Industry Summary Articles

Any major change to the way a company fundamentally gets its work done in the interest of operational efficiency has always been challenged by human nature. People generally don’t like change, and we resist it when we perceive that the promise of growth and/or profitability may not be beneficial to us personally.

We all have our own personal ROI and none of us are robots. Unless we are persuaded and unless we are fully “on board,” we are likely to be suspicious about change at the outset, half-hearted through implementation, and resistant from then on.

More than most other corporate endeavors, enterprise software technology initiatives fall victim to this reality. New implementations in ERP, CRM, SCM, MES, FMS, asset management, logistics management, and others all run into resistance. Product lifecycle management (PLM), however, encounters particularly acute challenges because its scope and breadth reach into so many departments, touches so many individual motivations, and often collides with many personal goals. As many of us have heard, “culture eats strategy for breakfast.”

While we constantly write, speak and think about PLM initiatives in terms of people, processes and technology, the “people” part means addressing the management cultural change in planning as well as fixing it in implementations that have fallen short of ROI expectations.

Many companies focus too much on processes and technology. People and their work habits—which comprise the organization’s culture—rarely get serious consideration.

In other words, the implementation plan’s inherent greatness is left to sell itself. Too many management teams seem to view culture as a box to be checked and then ignored. They apparently believe that if their people are told to do something, for example, use a new system, they will just do it.

When project leaders finally concern themselves with cultural change, they are in a crunch. The attention spans of management and implementation planners often become stretched. Startup time frames are short, hard deadlines are looming, and budget dollars are nearly gone...

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