How to Get the Most Out of Your PLM Software
If you’re venturing into the world of product development, you’ve likely heard of Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) software. PLM consolidates planning, development, manufacturing, and product information into one cohesive platform to connect everyone in your organization to the most valuable data. This “single source of truth” is vital for reducing design iterations, cutting unnecessary costs, enhancing product quality, and streamlining operations. But, how do you squeeze every ounce of value out of this digital powerhouse? Let’s find out.
The Key Functions of PLM Software
One of the first steps in maximizing efficiency with PLM software is to fully understand its capabilities. It juggles a mountain of data, manages changes during the product’s journey, and fosters team collaboration across departments. At its core, PLM is all about data management, bringing products to life visually, streamlining processes, and making teamwork seamless.
For example, PLM software like Windchill, a PTC software, manages critical product development data and streamlines change management processes. Fast, secure, and web-based, this business collaboration software enables companies to improve product quality by connecting teams to up-to-date product information.
Familiarizing your team with the functions of your business’s Product Lifecycle Management software will enable you to navigate the software with ease and efficiency.
Empowering Non-Expert PLM Users
PLM software is designed to strengthen collaboration amongst team members – to break down those ever-persistent data silos and bring people together. By working simultaneously, sharing insights and information, and exchanging ideas, your team can achieve greater innovation and make quicker decisions. PTC, a leader in PLM software, offers apps that are built on top of your PLM system to filter information into a consumable format.
ThingWorx Navigate serves as a great example of making PLM data more approachable for everyone. It’s about stripping away the complexity of Windchill data to support team members who might not be PLM wizards but still need to engage with critical product information. This approach is pivotal in fostering a workspace where insight and knowledge flow freely, inviting contributions from all corners of your organization.
However, unlike ThingWorx Navigate, EAC Productivity Apps (Windchill navigation apps) are highly customizable to meet your organization’s needs. Sitting on top of Windchill and Navigate, EAC Apps integrate your Product Lifecycle Management and Enterprise Resource Planning systems so departments across your organization can get access to data in an easily consumable format.
By offering these intuitive, role-specific gateways to important product data, EAC Apps and ThingWorx Navigate equip your diverse team of stakeholders with the understanding they need to navigate the product lifecycle with confidence and clarity.
Streamlining with Smarter Process Management
PLM doesn’t just organize your work; it makes it smarter. By automating workflows, the software cuts out the fluff and focuses on what’s essential, saving you precious time. Lean into this capability and watch your project timelines shrink and productivity soar.
Mastering the Data Deluge
PLM software can feel like drinking from a firehose with its data deluge. Managing this information efficiently is crucial. Keep data clean, consistent, and up-to-date. This ensures that everyone makes decisions based on the best information available, keeping your projects on track. Often this can involve data cleanup to make sure there isn’t unnecessary data crowding your reports. Or more commonly, training on all the capabilities of your Windchill system that you may be missing out on.
Our managed services team recognizes that the journey of PLM implementation doesn’t end with deployment, EAC underscores the importance of ongoing support, business process consulting, and adoption services through their EAC Alliance Program. This initiative demonstrates how businesses can continually derive value from PLM systems by adapting them to evolving business processes, driving home the need for ongoing evaluation, support, and optimization to maximize the software’s potential.
Never Stop Improving with Your PLM Software
Last but certainly not least, treat PLM software as your partner in growth. Regularly evaluate how the system serves your goals and find ways to fine-tune it. With your strategies evolving alongside the software, you’ll find new ways to enhance efficiency continuously.
In wrapping up, making the most of your PLM software isn’t just about understanding its features; it’s about immersing your team in its capabilities, promoting a culture of collaboration, tweaking processes for the better, and always striving for that next level of efficiency. Dive into the world of PLM, and you’ll soon discover the endless benefits it brings to the table.
If you’re looking for direction or guidance at any point along your Product Lifecycle Management transformation, EAC has experts to work with your organization through it all.
In today’s world, it’s not uncommon for companies to be rich in data but poor in insights. Despite having access to a wealth of information, organizations struggle to properly analyze performance and drive transformational improvements. This is where ThingWorx Digital Performance Management (DPM) steps in to bridge the gap.
This week in your factory, you’ve applied maximum effort, pouring countless hours into perfecting your product. As the work week ends, a feeling of slight disappointment remains.
Could you have accomplished more? Where did it go awry? You may not be able to find the answers on your own, leaving your factory inefficient and operating below its full potential.
If this is you, look no further. With the capabilities of Thingworx Digital Performance Management, you will unleash an untapped potential of data and boost your manufacturing processes.
What is Digital Performance Management?
ThingWorx Digital Performance Management (DPM) is a cutting-edge solution designed to help organizations identify, prioritize, and improve production issues.
By capturing lost production hours and their causes, DPM indicates where to focus for the most critical impact. Also, it optimizes the finite time available, allowing organizations to reclaim lost hours and increase effective time by 20% or more. Thus, directly impacting the bottom line.
How Does DPM Work?
Consider a manufacturing facility that can produce one unit per hour. In a week with 88 hours worked, the facility manages to manufacture only 44 units. Let’s say 12 hours are lost through planned downtime and 14 hours are lost due to changeovers.
That leaves about 18 hours unaccounted for. Where did those come from? With ThingWorx DPM, you can quickly identify issues, and why they happened, and then take appropriate actions to fix them.
Moreover, DPM calculates and analyzes discrepancies, providing valuable insights to improve productivity. DPM is a comprehensive toolset that propels organizations towards peak performance by tracking performance, conducting in-depth analysis, planning, and validating improvements.
The Production Dashboard
One feature included with DPM is the Production Dashboard. The visual dashboard is a crucial tool for supervising shift performance and gathering vital data to inform reporting and analysis. It is designed for supervisors and line managers to track productivity across various production lines.
Some key features of the Production Dashboard include:
Provides insights into shift progress at the production block level
Allows for automated and manual data entry, including reason codes to capture all losses
And offers a simplified interface to minimize disruption
Bottleneck Analysis
The Bottleneck Analysis tool is designed to automatically detect and monitor the most significant bottlenecks in your factory, providing valuable analysis and insights into OEE and OLE.
One of the challenges that customers face is a lack of visibility into bottlenecks, which leads to a disconnect between continuous improvement efforts and their impact on the business. However, bottlenecks are often dynamic and complex.
To address these challenges, DPM offers key capabilities to help identify and resolve:
Automatically identifying and tracking bottlenecks.
Systematic identification of the top constraints, which can significantly increase factory efficiency by 5-20%.
Management of the dynamic nature of competing bottlenecks.
Overall, DPM works relentlessly, making up for lost time by tracing the root cause of issues and providing precise remedies to ensure smooth and efficient functionality. Consider DPM an invaluable employee, working tirelessly around the clock without additional overtime costs!
Accelerate Problem Solving with DPM
DPM’s capabilities extend beyond surface-level analysis. By combining Pareto analysis and time loss analytics, DPM users can uncover and address a significant percentage of production problems.
Additionally, with the further integration of AI and machine learning, DPM streamlines the identification of patterns in data, resulting in faster problem-solving and decision-making.
For instance, a DPM user noticed quality losses between 3 p.m. and 4 p.m. Thanks to DPM’s automated analysis, the manufacturing team quickly determined that the issue was caused by a glare from the sunset, making the inspection camera unreliable.
All in all, DPM helped accelerate the problem-solving process saving valuable time and resources.
Reap the Benefits
Digital Performance Management is as remarkable as it sounds. DPM holds the secret to your production improvements and is ready to share them with you. Discover the plethora of benefits that are tied to DPM:
Standardized Measurement: DPM provides a consistent and standardized approach to measure losses, ensuring accurate evaluation of bottlenecks, and their impact on performance.
Efficient Root Cause Analysis: Leveraging AI technology, DPM identifies the root causes of bottlenecks and facilitates their permanent resolution, eliminating recurring issues.
Automated Problem Identification: DPM’s powerful AI algorithms automate the process of surfacing common issues, exponentially reducing the time spent on problem-solving.
Real-time Insights: What once took months to identify critical insights now becomes easily accessible through DPM’s intuitive interface, providing teams with immediate access to actionable insights.
Get Started with DPM Today!
In conclusion, if you want to revolutionize your performance management and take your organization to new heights, it’s time to embrace Digital Performance Management.
Remember, in today’s fast-paced world, those who leverage technology to gain insights and make data-driven decisions are the ones who thrive.
Are you ready to unlock the true potential of your organization with Digital Performance Management? Talk with an expert now to take your first steps toward success.
