For over 20 years I worked in the manufacturing industry as a designer, CAD or IT manager. One issue I have seen and experienced many times is the difficulty of getting upper management to understand the need and benefit of getting the latest CAD, PLM systems, or any other IT systems. In each role there was always the need for new software to keep my teams and systems as productive as possible. In this blog I will, at a very high-level, outline how I was able to get upper management to buy in on projects I felt were needed.

Very early in my career I was a CAD administrator. At the time we needed new CAD software. I was able to talk to upper management very often. I would try to explain and tell them the need. I would verbally walk through the benefits and even give them demos of the software. But… they would not want to pull the trigger on buying the latest software. I could theorize with them until I was blue in the face. It just didn’t matter.

Then, a mentor of mine recommended I put everything to numbers, such as creating a ROI and roadmap of what was required to implement the new software. So, I did. First, I did time studies against what we were doing today. I did this by getting input from various different users. This was basically recording how long it took them to do the most common tasks. I would always take multiple samples and then take the average. Then, using a trial install of the new version of software I was able to get comparisons for each use case tested against current software. I put the time savings to cost savings based on hourly rate averages. I also related it to increased engineering department output capabilities. For instance, our department could produce four projects a year. With the time improvements we can now produce five.

The next time I spoke with my manager, I simply put a one page short summary of total potential time and cost savings in front of him. Which in this case, immediately got his attention. He of course wanted to know how I came up with those numbers. I had to be ready to back my numbers up. I did this by giving him a more detailed page and walked him through my findings at a high-level. I also had a page outlining the general implementation roadmap with a timeline summary. Only three total pages, not a short novel. He could no longer just dismiss or put off the need. I received approval to proceed with my plan in less than a month after presenting my numbers to my manager. In this case my manager was one of the company owners, but having hard numbers and a tentative plan got the ball rolling.

One thing to note from the above example, by doing what I outlined above, it elevated my standing at my company. They were impressed at my willingness to push for, justify, and plan for something I believed in. Not just asking them to take on the burden of something I felt was a good idea.

This scenario was repeated throughout my career. I could bring in vendors to demo their product, put quote after quote in front of management. Meeting after meeting with vendors and upper management, I could not get management to agree until I took the time to document the true benefits in time and money (roadmap and ROI).

If you have product or process improvements you feel will benefit your company, you need to show your management that you truly believe in it. You need to do the needed research and documentation to show the benefit and how you recommend proceeding. You cannot just go and tell management there are problems. You must present a solution for the problem you are identifying. If you do this extra work, it will not only help get your request approved, but will also help how you are viewed by your management.

Look, I know what I am outlining is no small task. It can be time consuming, very time consuming in some cases. That’s why many times this never gets done and needed improvement projects never happen. There is just not enough time for internal staff to do the needed research, and get their day-to-day tasks done as well. That is why you need to partner with a company dedicated to help with product development improvements at your company, such as EAC. We don’t want to just sell you software, we want to help you and your company improve the way you design, manufacture, connect to, and service your products. We do this with our proven people, products and processes. If you and your company improve and succeed, we improve and succeed. We will do as much of the work as we can to help you get the needed numbers and roadmaps put together. There is always going to be some time needed from internal people. However, we try to keep this as minimal as possible.

In summary, if you can see areas where your processes or systems could be improved you need to put it to numbers. You need an ROI and a roadmap to take to upper management. It may seem frustrating at times, but you need to understand where management is coming from. They also have people they answer to. They can’t go to a board, or an owner, or their manager with just a demo and a quote. Not only is that not the information they are concerned with, but you typically don’t get that type of time with them. They need quick and real information to justify the need. You must be willing and ready to get this for them. Just remember, EAC is here to help you do this. Please reach out to us.

We perform Product Development System Assessments (PDSA) for our customers. I’m frequently surprised by how many product development organizations still use email as their primary medium for the communication of information. Attached to these emails are test reports, marketing information, requirements, etc. Documentation that is critical to the performance of their product development!

I recently read a British study stating 38% of a knowledge worker’s time is spent looking for information. I can’t really believe that. We’ve run into organizations where it is that high, but not as a standard or average. But event if you discount that and cut it in half, that is about 20% of the time that knowledge workers spend just hunting for information. And this time spent hunting, this loss of efficiency, is invisible because it just gets buried with everything else inside the charges to project time within specific projects.

The other issue we have with email is that it’s open loop. It has no feedback. If the timing of the sending of some information is wrong, then the recipient will have to search through their inbox for the information after the fact and often times will ask for it to be resent rather than hunt for it. Also, you have various revisions distributed across the organization sitting on various hard drives – some of them current and some of them out of date.

When Bowen & Spears, famous researchers, talked about the need for a direct link between internal suppliers and internal customers, I think they talked about that connection as more personal, more collaborative, and closed loop. For your information flow, if you’re still using an open loop system, find a collaborative tool — PLM for instance. Help your researchers and knowledge workers take the pain out of their information flow.

Contact us to learn more about how Systems Thinking and the application of our Product Development Operating System can help your organization become more efficient, productive, innovative, and competitive.

Follow Bill at http://www.twitter.com/systhinking

Recently I had an epiphany. It wasn’t the kind of epiphany that changes a life forever and drives someone to become a monk in the Himalayas, but it was an epiphany nonetheless. It had to do with collaboration, data management, reporting, and the way many of our customers inevitably deal with their customers.

For the sake of this blog I’m going to oversimplify the “discrete manufacturing” industry into two categories: Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEM) and OEM suppliers. Many of our customers supply larger companies. This puts our customers in a unique situation in which they operate their businesses within other people’s timetables. They operate their internal projects within larger projects managed by the end customer. This is where things can get tricky, but I digress…

I was grabbing lunch with a couple friends, colleagues, and long-time engineering veterans when the conversation veered into oncoming traffic. A simple question, “Does anyone have any meetings they need to get back for?” opened up a new line of dialogue. One of the engineers referenced a late afternoon meeting and started talking about the time they waste on redundant meetings with their internal teams and the end customer. Throughout any given week they have status meetings, update meetings, and check-ins on the updates and statuses. Everyone is always trying to stay on top of expectations and progress and it seems like it’s, well, getting in the way of progress!

The other engineer sympathetically chimed in because they both felt the same pain and frustration with the overhead of trying to GSD (Get $#!+ Done!). Throughout the conversation, phrases like “they didn’t hire me to attend meetings” and “I wonder if anyone is adding up how much these meetings cost?” were thrown around. I couldn’t help but think there had to be a better way…in fact, I knew there was a better way. You can dive in and learn more about Knowledge Worker Management and Time Boxing here, but for now I’m going to focus on the tools that can help GSD.

Nowadays the acronyms PDM and PLM have become common terms in the engineering and manufacturing world – Product Data Management and Product Lifecycle Management. These tools can relieve some of the frustration. If a company uses a tool like PTC Windchill to collaborate with customers and internal teams, they can set milestones, see real-time reporting based on work states, and manage changes easily and within clearly defined workflows. They can help provide answers to questions without needing to interrupt the engineering staff.

If you give us a call and a few minutes we can help you understand the return on investment in a legitimate PDM/PLM tool (something other than file folders and shared drives). We can help you figure out how much time and money PTC Windchill can save you – hard numbers that help the bean counters sleep at night. But, it is important to remember there are tangible benefits to improving your collaborative space that go beyond cycle times and promotion requests. Investing in a PDM or PLM tool can free up time for engineers to get back to engineering. An engineer’s lunchtime conversation should focus on the amazing innovations they’re working on. It shouldn’t focus on frustrating meeting-itis. Engineers aren’t cheap. Let’s get them back to work and out of redundant meetings. I think tools like PTC Windchill can help do exactly that.

By the time you have invested in a Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) system, you are ready to overcome the inefficiencies of your current processes, and reap the benefits of improved business operations and profits.  The key to maximizing those benefits lies only partially in the program itself.  The other part rests firmly in the hands of those who will implement the new program.  Making sure your employees know how to use the system to its best advantage will put your company well on its way to achieving its goals.

Employee Training as an Investment

Change, by itself, is often frustrating. Employees using one system for years grow comfortable even with features that do not operate as intended, sometimes designing elaborate work-arounds just to get the job done. Suddenly presented with a new PLM system, these employees may dread the unknown and cling to a subpar system for its familiarity alone.  Getting employees involved with the new PLM system early in the process when bringing a new system on board is important in maximizing its efficient use in your company.

When introducing your new system, start with a reminder of what you learned from your employees about the old system: what problems they were having, where there were inefficiencies or delays, and what impact that had on their ability to get their work done.  Then invite them to see how the new system will help alleviate those issues.  Once they see how they will benefit from your new program, they will be ready for their next step: learning how to use it.

Certified Training Opportunities

Training is available for product design and management programs including Windchill, Creo, Arbortext and more. Options include public or group training events, private training sessions and remote or eLearning opportunities. Web modules offer further employee development.

Whether they breeze through free tutorials and are completely comfortable with the new program, or whether they require more hands-on training, each member of your team will need full access to instruction that will make them experts in using the new PLM program.

You should also consider having a system available for experimentation. Each employee should be able to get the feel for how Creo, other CAD platforms, Microsoft Word, and company procedures work within a system like Windchill. Finally, get feedback from your teams to understand how they feel and what additional assistance they want.  Knowing that you want to give them all the tools possible to make the new program work will remind them that they are important players in helping your company achieve its goals.

How Training Your Employees Helps Your Business

Investing in your employees and their training is time well invested. Employees who are happy in their positions and feel appreciated are likely to stay at your company and take it to a higher level of productivity.  Employees frustrated by not understanding a new system, on the other hand, may look for greener pastures.  Implemented correctly, a new system can enhance not only work efficiency but employee satisfaction as well.

The highest quality, most advanced PLM products on the market are only as good as the employees that use them. Remember to invest in your employees as much as you invest in your technologies.  And when you feel thankful for that new program and the efficiencies it has brought, this time of year is a great time to show thanks to your team for ensuring your business success.

Small and medium sized businesses may appear smaller and more nimble than their large corporate counterparts, but they have the same need to manage engineering, inventory and process changes. Their need for this change management is just on a smaller scale. SMBs should have access to the same high-tech solutions for Product Data Management (PDM), only scaled to meet the needs appropriate for their size.

PTC Windchill: for PDM Essentials

Engineering projects both large and small require up-to-date product versions. Design, production and quality control teams all require quick access to the correct and most current product information. And access to this change management process must also be controlled to prevent unauthorized changes.

Windchill PDM Essentials is an easy to deploy system that meets these goals. You do not need to spend countless hours configuring the software to meet your individual needs. Configuration and installation wizards allow for fast, easy setup with less cost to the company.

CAD with Creo

CAD data management is essential for effective product improvement. Teams need the ability to work together to share their ideas. CAD models are stored in a central location with revision control features. With the included ability to use a 3-D viewer and markup utilities, those without the CAD capability installed can still work with the same stored model designs and provide their input.

Small and medium businesses can especially benefit from the ability to reuse and re-engineer existing designs. This is how a smaller business can leverage its prior work and find ways to grow. Control over different design versions allows small teams to be nimble and avoid design mistakes that could lead to increased costs and lost time. This is why Windchill PDM comes with PTC Creo View Lite and it works with a variety of other CAD systems, including AutoCAD.

Office Documents and More

This same change management can also be applied to regular office documents with a check in and a check out function. Check out locking prevents other users from modifying documents while the work is in process with a different team. Check in releases the document to other approved users. The history of when changes were made, and who made the changes, is stored to track the most current versions and ensure the changes were authorized.

Database searching is simplified to reduce the time needed to locate designs and documents. The interface allows you to search with multiple terms, from product numbers to created-by dates and names.

Keeping it all Moving at the Right Pace

Data publishing can also be scheduled to allow for viewing and access of documents at exactly the right time. This is how product lifecycle functions control when teams have access to data. It ensures that parts for manufacturing are not ordered before the final design is approved. Keeping everything on the right schedule is key and this level of lifecycle control ensures that all the people in your organization (regardless of size) are kept in the loop and product development flows smoothly and quickly.

These are the ways that PTC Windchill with PDM Essentials gives small to medium businesses the data and change management solutions that meets their current needs with the ability to add solutions as the company grows. From EAC’s perspective, we see PDM Essentials as an excellent base foundation that can be modified to meet your unique business needs – large or small. Please contact us so that we can tailor a solution that fits your business and your budget.