CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
25 October 2012
CIMdata News
‘Brave New World’ CIMdata’s 2012 PLM Road Map Conference Goes Strategic Before a Capacity Crowd By Jack Thornton, Principal MINDFEED Marcomm for CIMdata
The recently concluded CIMdata Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) Road Map differed significantly from its predecessor conferences with a shift in focus. In presentations on implementations under way and strategic visions under development, PLM Road Map 2012 earned its theme—a Brave New World—and its agenda subtitle, “PLM as THE Strategic Imperative.”
As always in a technology focused conference, there were presentations about progress in implementing PLM strategies. PLM Road Map newcomers included three presenters, Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, Schreiber Foods (dairy products), and Dow Chemical.
Presentations focused on discrete manufacturing were by the Aerospace Systems Design Laboratory at Georgia Tech, Caterpillar, Cummins, EADS, Mercury Marine, Parker Hannifin Aerospace, the U.S Army's Armament, Research, Development and Engineering Center (ARDEC), Waltonen Engineering, and Whirlpool. As in past years, the automakers and their suppliers were well represented: Dana, Delphi, Ford, GM, GKN Driveline, Jaguar Land Rover, and TRW.
All these firms spelled out the evolution of their PLM strategies, how they are making headway in communications and collaboration, and their successes in wrestling with legacy systems, entrenched bureaucracies, convoluted workflows, and “silos” of expertise.
The themes "Brave New World" and "Strategic Imperative" highlighted the conference’s expansion. This was intended to meet the strategic needs of new-product-development in two ways—more detail on PLM implementations and the introduction of a strategic management track. Nearly 300 attended PLM Road Map 2012, up from approximately 220 last year—a capacity crowd in the Plymouth, Mich., conference center CIMdata uses.
At every conference there are eye-opening insights. Three of this year’s came from:
Dow’s PLM Project Manager Mike Williams who spoke on “sandwiching” PLM as an important interface between enterprise resource planning (ERP) and manufacturing execution systems (MES). This is a key part of Dow’s transition of its commodity-based business toward high-value, low-volume specialty chemicals.
Continuous-process manufacturers, such as Dow, offer hot business opportunities for PLM solution providers and fresh insights for implementers. Dow is pursuing ERP, PLM, and MES to form an integrated, end-to-end solution for managing products and production as part of Dow’s transformation. “PLM is rarely deployed in the chemical industry,” Williams observed. “It has been found difficult to straddle the diverse requirements of numerous and varied chemical production systems relative to PLM strategies and implementation plans.”
“As a highly capital intensive business, Dow has a compelling need to implement an integrated ERP-PLM-MES solution. The drivers for Dow are high asset utilization (including overall equipment effectiveness or OEE) and rapid introductions of new products with PLM. This requires a well-coordinated definition of both the material specification and the equipment capability.”
“Dow Chemical’s No. 1 reason for implementing ERP is effective governance, most specifically for compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley’s financial regulations and environment, health & safety (EH&S) requirements,” Williams said. “The first implementation phase required the installation of a global specification and recipe repository of both raw materials and finished goods.” He noted that Dow’s Advanced Materials division alone has 16,000 active SKUs, including reactive intermediates, and about seven times that number in raw materials, all of which is regulated in over 100 different countries.
Dow’s multi-year implementation of ERP, PLM and MES is roughly 30% complete.
Jon Hirschtick, founder of solid-modeling pioneer SolidWorks, offered several blunt challenges to the computer-aided design (CAD) and solid modeling software companies—and some comfort to frustrated engineers and designers. The relevance to PLM is direct since CAD and solid model data are the biggest inputs to new-product development. (Hirschtick recently retired from running SolidWorks for its owner, Dassault Systèmes.)
“CAD and solid-modeling vendors must accept the reality that in engineering, the single-vendor CAD doctrine is dead,” he said. “Vendors must accept that non-native data is not a foreign invader.”
He singled out three profound CAD changes underway:
- Better ways of representing geometry in “kernels,” the hearts of CAD and solid modeling systems, plus better accommodation for engineering fundamentals and physics.
- Computing platforms with multi-core central processing units (CPUs), multi-threaded software too can keep pace with gigabyte-sized models and renderings, and the explosion in the use of hardware from Apple Computer. “The platform shift to Microsoft Corp. Windows operating systems from UNIX is tiny compared to what is happening now” in operating systems and CAD platforms.
- Design processes that “are highly fragmented and widely distributed throughout virtual organizations.”
Hirschtick added that “the CAD vendors are hard at work on these investments and other advances. Users need to think through the implications for their own businesses and encourage the vendors to push ahead.”
He admitted to frustration with CAD systems’ geometry kernels. Kernels have relied on boundary representation (B-Rep) geometry for decades for lack of anything better. Alternatives to B-rep include “voxels” (three-dimensional volumetric picture elements, or pixels, used in gaming and medical imaging) and fault-tolerant modeling. But neither has won a following in engineering.
David E. Cole, chairman emeritus of the Detroit-based Center for Automotive Research (CAR). Dr. Cole pointed out how completely the automakers’ business models have changed in recent years and the upheavals underway in developing new cars and trucks.
Widely recognized as the dean of Detroit’s industry analysts, Dr. Cole is chairman and co-founder of the AutoHarvest Foundation—“Collaborate, Innovate and Win.” AutoHarvest is an “industry-inspired, open innovation marketplace that supports advancement through collaboration and provides a richer, deeper pool of intellectual property.”
People, Processes, Technology
In CIMdata’s view, PLM is about bringing people, processes, and technology to bear on product development and its many requirements. At PLM Road Map 2012, all three were addressed from many angles.
People: The engineering workforce is evolving, becoming more social-media savvy and increasingly diverse in both skill sets and cultures. This has broad implications for engineering management and PLM, and especially as mechatronics and embedded software become product differentiators. Peter Bilello, CIMdata president, observed that today’s young engineers “live on the Internet while those of us aged 40 and up go to it when we think we need to.” The difference in outlook and approaches to work are huge.
Process presentations centered on design optimization in both products and processes. Ramifications touched on prototypes (a few virtual prototypes now and some day just one physical prototype) and using digital manufacturing for right-first-time production, sound ergonomics, and short learning curves in manufacturing.
Process discussions also got into consolidating hundreds of legacy engineering applications in large enterprises and the virtualization of operations that in some companies seem close to fragmentation. Consolidation and virtualization underscore the growing importance of configuration management in PLM. In his closing remarks, Bilello asked, "how can we make complexity trivial?"
Technology discussions revolved around the explosion of computing power and high-performance computing. Among the issues were democratization of engineering—with “collab” being assumed if not yet a reality—and limitations still imposed by computer hardware. CPUs (central processing units), network bandwidth and read/write (input/output or I/O) speeds fall farther and farther behind the data tsunami’s rates of data creation and duplication. An obvious solution is PLM in the Cloud, a.k.a., data anytime anywhere.
Summing Up
For returning PLM Road Map attendees, all this builds nicely on the 2011 conference. At the risk of oversimplification, 2011 was about "how" and 2012 was about "why." Many 2011 presentations focused on using PLM to overcome complexity in engineering—“before complexity drowns us all”—and how the biggest implementation challenges were being overcome. In 2012, these challenges were subtexts amid the broader, higher-level focus on strategy.
http://www.catiacommunity.com/feature_full.php?read=1&cpfeatureid=71427&page=all
Become a member of the CIMdata PLM Community to receive your daily PLM news and much more.
Tell us what you think of the CIMdata Newsletter. Send your feedback.
CIMdata is committed to your privacy. Your personal information will never be sold or shared outside of CIMdata without your express permission.