CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
23 December 2011
CIMdata News
“Evolving & Adapting, PLM Captures New Market” By Peter A. Bilello, President, CIMdata Inc.
Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) is expanding its technological impact into an extensive set of diverse new markets. Companies in pharmaceuticals, apparel, food and beverages, and consumer packaged goods as well as the architectural, civil engineering, and construction industries are implementing PLM solutions tailored to their needs. All of them expect the kind of PLM benefits that automotive, aerospace and other discrete manufacturing companies have enjoyed for years.
The flexibility of these new PLM solutions is further proof of PLM's maturity. They also reinforce its pivotal role in managing the organization's intellectual assets, i.e., the product knowledge, that is the wellspring of the future success of any enterprise.
In capturing these new markets, PLM solution suppliers are creating new capabilities, extending user interfaces, modifying workflows, and even tinkering with architectures. Specifics are still being hammered out, but the adaptability, flexibility, and scalability of PLM solutions have never been in doubt. In many cases these new PLM solutions are playing very different roles in these new markets, often in sharp contrast with “traditional” role of PLM in the design and manufacture of discrete parts and assemblies.
Production facilities in these new markets differ as greatly from one another as they do from discrete manufacturing. “Pharma” uses workbench-scale presses to squeeze powdered medicines into tablets. Apparel is pattern making, fabric cutters, and sewing machines meshed with seemingly endless global supply chains plus tight linkages to multiple retailers and wholesalers. Food and beverage plants are crammed with canning, bottling, and labeling machines-all of which is closely regulated.
Fraser
For consumer packaged goods, simulating and analyzing shoppers' experience is a major source of product-related knowledge as well as a business driver; the Procter & Gamble implementation spells this out. The drivers of innovation in the other businesses also differ profoundly. Pharma relies on massive “doses” of biochemistry and regulatory compliance. Apparel depends on astutely discerning fashion trends. Food and beverage companies work constantly on new recipes, and on the traceability of what they sell-increasingly from farm to fork.
All PLM implementations span product development from front-end concepts through production and on to maintenance, support, logistics, distribution and eventual disposal. This means that PLM solutions link every part of the extended enterprise that is concerned with product development. With PLM, the links among hundreds of different workflows become transparent and collaborative.
As always, the basic PLM challenge is tracking and securing product knowledge as it is created anywhere in the organization and making it available to anyone who needs it, on demand. To be broadly effective, however, collaboration on a company's intellectual assets must run throughout the organization and beyond to suppliers, partners, customers, and increasingly to regulators.
There are dramatic differences among the industries in these new PLM markets. Their business drivers and what to them constitutes product knowledge are also quite different. Within discrete manufacturing, of course, business drivers and the makeup of product knowledge also vary, though within smaller boundaries. Accommodating differences among user organizations is nothing new for PLM.
Beneath it all, the basic PLM rationale remains unchanged. All these industries see PLM as an enabler for information gathering and managing that information effectively from concept to end of life. As a single source or single version of the truth, PLM solutions also empower the collaborative development of today's and tomorrow's products and do additional duty as platforms for knowledge capture and business analytics.
Pharmaceuticals
The challenges of managing product knowledge in pharma include convoluted drug discovery processes and development that spans many years. Clinical trials must be closely monitored to retain information, and the knowledge gained during years of trials must be fully shared. The attention of regulators and the need to fully comply with their strictures are unceasing. So is the continuous analysis and verification required by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and its counterparts around the world.
PLM solutions in pharma offer continuous tracking of regulatory compliance and potential risks-while upgrading links between R&D, operations, and corporate strategies. PLM solutions also offer a powerful approach to extracting the inherent value in two major FDA initiatives:
- Quality by Design (QbD) includes traceability of every molecule in pills, liquids, and sprays as well as their purity. QbD also covers every component in production and testing equipment.
- Process Analytical Technology (PAT). PAT establishes continuous verification down to the size and shape of particles in powdered drug compounds. The FDA sees PAT as the path to right-first-time production and eliminating waste.
In addition, PLM solutions provide ways to help pharma manufacturers integrate regulatory requirements into their development processes, again using a single repository of product information. PLM solutions help with the crucial early identification of potential errors and conflicts. PLM is invaluable in the making of hundreds of timely decisions that optimize a drug's profitability throughout its lifecycle.
These decisions are made in dozens of corporate functions that increasingly span the globe. With PLM solutions at hand, decision makers can drill down through many layers and types of data and information, some of it overlapping and some conflicting. Previously in pharma, these critical IP decisions were based on painstaking reviews of thousands of spreadsheets.
Pharma is taking PLM a long way beyond computer-aided design (CAD) and computer-aided engineering (CAE, mechanical simulation and analysis) where PLM first gained broad acceptance.
Retail and Apparel
The differences between pharma and retail and apparel could hardly be larger yet PLM is gaining ground in both.
Pharmaceuticals are highly regulated because the consequences of even small failures can be tragic and fatal. In apparel, however, small failures are rarely noticed and may be inconsequential; fabric, trim, and measurement errors can be sold as “irregulars” (with big discounts). Very lightly regulated compared with pharma, apparel firms are at the mercy of fashion trends and even whims of the major retailers and their shoppers. Misreading fashion trends can have dire consequences.
In the retail and apparel industry, PLM solutions align suppliers so that seasons, departments, fashion collections and even specific styles meet corporate performance targets. Ideally these alignments go all the way down to the individual stores' stock keeping units (SKUs) that identify each variant in style, size, fabric, color, and trim. Adding to these complications is the fact that some retailers distinguish up to ten selling seasons through the year. Missing seasonal shipment dates can be dire, too.
PLM solutions in retail and apparel also effectively manage images-photos, artwork, flat sketches, color chips, and other media-in their native formats-along with patterns, colors, size charts, and measurements. These too are part of the product-related knowledge of retail and apparel.
On the “business” side of fashion, PLM solutions track the costs of fabrics, labor, energy, transportation, and merchandising costs. Also monitored closely are consumer spending, requests for quotations (RFQs) and samples; and even the Green movement, which has its own views on traceability. Bringing all this together in PLM helps move decisions closer to retailers and their customers.
Food and Beverages
The food and beverage (F&B) industries share some PLM drivers with both pharma-strict regulation, for example-and with apparel, as tastes in food are also highly changeable.
In F&B companies, recipes, ingredients, labels, and nutritional statements, and packaging are all part of their product-related intellectual assets. Managing the ingredients information in PLM also offers the information necessary to respond quickly to product contamination issues-and to resolve them satisfactorily.
Food-borne illnesses cause losses of hundreds of millions of dollars every year. The risk of illness is a major, though far from the only reason for the nearly universal adoption of intelligent specification management (ISM) systems. ISMs create, manage, and optimize formulas and recipes, and are becoming the core of PLM implementations in F&B.
Industry standards like ANSI/ISA S88 and ANSI/ISA S95 have been incorporated into PLM solutions to help manage safety and regulatory compliance. Both automate data collection, and the more granular that data the better. S88 is a design philosophy of instrumentation, of the control of batch manufacturing processes (both manual and automated), and managing recipes. S95 is the standard for integrating enterprise and corporate-business functions with production control systems. S88 and S95 are themselves integrated. ISA refers to the Instrumentation, Systems, and Automation Society.
Consumer Packaged Goods
Although generally inedible, the products of consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies comply with restrictions very similar to those of F&B. Perhaps the best expression of that business reality is what Procter & Gamble Co. in Cincinnati has accomplished. P&G's company-wide Corporate Standards System (CSS) includes over 1.2 million technical specifications. CSS covers more than 100,000 suppliers and the materials, formulations, processes, and packaging used throughout P&G. The company credits CSS with cutting months off the average time to get new products to market.
CSS offers compelling testimony to the scalability of PLM as well its flexibility and adaptability. A few large numbers tell the story:
- More than 12,000 P&G people use the system 24/7 to track every brand across all regions and business units.
- Some 9,000 of P&G's 127,000 employees worldwide work in R&D.
- Product-development data is entered a million times every day.
Given P&G's size, executives say that using CSS to accelerate time-to-market saves hundreds of millions of dollars per year. P&G makes, packs, and ships hundreds of thousands of different packages-detergents, soap, shampoo, cosmetics, toothpaste, batteries, shavers, and so on. It adds more every year. Total sales approach $80 billion a year to several billion people.
Architectural, Engineering, and Construction
The professions that comprise architectural, engineering, and construction (AEC) are taking yet another approach to PLM. They are blending traditional project management (CAD files and blueprints) with scheduling, simulation and analysis literally from the ground up with digital manufacturing to manage equipment and materials at the site and optimize the pace of work, with knowledgeware to capture best practices and ensure their use in future projects, and much more.
Successfully integrating these into an all-encompassing PLM strategy pays off in many ways. Well-implemented PLM helps with everything from gaining project approvals and securing funding and tracking regulatory filings-each with masses of documents and convoluted sign-offs)-tracking design changes and their “downstream” impacts, and coordinating the work of hundreds of subcontractors that use dozens of different CAx systems-all while staying on or ahead of schedule and within budget.
PLM's Unchanging Rationale
Behind these developments, however, PLM's powerful rationale is little changed. As PLM solution suppliers offer new capabilities, more intuitive user interfaces, and more real-world workflows, PLM's potential benefits grow steadily. So do the opportunities PLM solutions present to users in developing the products of the future. As we noted at the outset, PLM solutions' adaptability, flexibility, and scalability have never been in doubt.
This article appeared in ConnectPress CATIA Community,
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