve by connecting your data systems stems from your ability to acquire real results.
What does that mean?
Positive results have a tendency to snowball into more and more success. Results give your organization the confidence it needs to quickly deliver value. Providing access to the right information empowers a team, department, company to reach their true potential. We want to help your company thrive.
Why is it important to manage your product Bill of Materials (BoM) in a PLM (Product Lifecycle Management)? This is a tough question to answer across the board for every company, but this article breaks down what you need to know.
The level of BoM management in PLM can be dependent on your companies’ products, downstream systems, and product development processes.
With that in mind, here are some general benefits and reasons to manage the creation of your product BoM in PLM.
The benefit of bill of materials management in PLM
PLM in nature is meant to be a tool to help engineering manage their production date while allowing dynamic collaboration and change control throughout the product development cycle.
The data managed in a product lifecycle management system includes CAD and BoM information, as well as additional supporting product information and documentation.
PLM functionality typically allows an organization to store any and all product information in a structured manner. The structured manner is what properly represents the product within all stages of the product’s development.
This includes everything from initial design requirements, to manufacturing requirements and process plans, to quality assurance documents- all linked to a single product structure.
This gives you the ability to graphically see a truly complete representation of any and all products managed within the PLM system.
In addition, many of the top PLM systems (such as PTC Windchill) give you the ability to manage different views of a single bill of material.
For instance, you could see the design or engineering view of the structure and all design information needed for that BoM product structure.
You would also have the ability to look at a manufacturing view that has the structure defined in a way to support the best possible manufacturing process, while it also links to any supporting information and work instructions.
Additionally, you could see a service BoM that represents exactly what is on-site or on the hands of a customer, with linked product information specifically related to service or support (such as a service repair or product manual).
These systems focus on tracking and managing all cost and profit throughout the process.
Because of this, changes are tightly controlled and require significant steps to ensure proper applications across the system.
There are also few systems that allow for full product representation inside of ERP or MES as outlined above. Nor do they fully support many different views of the same BoM.
ERP tends to only manage what is required to properly manufacture or sell a product, which does not always represent the full product design or its full breadth of supporting information and documentation.
There many impacts on these fundamental differences.
When to use PLM for BoM Management
Here are some general concepts as to when to use PLM for BoM management.
When your product development is in the dynamic phases that require many changes and updates at each phase gate, your bill of materials should be primarily managed in PLM.
If your product requires specific requirements management, detailed manufacturing, quality work instructions, or an intensive manufacturing process, it’s in your best interest to use product lifecycle management for your BoM.
At the very least, all of your product information should also be managed, or linked to your product lifecycle management system to ensure full accountability to all information updates required in the instance of change.
Integrating ERP and PLM
At a minimum, if you have an ERP system it’s important to integrate your system together with PLM.
It’s essential to establish key integration points between your enterprise systems that send needed information back and forth to your enterprise resource planning solution. This will help you properly execute new product releases and changes.
By integrating your systems, your ERP processes will ensure all proper tasks and functions are executed in your ERP or MES systems.
From there, your ERP to PLM system integration would send information back to your PLM system to close the loop.
These are our best practices to help you get ahead and to take product data further.
PTC Windchill saves ALM Positioners 4 hours per project
If you are trying to confidently make a smooth transition from paper files to digital files with a complete PLM solution, you should contact us to learn more about PTC Windchill. Read on to learn more about a business who succeeds in digital transformation to reduce time-to-market, decrease costs, and increase collaboration.
Business Overview
ALM Positioners, Inc. is a manufacturing and assembling facility for state-of-the-art positioner lifts located in Rock Island, Illinois. Myron Pundt, VP of Engineering at ALM said, “We build positioners that lift, rotate, and turn machinery in the manufacturing industry. The positioners allow our customers to put their parts at the right elevation and rotation for their operators to build things efficiently.” Their business eliminates the need for straps, chains, and slings and instead allows the operator to raise and position weldments and assemblies to the necessary height and working position.
ALM specializes in custom designs and manufacturing solutions for their customers who need positioners to meet specific requirements. Their unique selling proposition in the Industrial Automation Industry allows them to offer significant cost savings for equipment, improved safety for welders and operators, and increased manufacturing and assembly production efficiency to their customers.
Business Challenges
ALM was challenged by an increasing number of custom design requests. These requests increased product design cycle times. Inaccurate and inefficient information was finding its way to engineers and technicians because product data was stored in paper documents throughout the manufacturing facility.
Pundt reported, “We would have a lot of problems with not having the right prints, so something would end up being built wrong – requiring rework or just extra time to disassemble or reassemble it.” Modifications were being made to designs that weren’t communicated to other departments. This created a bottleneck in operations causing stalls in production and higher costs due to rework. “We’re looking to streamline our processes and get rid of the paper on our shop floor.”
To keep up with the demand of their customers, ALM knew they had to be able to securely store and access product information, Bill of Materials (BOMs), and design requirements all in one place to eliminate the bottleneck and to operate at maximum speed and efficiency on the shop floor. Kevin Toft, President at ALM, proclaimed, “Our company is growing at a fast rate. Last year we saw a forty-six percent growth in our sales revenue and we expect that we are going to double sales by the end of 2019. We need to have systems that work for us so we can continue to see that kind of growth. We have to be as efficient as possible.”
Solution
ALM Positioners turned to EAC Product Development Solutions to help solve their bottleneck problem. EAC helps companies optimize their product development systems so they can succeed in the market place. EAC is a PTC value-added network partner, offering the latest advancements in technology utilized by companies around the world, including PTC Windchill. EAC’s Solution Architects proposed PTC Windchill, a product life cycle management (PLM) tool that allows organizations to consolidate and manage product information into digital form.
Implementation
With the help of EAC’s implementation team, ALM incorporated Windchill throughout their organization so they could view, operate, and manage up-to-date CAD designs on computers throughout the shop floor. “Before we implemented Windchill we were running paper copies. Our ERP implementation was through exported BoMs in Microsoft Excel and we would import them back into the ERP system. It was very time consuming and inefficient,” Pundt explained. Windchill eliminated the obligation to use multiple systems to view product information, associated BoMs, and CAD designs.
Overall employee morale was up because there was less redundancy throughout the early design stages. Brydon Sanders, Product Design Engineer at ALM, reports, “Before Windchill we had an archive of data that was not necessarily 100% accurate. So, when we were sorting data that we thought was right, we’d find out there was a problem after we made changes to it. EAC helped us customize a life cycle specifically for how small of a company we are to help facilitate changes and make the correct revisions. Everything is much faster when designing and validating the product.”
EAC helped customize Windchill to optimize operational efficiencies specifically for ALM’s needs. Colten Brunenn, Product Manager at ALM, reported, “EAC’s implementation specialist was on site for several days at a time throughout the implementation process to help us customize the application to our needs. The specialist was giving us examples, walking us through the processes, showing us how it would work if we did it a certain way, and showed us how to make things easier. It opened our eyes to the capacity and abilities of what we could do with Windchill for our specific needs.”
Results
Compared to previous processes, ALM is able to more quickly and accurately meet their customer’s needs because of their Windchill implementation. “We save about four hours per job with just the front-end BoM load and getting the information into the ERP system – which has been huge,” Pundt explained. “Customers tend to want what they want and a lot of times we can get their order over our competition because we’re willing to customize it for them. Windchill and our new ERP system make it very easy to manage those customizations and helps us to make sure that we have materials in-stock and on-time to meet those needs.”
“With the implementation of Windchill, our manufacturing efficiency is greatly improved. Everything is live on the shop floor now, there are no more paper copies, no more prints getting lost, and nobody building something off the wrong or unrevised print. It has really improved our efficiency through the manufacturing process,” Pundt said. Transitioning into a digital workflow with Windchill allows ALM to reduce time-to-market, decrease costs, and increase collaboration throughout the organization.
