PLM Pain Relief

by Steve Bruneau, NetIDEAS, Inc. 

Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) initiatives are hard, and getting the results you envision once you commit to this initiative is even harder. Success requires a broad strategy that combines a systems approach, an application vision, and sweeping organizational change. By planning for and proactively managing this complex process, companies can reap huge rewards for their business and users alike.

NetIDEAS, Inc. has been deploying, customizing, and maintaining Windchill systems since February 2000. As an application service provider, we are responsible for the technical aspects of the initiative and for guiding clients through the areas they must manage themselves. With over 3,500 users in our production Windchill systems, our clients range from small to large and span a number of industry verticals.

We’ve learned a lot along the way. The general prescription that we offer in each PLM engagement covers seven basic principles for success. This article provides an overview of these requirements to help anyone either planning a PLM initiative or needing to get a current program back on track.   

1. Establish a unified application vision.

By definition, Product Lifecycle Management covers a broad array of business processes. At the outset, it’s essential to clearly define the “from” and “to” models and plan a careful evolution between the two.

Engaging the full functionality of an enterprise solution such as Windchill creates enormous cultural upheaval, and resistance to change is the greatest single challenge to success. As a result, most successful programs take a more incremental approach by targeting their long-term desires, but also setting a staged progression that matches their worst pain points and their culture’s ability to embrace that change. For example, they might focus first on project collaboration and, more specifically, document-sharing or simply getting their data management in order. 

2. Provide consistent, focused leadership.

Leadership from senior management is needed both upfront and on a day-to-day basis to prepare the organization for the downstream benefits. Given the cultural adoption issues, the role of the senior manager is to serve as cheerleader for the PLM initiative, helping the implementation team keep its eye on the goals and make common sense decisions along the way. The leader also needs to communicate the pros of the new business model/process to the organization while also acknowledging the cons. In the most successful implementations, organizations find a way to generate buy-in from employees so that users “pull” on rather than resist the system.

3. Allocate and support the right resources.

The right team is needed to facilitate a successful deployment and the long-term care of a PLM system. Team members must be problem-solvers who are unafraid of change, experts in their respective business areas, and motivated to “make it work.” They should also be able to work with other disciplines and understand the difference between what is important and what is urgent.

The implementation team also needs a strong project manager who can bring out the best in the rest of the players. This leader must have power to make decisions and not be encumbered by the week’s production issues.  

4. Know the application infrastructure, security, performance, business continuity.

As the central system for managing product data over its lifespan, the PLM system must make data available to users so that they can perform their jobs. The organization will expect that the system is there for their use, so the infrastructure must be architected to meet those expectations. A well-structured system is built on four core elements: 

Network.  If the intent is to collaborate with a distributed enterprise or the supply chain, network and security considerations will require higher priority.  The network bandwidth required is a function of the type of data to be shared within the environment. A general rule of thumb is 10MB/minute on T1. For lightweight office documents, a Partial T1 is likely sufficient. When dealing with heavy CAD data, your organization needs to evaluate how big the files are and how often they are checked into and out of the system. Should the performance fail to meet expectations because of the desires/habits of the users, replication appliances can be implemented locally for content caching. Senior leadership needs to communicate to the CAD team that having a check-in take a few more seconds might save many other users hours spent in looking for the right data. 

Data center. A PLM rollout will go through several phases that will affect the load on your system.   When sizing the servers, the key elements are CPU power, memory, and disk storage. CPU power with Windchill continues to increase with larger HTML pages. Both Oracle and Windchill require plenty of memory for reasonable performance. Disk storage is a function of the number of data objects, their average size, and the frequency of change on those objects. The fact that Windchill saves previous iterations along with visualization and markup files must be taken into consideration as well.

Security. Protecting your organization’s data is paramount. While system security has several dimensions, it is important to keep in mind that the majority of security breaches come from employees rather than from an outside hacker. Proactive firewall management and use of standard HTTPS (128-bit encryption) is our standard approach to minimizing external threats. 

Business continuity. Most companies are unprepared for the business continuity issues involved in implementing a PLM system. Network reliability requires 24x7 accessibility and must be redundant and fault tolerant. In our implementations, NetIDEAS servers are directly connected to five tier-1 ISPs, all of which have an SLA with uptime and round-trip performance guarantees. In addition, the data center must be high availability, which includes clustered servers, automatic fail-over and load balancing. We also utilize high availability disk storage and recommend establishing and practicing a routine backup strategy for recovering mission-critical data if circumstances demand. Development servers should be used for testing out new functionality, upgrades, and bug investigation to protect the production system stability.

5. Proactively manage the business process evolution.

Best practices vs. “our way” is the challenge that all PLM initiatives face. Organizations must realize that no tool will be perfect and the fit between the system and the business processes needs to be worked hard.

Customizations significantly affect initial development costs, schedule, and risk, as well as complicate the ongoing maintenance and upgrades of your system. NetIDEAS recommends that you walk before you run—rather than customize numerous elements, make a slight modification to the business process to achieve the desire outcome. By fully understanding how the system works before making alterations, organizations are better able to make the right trade-offs toward the required fit.

6. Establish a training curriculum that keeps it simple.

Implementing a new system is perhaps one of the hardest changes for an organization to make.  The key to helping the culture embrace the new system is to communicate its intended business benefits and acknowledge the extra work and pain that users feel as they begin the process. From the project kickoff, providing a proactive training curriculum highly focused on those users is essential.

The training should, however, be kept very simple and apply directly to the things users do every day. Trainers must also be able to articulate the broader system benefits so that users have an appreciation how the new practices fit into the bigger picture.

7.  Prepare for the constant care and feeding.

PLM software is not plug-and-play. As your products evolve to remain competitive in your industry, so too do the technologies, threats, and business processes to create those products. As an organization, you must be proactive to leverage the changing landscape for your benefit rather than find yourself in a reactive posture.

From a software perspective, bug fixes, enhancements, and new functionality are normal occurrences that warrant attention. Full revision upgrades also warrant substantial investment to test out data migration integrity, impacts of customizations, and then the revision of training materials to reflect the changes.

Regardless of how you shape the team that helps you deploy and manage your PLM initiative, the seven key ingredients outlined here have proven time and again to be equally important to long-term success. While it’s possible to overlook some of these areas (and it happens!), doing so directly diminishes the business benefits of your PLM initiative. But by allocating sufficient attention to these priorities, our best clients continue to realize steady returns from their system. 

And on that theme, cost per seat is often used as one of the key ROI parameters for a PLM initiative. That parameter needs to be replaced with cost per deployed seat, where the size of the deployment is directly related to the business processes realizing value from the system. Paying attention to these seven ingredients of success will help you attain that value.

Steve Bruneau is vice president at NetIDEAS, Inc. He will be presenting this topic in greater detail at the upcoming PTC/USER World Event in Dallas, TX. Steve can be reached at 856-914-9426 or via email at steve.bruneau@netideasinc.com. You can also leave your contact information at the NetIDEAS booth (#521).