Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is a software licensing and delivery model in which you are buying software subscription and software is typically centrally hosted. Here is a potentially big news – SaaS model is proliferating into manufacturing. Welcome Product-as-a-Service (don’t be confused with PaaS- Platform as a service). According to IDC report, manufacturing companies have seen some potential in after sales services and support. There is a good chance soon we will be buying services and not manufactured product. Here is a passage from IDC article to explain more.

By 2018, 40% of Top 100 discrete manufacturers and 20% of Top 100 process manufacturers will provide Product-as-a-Service platforms. Leading manufacturers have seen the potential that after-sales service revenues hold, with some generating up to 50% of their profits from after-sales sources. As manufacturers apply service innovation to their efforts, the product becomes a platform to deliver business outcomes and tangible value. IDC Manufacturing Insights defines product-as-a-service as the transformation of service from a standalone function within a manufacturing organization into an integrated product and service offering that delivers value in use. Manufacturers transition from selling physical products to selling the business outcomes the products will deliver.

Among the IT impacts we see as a result of product-as-a-service are the need for IT to support a global service delivery network with systems that enable the process flow for this new business model. Major systems, from customer management to service parts planning to finance and accounting will need to be altered and brought in alignment with how the product-service is brought to market. The change necessary is not to be underestimated, which is why we see approximately 40% of manufacturing reaching out to external IT service providers to assist with the implementation of product-service systems.

To transform organization to sell services from selling products is a big deal. As it was mentioned above, it will bring significant challenges to transform existing IT systems. However, it made me think about challenges it can also bring to product lifecycle management environment and its core – BOM management.

The article Bill of Materials (BOM): Necessary or Just Nice to Have? from SparePartsKnowHow blog speaks about the role of Bill of Materials in services and spare part management. The article brings some interesting controversy around the need to have an up-to-date bill of materials in service. The article is very practical and I specially liked some examples. Here is my favorite passage:

If you choose to go down the path of software optimization (a theoretical approach) you probably do need to ensure that your BOMS are up to date. However, if you apply a pragmatic and process based approach such as the Inventory Cash Release process then the BOMS are less important. This type of approach forces you to look at the issues that drive your spare parts holdings.

These issues are not related to how many machines you have that use the part, they are almost universally related to the processes in place for spare parts management. These include: the basis of decision making (emotional, logical or data based), supplier relations, commercial arrangements, supply chain, procurement, planning, team behavior, and accountability. These are the most obvious examples.

From direct experience I can say that without a doubt these issues have far greater effect on your spare parts holdings than knowing whether you have X machines that use part Y. Of course the number of machines requiring a part will be an influence on the required holding levels, as it impacts demand, however, for the vast majority of companies their spare parts levels are far more influenced by the issues listed above and addressing these is the best approach for reviews and optimization.

That discussion reminded me very old disputes between Order Point and MRP strategies. It is clearly better to manage inventory by knowing what organization is manufacturing rather than maintaining a specific level of inventories. Moving into modern IoT era, I can see even more potential to correspond to a specific product requirements and needs to manage services and maintenance operation.

To have exact BOM of products in service can be tricky. This type of information is not well maintained by manufacturing organizations (especially, it is related to manufacturers that not using Serial Number BOM). It can be a challenge for this organization to move into more intelligent BOM management practices to bring up-to-date BOM in service management.

What is my conclusion? Manufacturing organizations will have to transform to support "Product-as-a-Service" model. It might create some significant IT challenges. One of potential challenges is the need to manage bill of materials for physical products in service and operation. The importance of BOM management will depend on specific "service management practices". We are going to see the evolution of these practices and related PLM technologies in coming years. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

Image courtesy of pakorn at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

It is hard overestimate the importance of Bill of Materials for product development. In my keynote at ProSTEP iViP symposium in Stuttgart earlier this month I’ve been sharing my thoughts why developing of single BOM across multiple disciplines in critical for organization. I wanted to bring few examples that can demonstrate why having a single BOM strategy can bring benefits to product development and manufacturing organization.

Earlier today, at Siemens PLM connection event in Dallas, I captured the following slide demonstrating an integrated approach in design, manufacturing, planning and production. What is really interesting is how as-design, as-planned and as-build views in PLM are integrated with design, manufacturing, planning and production.

Few days ago, I the following article by 3D CAD World article caught my attention – Progress in closing the product lifecycle’s loops  by Peter Bilello, president of CIMdata. The article speaks about the importance of collaboration across diverse enterprise groups.

For many years, the PLM industry has greatly benefited from a steady stream of improvements in collaboration among ever more diverse enterprise groups—in data interoperability, for example, and in the transparency of workflows and processes. The development, manufacture and support of globally competitive new products are, however, still hamstrung by the remaining open loops new and old.

Later in the article it came to the topic I was looking for – Bill of Materials. According to article, BOM is a biggest remaining challenge to make integration running smooth. Here is the passage, which explains that.

Between engineering, manufacturing and finance, a big remaining challenge is the bill of materials (BOM) in its many forms—the as-designed BOM, the as-engineered BOM, the as-manufactured BOM, and so on. Generated and managed with PLM and often executed by enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, BOMs themselves are loop closers. PLM-ERP connectivity and interoperability are steadily improving, but some open-loop issues are resolved only after time consuming face-to-face meetings.

What is my conclusion? Single BOM could be a great thing if vendors will figure out how to implement that. As you can learn from Biello’s article, PLM-ERP has open-loop issue and BOM is a tool to close that. However, companies are concerned about bringing single BOM strategy since it can raise lot of organizational challenges for them. At the same time, the demand for better integration and collaboration can put companies in front of decision to bring single BOM to close open loops between engineering, manufacturing and production anyway. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

Image courtesy of Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Products are getting complex these days. Look on every small electronic gadget in your hands. It is actually combined from multiple pieces – mechanical parts, plastics, electronic and software. Traditionally you are using separate tools to design these parts – MCAD, PCB design, software tools. Then it gets tricky a bit – you need to put together right information about the product, manage changes, coordinate with suppliers, etc. PLM tools are here to help. But, for some reasons, it is a difficult problem to handle.

Engineering.com article In High-Tech Electronics, Managing Three Lifecycles As One is a New Key to Product Development by Laila Hirr speaks exactly about that problem. Here is my favorite passage from the article explaining the problem:

HTE’s need for PLM is straightforward—a firmer grasp of the information generated before and during product development and subsequently “in the field.” Many information needs go unmet when products go into assembly operations of original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and built into other manufacturers’ components in complex supply chains. Users and system integrators may also be slow to share information.

For many reasons, PLM has repeatedly fallen short in this industrial sector. At CIMdata, the reason we see most often is a lack of integration with the full information set that defines the product. Achieving this integration is a multidisciplinary challenge and in PLM’s twenty-plus year history with the high tech industry, the challenge has yet to be resolved. This largely accounts for the scarcity of compelling PLM successes in HTE and the ongoing skepticism about PLM.

Article speaks about absence of integration between tools and dependencies on homegrown spreadsheets to manage bill of materials and change. Which made me think about core problem in PLM tools – management of multi-disciplinary BOM. I addressed this problem in the keynote presentation at ProSTEP iViP Symposium few weeks ago – PLM and ERP: separated by a common Bill of Materials (BOM). PLM systems today are addressing BOM management. Most of them are taking an approach to manage multiple bill of materials view. However, these tools are not efficient enough to manage a BOM which contains mechanical, electronic and software pieces together. The complexity of BOM is driven by multiple disciplines, change management and product lifecycle as I presented on the following slide

What is my conclusion? Technical difficulties and disagreement between people often can lead to problems in establishment of cohesive BOM management solutions. PLM fails to provide a way to manage multi-disciplinary BOM and changes. High-tech and electronic industry is specific because of high diversity of design tools – mechanical, electronic, software. PLM tools are not integrated well with design tool, which leads to poor BOM management. There are several reasons why it happens – limits of BOM management tools, complexity of integrations between design tools provided by multiple suppliers, UI complexity. Just my thoughts..

Best, Oleg

Image courtesy of Toa55 at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Platformizaiton in PLM is an interesting trend. If this is a first time you hear about "platformization", you are not alone. The term was "coined" by CIMdata – analytical and consulting outfit focusing of PLM and manufacturing. You can read more here – Platformization: The next step in PLM’s evolution. As I mentioned earlier in my blog, it is hard to understand what specifically CIMdata means by platformization. So, I’m still learning…

In one of my earlier posts I made a guess that that Today’s CAD and PLM tools won’t become future PLM platforms. So, you may ask me – what does it mean with regards to existing PLM platforms provided by top CAD/PLM providers? First of all – relax. Nothing is happening fast in PLM platform world. Large manufacturing companies are running their business in a very conservative way and it takes years until some changes will happen. In my old blog from 2011 – PLM platforms: Who is Right and Who is Left? I touched some aspects of future competition between PLM platforms. Interesting enough, five years after my post, some of these disputes are still very hot.

One of these stories connected to Dassault Systems and 3DEXPERINCE platform. It was called V6 back in 2011, but I don’t think it changed a lot and I’m going to touch it later in my post. My attention was caught by Verdi Ogewell blog post – PLM at Jaguar Land Rover – The Moment of Truth for Dassault’s 3DEXPERIENCE Platform. I found it very interesting and it is absolutely worth reading. It speaks about history of Dassault’s 3DEXPERIENCE platform adoption by JLR. The internal JLR’s code name is iPLM. I found a bit funny that Dassault strategy name was called "beyond PLM". I captured two interesting data points from the article.

The first data point is related to Dassault competition Siemens PLM. Teamcenter is still a production backbone for JLR. Here is a passage that says that:

Siemens was eliminated in JLR’s evaluation – 7 years later, it still uses Teamcenter. Siemens’ Teamcenter (TC) was eliminated as an option due to architectural reasons. TC’s unified architecture wasn’t ready at the time.But here is the paradox; Teamcenter is still a major part of JLR’s product data management backbone, generally used in combination with CATIA V5. Even in the last few years, JLR has bought new TC licenses in anticipation of the new PLM project

Second data point is related to the core element of JLR iPLM implementation – configuration driven BOM. According to the article, this one of the most important components of iPLM and it connects BOM to variety of different BOMs and support change management activities. Here is the passage with some more details.

During 2015 the goal is to establish the fully functional platform through a gradual entry process containing four parts (”P1-P4”), which in turn will make it possible to develop and realize the first vehicle ever (”Vehicle 1”) on the completed iPLM platform.With these platforms in place, iPLM lead at JLR, John Knight-Gregson, claims that ”after four years in [the] making,” it will have the ability to execute on: Milestone driven configuration; Configuration driven BOMs; BOP/BOM/BOI/etc driven CAD; Integrated Change Management.

Dassault Systems has a strategy called "Zero BOM errors". The article touched BOM story by referencing the conversation with Andy Kalambi, CEO of ENOVIA. It reminded me my article – PLM and Zero BOM errors: the devil is in details. I guess bringing configurable BOM in a data-driven 3DEXPERIENCE environment is a core elements of Dassault System strategy. However, it requires a lot of components inter-playing together for fully configurable view of vehicle with support of change management.

What is my conclusion? To have PLM vision is a great thing. Dassault System certainly has one. "Beyond PLM" vision is even better (note, the name of my blog and Dassault System vision name is an absolute coincidence). But… to make platform successful requires to handle a very basic set of PLM operations. What I learned from Engineering.com JLR story – it is all related to managing of CAD data and configurable BOMs. Without that, all bells and whistles of a new platform are useless. Configurable BOM functionality is needed to move JLR from Teamcenter to ENOVIA and this is one of the most interesting PLM platform validation points. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

Image courtesy of ammer at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Integration of hardware and software is a topic in mind of many manufacturing companies these days. PLM was traditionally focused on mechanical and lately on electronic topics cannot ignore more software. Software developers are using a different set of tools for configuration management. For long time ALM (Application Lifecycle Management) tools took a separate stand from PLM tools. All these things in the past. Software vendors and manufacturing companies cannot ignore complexity of modern product literally powered by software in every part. I’ve been blogging about it long time ago – PLM and ALM: How to blend disparate systems and lately – How to combine engineering and software BOMs.

In one of my last posts – The importance of software BOM for hardware security, I pointed out how important to get an access to right information about software and electronic running in your products. For many manufacturing companies the information about mechanical, electronic and software components is siloed in different data management systems.The importance of new tools capable to manage multidisciplinary product information is raising. Software BOM security is just one example of the trend. The demand to provide systems able to handle all aspect of product BOM is increasing.

The article in WIRED magazine few days ago brings an interesting perspective on the importance of software security in automotive products. Navigate to the following article – Hackers remotely killed a Jeep on the highway – with me in it. The story is fascinating and gives a lot of "food to think about". Here is my favorite passage:

All of this is possible only because Chrysler, like practically all carmakers, is doing its best to turn the modern automobile into a smartphone. Uconnect, an Internet-connected computer feature in hundreds of thousands of Fiat Chrysler cars, SUVs, and trucks, controls the vehicle’s entertainment and navigation, enables phone calls, and even offers a Wi-Fi hot spot. And thanks to one vulnerable element, which Miller and Valasek won’t identify until their Black Hat talk, Uconnect’s cellular connection also lets anyone who knows the car’s IP address gain access from anywhere in the country. “From an attacker’s perspective, it’s a super nice vulnerability,” Miller says.

From that entry point, Miller and Valasek’s attack pivots to an adjacent chip in the car’s head unit—the hardware for its entertainment system—silently rewriting the chip’s firmware to plant their code. That rewritten firmware is capable of sending commands through the car’s internal computer network, known as a CAN bus, to its physical components like the engine and wheels. Miller and Valasek say the attack on the entertainment system seems to work on any Chrysler vehicle with Uconnect from late 2013, all of 2014, and early 2015. They’ve only tested their full set of physical hacks, including ones targeting transmission and braking systems, on a Jeep Cherokee, though they believe that most of their attacks could be tweaked to work on any Chrysler vehicle with the vulnerable Uconnect head unit.

While story is still under development, it is already raised many questions. Some of them led to discussion about standards for cars’ defense against hackers. I’m expecting an increased demand for software capable to manage traceability and tests of mechanical, electronic and software systems together to insure car is not vulnerable to potential hacks.

Manufacturing business technology article echoed the same topic –Software Integration With Hardware Crucial For Manufacturing. It confirms that hardware – software integration is complex and very few companies are doing it in a right way. It gives interesting recommendations how to improve that – common data model, integrated requirement and change management tools and a framework independent from software tools. A common data model is my favorite. Here is a quote:

A common data model. Unified ALM-PLM defines a common data model and change management processes for managing an entire system, both hardware and software data, without duplicating data management or business processes across those systems. The two primary integration points are, first, tying back the requirements to the software and hardware bill of materials and, second, linking defects back to change requests and change orders so PLM can reflect them.

While all recommendations make sense to me, I have a concern about their implementations in real life. How feasible to create a common data model using existing PLM and ALM software tools? A dream data and lifecycle management system should be flexible enough to handle all system definitions from mechanical, electronic and software as well as system behavior related to that.

What is my conclusion? The complexity of modern products is creating demand for new capabilities to support by PLM and ALM software. While integration is usually hardest part of PLM implementation, not all PLM system are flexible enough to maintain demanded "common data model" to handle all bill of materials and related information. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

picture credit WIRED article

Cost is one of the most important drivers to optimize manufacturing and operations. But at the same time, this is not a single criteria when you think about optimization of your product design and component selections. The way to look about it is to think about complete ecosystem combining manufacturing, distribution and sales. Competition in cost and distribution is driven by an increased role of internet connectivity and global economy.

In order to be economically viable, manufacturers and retailer must be able to sell product faster and at competitive prices which sends which sends a ripple effect down the supply chain and manufacturing operation.

One of the aspects of cost optimization is related to component selections. In some industries like electronic manufacturing it can be a dominant factor to drive your product cost. Component selection is complex process if you think beyond simple attempt to pickup the cheapest components. You can think about few possible strategies to optimize component selection process.

Reduce number of suppliers

Distributors are offering products from multiple manufacturers. You can get an additional advantage from consolidate supplier base. It will save number of purchase orders to manage as well as save time for supply chain team. In most of situation, it can also save shipment cost.

Check multiple options – manufacturer and distributors

In some cases buying directly from manufacturers can give you the lowest price. But this is not always true. Because of different reasons such as distributorship agreements and variation of demand and supply, distributor can offer lower prices than manufacturer and you can leverage it for your product.

Minimize inventory cost

To carry inventory is not efficient. Especially for small manufacturers. One of the factors in the decision process is optimize inventory cost. You can check delivery options and variety of hold inventory and cancellation options provided by suppliers and distributors.

All options I mentioned above requires transparency and collaboration between engineering and supply chain. Thinking about potential component alternatives might require round trips to engineering department and changes in a product design.

One of the bottlenecks in this process is bill of materials. For large companies, bill of material is usually located in multiple systems and needs to be synchronized. PLM, ERP, Supply chain systems- this is only a very short lists. Larger companies might have some homegrown systems with bizarre interfaces and communication options. In smaller companies, email + Excel spreadsheet combination is a killer tool to synchronize, but also a place to introduce mistakes.

Real time collaboration between engineers in multiple departments and supply chain professionals can eliminate mistakes and streamline the process. Bill of materials is a key element to make this communication efficient and compare multiple options.

What is my conclusion? Modern manufacturing environment is increasing the bar to enable transparency and collaboration between people and departments. To have system that can enable real time collaboration using updated bill of material can be a great enabler. Unfortunately, many organizations stack with “synchronization” of data between systems. This is a core of significant inefficiency. The opportunity to improve it is huge. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

Earlier this year I wrote about 5 important things about PLM for hardware startup. It came down to management of the following product data elements – document records, parts, bill of materials, change tracks and tasks records. While all together are critical, I want to point on parts and BoM management as an absolutely critical for every hardware project – parts and BoM records.

BoM and part information is a core data elements describing the information about what you plan to manufacture. Depends on the complexity of the product, you can have larger or smaller bill of materials.

Most of product manufactured today are not simple collection of mechanical parts as it was decades ago. Modern products such as smart phones, electronic gadgets and other small devices are combined of mechanical parts, plastics, PCBs and software. The diversity of multidisciplinary data creates a high level of data management complexity. In case you are managing product data using spreadsheets, you need to establish an appropriate sections for different BOM elements.

Parts and part numbers are extremely important. Part numbers will help you to manage parts and part lifecycle. It all starts from your ability to identify part and use it later on in Bill of Materials, change orders, communication with suppliers and ordering system. A very critical aspects of part management is interchangeability. I found it one of the most confusing elements for many people in PLM and BoM management. In a nutshell, interchangeability defines the way a particular part can be replaced with another parts. In a large manufacturing companies part interchangeability is deeply connected to ERP and procurement processes. For small batch manufacturers such as hardware startups it is actually ends up with a problem of part availability. It leads to a severe problem finding part alternatives and issuing change order to contract manufacturer.

Embedded article The Common Parts Library (CPL) Initiative speaks about the challenge of finding part alternatives and how Octopart CPL can help. Octopart is part search engine and information aggregator recently acquired by Electronic CAD developer – Altium. The following passage is a great explanation of the problem with parts availability.

Smaller components, like passives, are easy to put into CAD, but not necessarily easy to keep on hand. You can pick a part on Monday and then discover that it’s out of stock when you need more the following Wednesday. The larger components in complex packages, like high pin-count microcontrollers, can also cause problems. The specific package you want may go in or out of stock at the various distributors. As a result, the initial build phase of a project can be a bit like musical chairs, trying to chase down the stock of a sole or limited-source part.

The Octopart engine allows you to search for a part from most of the available distributors, all in one spot with the same search action. So, if the QFN version of your MCU keeps disappearing from one place, and randomly reappearing in some other place, then Octopart will lead you right to it.

On the surface is seems like an easy problem to solve. But actually, the problem itself is much complicated. It comes down to coordination between hardware company, contract manufacturer and the component ordering. You don’t want to wake-up one morning and discover that components for the next manufacturing batch are discontinued or have long lead time. An appropriate change notification mechanism in your BoM management system can help to solve it. Think about it as a function that coordinate part availability, size of your bath and schedule together. The same function can notify about potential problem. And this is a moment of time when interchangeable part definition in your BoM can help. What you want to prevent at this moment is a long loop into design and engineering to validate acceptance of an alternate components. Although, you cannot prevent 100% of such cases, to decrease it can eliminate potential delays.

What is my conclusion? The problem of BoM management and part interchangeability is critical for small batch manufacturers such as hardware startups and makers. Part obsolescence or long lead time can lead to project schedule failure that can be fatal for your hardware project and company business. Think about delivering products for holidays season or standing up for promised days in your crowdfunding campaign. Therefore to manage BoM and part information together is a critical element of your data management and product lifecycle strategy at very early stage of your project. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

Image courtesy of phasinphoto at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Bill of Materials (BoM) is a vital part of every product definition. In engineering and product development everything starts and stops with the development of BoM. It is essential for complex products such as aircraft and automobile. But BoM is equally important for small hardware startup just getting off the ground to develop prototype and manufacturing first initial product batch. Read more in my earlier article – 5 elements of PLM for hardware startup. But BoM just looks easy from the beginning. As you are moving forward into product development, lifecycle, configurations, maintenance, support, you can discover multiple dimensions of BoM management complexity.

BoM management is an essential part of every PLM system today. At the same time, complexity of existing PLM tools and high cost are creating difficulties to manage BoM using PLM tools. As you can see from the following two reports, Excel is considered as #1 BoM management tools by CIMdata – leader analyst company in product lifecycle management.

I captured results of another research made by manufacturing consulting and service company – Dragon Innovation. The research shows that majority of their customers are using Excel spreadsheets to manage BoM and even don’t know what "PDM" stands for.

So, spreadsheets vs. PDM / PLM tool? This is a dilemma for many companies of any size – small hardware startups and large global manufacturers. If you are a small company, Fictiv blog article – How to build a BoM? gives you a recipe to follow explaining how to create BoM and what tools to use. In a nutshell, the recommendation is to use spreadsheets and migrate to PLM tools within time, as you product and development process is getting more complicated.

Keeping track of BOM spreadsheets is bearable with 1 product, but when you have multiple products, it can become a headache quickly. A PLM (product life management) system is a BOM, master parts list, and process management tool all in one. Before you get ready to do a pre-production build, have all the engineers review the latest BOM together, then lock down this version for the build and communicate its version number to the manufacturing partner.

The number of articles about BoM management and PLM is large. But of the less known resource could be Teamcenter blog about BoM management. I found the following article specially interesting if you are focusing on complex products – PLM BOM and the Next Generation Design Paradigm for the World’s Most Massive and Complex Products.

PLM BOM systems poses many challenges. The current approach relies on hierarchical product structures consisting of many levels in a tree-like structure that captures organizational nodes as well as nodes with associated product data such as CAD files, documents and usage specific attributes. However, for defining a massive and complex product consisting of millions of parts and welds, where each individual node as well as parent nodes consisting of a collection of individual nodes that can have their own lifecycle and revisions, the traditional PLM BOM data management techniques reveal a significant number of challenges.

At the same time, migrating to PLM system can cost hardware company agility and speed. I captured the following video with Scott Miller of Dragon Innovation speaking about BoM add-on template Dragon developed for Google Spreadsheet. Watch the video from the <> min where Scott is speaking about his PLM experience back in iRobot.

https://youtu.be/CuirqhYODjA?t=210

My favorite quote at 3:30 of the video. "Nothing stops us faster than Windchill. PLM can put us in a dead stop when we are trying to get product out".

PLM vendors are making progress meantime and you can find BoM management tools in every PLM product portfolio. These tools are various depending on your requirements and product environment. You can consider mature tools like Teamcenter, Windchill and Enovia to manage complex product configurations (especially if it involves lot of 3D CAD work associated with BoM). At the same time, newer cloud based tools such as Arena and Autodesk PLM360 can be a better alternatives won’t require significant IT resources and provides a nicer user experience.

What is my conclusion? Spreadsheets are easy to start. You can pull data, make changes and keep it flexible. But within time, spreadsheet management will add an additional cost and complexity on every change you want to do. Companies are considering to hire Chief Excel Officer to manage BoM spreadsheets. At the same time, PLM tools are complex. Even the most flexible cloud tool can put you in a dead stop on your way to make a progress in product engineering, manufacturing and delivery if don’t put enough resources and plan it upfront your PLM implementation. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

Globalization and contract manufacturing are two important trends that shaping modern manufacturing. Companies are using contract manufacturers (CM) for different purposes – design, component supply, assembly, fabrication, etc. In some industries such as electronic, contract manufacturing is an absolutely vital part of your product success. My attention caught by EE Times article: 5 Don’ts and Do’s for Working with a Contract Manufacturer. It is short and sweet – I certainly recommend you to have a read.

Here are my favorite two recommendations – prepare detailed documentation and design for manufacturing.

Prepare Detailed Documentation — I don’t think it’s possible to under-communicate when it comes to providing instructions to a CEM. The more CAD files, schematics and specs you deliver with your design the better, from our perspective. And don’t forget to provide a comprehensive bill of materials with alternate part numbers – or have your CEM do this for you.

Design for Manufacture — DFM essentially means considering how easy and cost-effective it is to manufacture an assembly, and designing to reduce those costs. You need a manufacturing mindset to do this well, so leave room for a DFM review and adjustments in your plans.

Thinking about contract manufacturing processes took me back to my 3 modern BOM management challenges. Bill of Material is an important key element in both – documentation and design for manufacture. Very often contract manufacturing work is focused on processes management by ERP system. However, you need to have solid PLM foundation to start thinking about CM work earlier in the process.

So, what are critical elements of PLM system to support your CM processes:

1- Access to component libraries. To have information about components, availability, cost and other parameters such as regulation is critical. To replicate this information into your PLM system is possible, but not reliable and not scalable. Check how PLM system can access this information online or federate it with ERP system you have.

2- Flexible and granular BOM management. You need to organize bill of materials in the way engineering and CM will be able to access it. By doing that you will allow early access to all parties involved into design and manufacturing to access product information.

3- Change management. Everything is changing. It will happen to your design and manufacturing plan too. Find a tool that allows you to manage traceability of changes alongside to bill of material and manufacturing plans.

4- Security. You need to have right technology in place to isolate information that belonging to different CM and subcontractors. It is important to maintain your business relationships and not to disclose sensitive information.

What is my conclusion? Globalization and cost competition leads companies to find somebody else to produce components and outsource specialized work. In many domains, CM is a way to structure industry (think about fabrication and electronic manufacturing as best examples). It leads to outsourcing, offshore and many other options to make the same work in a different places. Bill of materials (BOM) is a critical element in supporting of contract manufacturing. You need to have an ability to organize BOM in a way that allows to all involved organizations to access and make changes in the controlled way. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

Image courtesy of Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Yesterday, I had a privilege to share my thoughts about Bill of Materials and BOM management during my keynote at ProSTEP iViP Symposium in Stuttgart. That was my first time at ProSTEP conference. The first day is over. I will be publishing  updates in my live blog here.

The discussion about Bill of Materials is always interesting and entertaining. BOM is a centerpiece of every engineering solution. As an organization you have to manage different aspects of Bill of Materials during design, engineering, manufacturing and support stages. These days, as companies are moving from selling products into services, support and maintenance BOM is getting more into the focus of discussions. After all, Bill of Materials is complex topic. On the following picture you can see multiple dimensions of BOM complexity:

In every organization, Bill of Materials has two notions  – technical and political. The first one is absolutely important. The following three characteristics are absolutely important if you think about reliable BOM management solution: 1/ ability to manage multi-disciplinary data; 2/ scalability; 3/ user acceptance. User acceptance is a tricky thing. The demands of people in an organization about BOM are different. Engineering, manufacturing, support, supply chain, sales – these organizations have want to see BOM differently.

However, regardless on the role of a person in organization, the following demands are absolutely critical: 1/ No errors (each mistake in BOM is painful and can lead to significant problems in an organization ; 2/ No painful date re-entry (nobody wants to enter information into BOM multiple times); 3/ No painful synchronization of data between PLM, ERP and other systems.

Below you can find a full deck of my presentation:

What is my conclusion? Bill of Materials and BOM is a very interesting topic. My hunch, it is getting even more in the focus of people as products are getting more complex. These days every single product is a combination of mechanical, electronics and software. Manufacturing companies are selling it as a services. Customers are demanding configurability, high quality and low cost. How to manage all these things together? The following three questions are absolutely important when you think about BOM management – 1/ How to support connected processes in an organization? 2/ How to stop synchronizing BOM between silos (PLM, ERP and others)? 3/ How PLM and ERP can support a concept of “single BOM”? Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

PS. If you want to discuss more about BOM management, please feel free to contact me directly.

It is hard overestimate the importance of Bill of Materials for product development. In my keynote at ProSTEP iViP symposium in Stuttgart earlier this month I’ve been sharing my thoughts why developing of single BOM across multiple disciplines in critical for organization. I wanted to bring few examples that can demonstrate why having a single BOM strategy can bring benefits to product development and manufacturing organization.

Earlier today, at Siemens PLM connection event in Dallas, I captured the following slide demonstrating an integrated approach in design, manufacturing, planning and production. What is really interesting is how as-design, as-planned and as-build views in PLM are integrated with design, manufacturing, planning and production.

Few days ago, I the following article by 3D CAD World article caught my attention – Progress in closing the product lifecycle’s loops by Peter Bilello, president of CIMdata. The article speaks about the importance of collaboration across diverse enterprise groups.

For many years, the PLM industry has greatly benefited from a steady stream of improvements in collaboration among ever more diverse enterprise groups—in data interoperability, for example, and in the transparency of workflows and processes. The development, manufacture and support of globally competitive new products are, however, still hamstrung by the remaining open loops new and old.

Later in the article it came to the topic I was looking for – Bill of Materials. According to article, BOM is a biggest remaining challenge to make integration running smooth. Here is the passage, which explains that.

Between engineering, manufacturing and finance, a big remaining challenge is the bill of materials (BOM) in its many forms—the as-designed BOM, the as-engineered BOM, the as-manufactured BOM, and so on. Generated and managed with PLM and often executed by enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, BOMs themselves are loop closers. PLM-ERP connectivity and interoperability are steadily improving, but some open-loop issues are resolved only after time consuming face-to-face meetings.

What is my conclusion? Single BOM could be a great thing if vendors will figure out how to implement that. As you can learn from Biello’s article, PLM-ERP has open-loop issue and BOM is a tool to close that. However, companies are concerned about bringing single BOM strategy since it can raise lot of organizational challenges for them. At the same time, the demand for better integration and collaboration can put companies in front of decision to bring single BOM to close open loops between engineering, manufacturing and production anyway. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

Image courtesy of Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Products are getting complex these days. Look on every small electronic gadget in your hands. It is actually combined from multiple pieces – mechanical parts, plastics, electronic and software. Traditionally you are using separate tools to design these parts – MCAD, PCB design, software tools. Then it gets tricky a bit – you need to put together right information about the product, manage changes, coordinate with suppliers, etc. PLM tools are here to help. But, for some reasons, it is a difficult problem to handle.

Engineering.com article In High-Tech Electronics, Managing Three Lifecycles As One is a New Key to Product Development by Laila Hirr speaks exactly about that problem. Here is my favorite passage from the article explaining the problem:

HTE’s need for PLM is straightforward—a firmer grasp of the information generated before and during product development and subsequently “in the field.” Many information needs go unmet when products go into assembly operations of original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and built into other manufacturers’ components in complex supply chains. Users and system integrators may also be slow to share information.

For many reasons, PLM has repeatedly fallen short in this industrial sector. At CIMdata, the reason we see most often is a lack of integration with the full information set that defines the product. Achieving this integration is a multidisciplinary challenge and in PLM’s twenty-plus year history with the high tech industry, the challenge has yet to be resolved. This largely accounts for the scarcity of compelling PLM successes in HTE and the ongoing skepticism about PLM.

Article speaks about absence of integration between tools and dependencies on homegrown spreadsheets to manage bill of materials and change. Which made me think about core problem in PLM tools – management of multi-disciplinary BOM. I addressed this problem in the keynote presentation at ProSTEP iViP Symposium few weeks ago – PLM and ERP: separated by a common Bill of Materials (BOM). PLM systems today are addressing BOM management. Most of them are taking an approach to manage multiple bill of materials view. However, these tools are not efficient enough to manage a BOM which contains mechanical, electronic and software pieces together.  The complexity of BOM is driven by multiple disciplines, change management and product lifecycle as I presented on the following slide

What is my conclusion? Technical difficulties and disagreement between people often can lead to problems in establishment of cohesive BOM management solutions. PLM fails to provide a way to manage multi-disciplinary BOM and changes. High-tech and electronic industry is specific because of high diversity of design tools – mechanical, electronic, software. PLM tools are not integrated well with design tool, which leads to poor BOM management. There are several reasons why it happens – limits of BOM management tools, complexity of integrations between design tools provided by multiple suppliers, UI complexity. Just my thoughts..

Best, Oleg

Image courtesy of Toa55 at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Platformizaiton in PLM is an interesting trend. If this is a first time you hear about “platformization”, you are not alone. The term was “coined” by CIMdata – analytical and consulting outfit focusing of PLM and manufacturing. You can read more here – Platformization: The next step in PLM’s evolution. As I mentioned earlier in my blog, it is hard to understand what specifically CIMdata means by platformization. So, I’m still learning…

In one of my earlier posts I made a guess that that Today’s CAD and PLM tools won’t become future PLM platforms. So, you may ask me – what does it mean with regards to existing PLM platforms provided by top CAD/PLM providers? First of all – relax. Nothing is happening fast in PLM platform world. Large manufacturing companies are running their business in a very conservative way and it takes years until some changes will happen. In my old blog from 2011 – PLM platforms: Who is Right and Who is Left? I touched some aspects of future competition between PLM platforms. Interesting enough, five years after my post, some of these disputes are still very hot.

One of these stories connected to Dassault Systems and 3DEXPERINCE platform. It was called V6 back in 2011, but I don’t think it changed a lot and I’m going to touch it later in my post. My attention was caught by Verdi Ogewell blog post – PLM at Jaguar Land Rover – The Moment of Truth for Dassault’s 3DEXPERIENCE Platform. I found it very interesting and it is absolutely worth reading. It speaks about history of Dassault’s 3DEXPERIENCE platform adoption by JLR. The internal JLR’s code name is iPLM. I found a bit funny that Dassault strategy name was called “beyond PLM”. I captured two interesting data points from the article.

The first data point is related to Dassault competition Siemens PLM. Teamcenter is still a production backbone for JLR. Here is a passage that says that:

Siemens was eliminated in JLR’s evaluation – 7 years later, it still uses Teamcenter. Siemens’ Teamcenter (TC) was eliminated as an option due to architectural reasons. TC’s unified architecture wasn’t ready at the time.But here is the paradox; Teamcenter is still a major part of JLR’s product data management backbone, generally used in combination with CATIA V5. Even in the last few years, JLR has bought new TC licenses in anticipation of the new PLM project

Second data point is related to the core element of JLR iPLM implementation – configuration driven BOM. According to the article, this one of the most important components of iPLM and it connects BOM to variety of different BOMs and support change management activities. Here is the passage with some more details.

During 2015 the goal is to establish the fully functional platform through a gradual entry process containing four parts (”P1-P4”), which in turn will make it possible to develop and realize the first vehicle ever (”Vehicle 1”) on the completed iPLM platform.With these platforms in place, iPLM lead at JLR, John Knight-Gregson, claims that ”after four years in [the] making,” it will have the ability to execute on: Milestone driven configuration; Configuration driven BOMs; BOP/BOM/BOI/etc driven CAD; Integrated Change Management.

Dassault Systems has a strategy called “Zero BOM errors”. The article touched BOM story by referencing the conversation with Andy Kalambi, CEO of ENOVIA. It reminded me my article – PLM and Zero BOM errors: the devil is in details. I guess bringing configurable BOM in a data-driven 3DEXPERIENCE environment is a core elements of Dassault System strategy. However, it requires a lot of components inter-playing together for fully configurable view of vehicle with support of change management.

What is my conclusion? To have PLM vision is a great thing. Dassault System certainly has one. “Beyond PLM” vision is even better (note, the name of my blog and Dassault System vision name is an absolute coincidence). But… to make platform successful requires to handle a very basic set of PLM operations. What I learned from Engineering.com JLR story – it is all related to managing of CAD data and configurable BOMs. Without that, all bells and whistles of a new platform are useless. Configurable BOM functionality is needed to move JLR from Teamcenter to ENOVIA and this is one of the most interesting PLM platform validation points. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

Image courtesy of ammer at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Mass production involves making many copies of product, very quickly for lowest possible cost. It is all about producing standardized products using assembly lines. The term mass production was invented almost 100 years and it became a symbol of Industrial Revolution.

Here is the news… It looks like that era of mass production is coming to its end. Customers (you and me) are demanding customized products that will be tailored to our specific needs. Mass customization is a new frontier in business for manufacturing. At its core, mass customization methods should address a tremendous increase in variety and customization without a corresponding increase in costs. At its limit, it is the mass production of individually customized goods and services. At its best, it provides strategic advantage and economic value.

Mass customization is tricky and it requires rethinking of many applications and services we use to support manufacturing business. It includes design, manufacturing planning, cost, vertical integration and many others. I covered some of these topics in my earlier articles – The role of PLM in mass customization; Mass customization is a real reason for PLM to want MBOM; Cloud CAD / PLM and mass customization future.

3D printing and other new manufacturing technologies combined with new software technologies such as cloud computing and internet can make a real difference. What about custom-made high-heel shoes? In my earlier blog, I shared a story from Thesis Couture about how to make 3D printing to make tailored high-heel shoes a reality.

Earlier this summer my attention caught Dassault System announcement – 3D Printing-Ready Application to Personalize Goods for “Online Retail”. It speaks about new product – 3DVIA Make which supposed to help retailers to offer customer-personalized products without requiring a huge back-end inventory or a lengthy fulfillment process. The following video is offering an interesting process – collaborative personalization.

The following passage can give you an idea what is behind the scene.

Collaborative personalization is a process where the brand, the retailer and the customer collaborate to create personalized products.  Seamlessly integrated with your online store, 3DVIA Make enables you to deliver brand-approved personalized products.  Your customers personalize products within the parameters you set, while capturing their individual needs and desires. 3DVIA Make brings the power of product personalization and the flexibility of 3D printing to consumers that want to create a one-of-a-kind product and enables retailers to develop on-demand businesses and to avoid many of their current associated costs.

What is my conclusion? The trick is to increase in variety and customization without a corresponding increase in costs. This is a biggest problem to turn mass customization into reality. It looks like some industries will be a low hanging fruit for PLM vendors to support mass customization. Retail and jewelry is one of them. 3DVIA Make is  a good example how to embrace 3D printing technologies together with cloud services to turn mass customization into a reality. This is a friendly note for PLM strategist and architects. Future techniques and industries are open for discovery. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

Image credit Dassault Systemes

I started a series of article explaining how hardware startup can establish product lifecycle management strategy and why it can be beneficial already early in their product development cycle. You can catch up on these blog posts here – PLM 101: Product Lifecycle for Hardware Startups and 5 Elements of PLM for Hardware Startup.

There are two top priorities when you run manufacturing company of any size: quality and cost.

Today I want to focus on product cost and how it is related to product lifecycle records. While I explained you about importance of setting product records, managing documents, parts, bill of materials and change tracking, I didn’t manage the last important thing ­ product cost. Everything starts and ends with product cost. If you cannot predict and manage it, the odds are your product will go bankrupt even before you manufacture it.

How to get cost assessment done

Establishing methods and tools to manage product records is your way to get cost assessment under control. It is well known fact that 70­-90% of product cost is influenced by 20-­30% of parts. So, the ability use PDM/PLM tool to deconstruct product data into right groups is essential. However, this is just a beginning of managing your product lifecycle.

Components you are buying from suppliers are representing only part of your product cost assessment. You should take into account discounts at volume and other aspects of cost management in variety of supply chain scenarios.

Another aspect of cost assessment is manufacturability. Cost of manufacturing tools, assembly process, quality and testing processes are all elements in your product cost assessment. Good data management and PLM tools can help you to manage that aspects of product development cost in a right way.

Finally, one of the very often missed element of product data record is packaging and spare / maintenance part. To include that information into product data lifecycle is essential too.

Net­-net, to have an ability to manage a full structure of information influencing product cost is a very important even during early stages of product development and transfer to manufacturing.

The anatomy of bill of material breakdown

Bill of Material is an essential part of product record and lifecycle. Therefore, it is important to manage a diversity of information coming to bill of material in the right way. Most of product manufactured today are not simple collection of mechanical parts as it was decades ago.

Modern products such as smart phones, electronic gadgets and other small devices are combined of mechanical parts, plastics, PCBs and software.

The diversity of multidisciplinary data creates a high level of data management complexity. In case you are managing product data using spreadsheets, you need to establish an appropriate sections for different BOM elements. PDM / PLM tools can help you to establish product data records in a better way and manage change processes.

In addition to managing parts, it is essential to include absolutely EVERYTHING you can think about influencing your product cost. It is packaging, service components, transportation services, etc. Missed part in bill of materials can cost you a fortune, when your won’t be able to ship it to your customers.

What is my conclusion? To establish product lifecycle foundation including product record and related data management functions early in product design and prototyping phase is very important. It can help to set up basic data records and make product cost assessment early in the process. Overall, it will increase changes to meet projected product cost and delivery dates. Hardware developers should consider using data management tools to perform structuring of product components and assemblies. Solid data foundation can also help establishing product database to manage full lifecycle of the product ­ prototype, contract manufacturing, RFQ and later on quality processes. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

Cost is one of the most important drivers to optimize manufacturing and operations. But at the same time, this is not a single criteria when you think about optimization of your product design and component selections. The way to look about it is to think about complete ecosystem combining manufacturing, distribution and sales. Competition in cost and distribution is driven by an increased role of internet connectivity and global economy.

In order to be economically viable, manufacturers and retailer must be able to sell product faster and at competitive prices which sends which sends a ripple effect down the supply chain and manufacturing operation.

One of the aspects of cost optimization is related to component selections. In some industries like electronic manufacturing it can be a dominant factor to drive your product cost. Component selection is complex process if you think beyond simple attempt to pickup the cheapest components. You can think about few possible strategies to optimize component selection process.

Reduce number of suppliers

Distributors are offering products from multiple manufacturers. You can get an additional advantage from consolidate supplier base. It will save number of purchase orders to manage as well as save time for supply chain team. In most of situation, it can also save shipment cost.

Check multiple options – manufacturer and distributors

In some cases buying directly from manufacturers can give you the lowest price. But this is not always true. Because of different reasons such as distributorship agreements and variation of demand and supply, distributor can offer lower prices than manufacturer and you can leverage it for your product.

Minimize inventory cost

To carry inventory is not efficient. Especially for small manufacturers. One of the factors in the decision process is optimize inventory cost. You can check delivery options and variety of hold inventory and cancellation options provided by suppliers and distributors.

All options I mentioned above requires transparency and collaboration between engineering and supply chain. Thinking about potential component alternatives might require round trips to engineering department and changes in a product design.

One of the bottlenecks in this process is bill of materials. For large companies, bill of material is usually located in multiple systems and needs to be synchronized. PLM, ERP, Supply chain systems- this is only a very short lists. Larger companies might have some homegrown systems with bizarre interfaces and communication options. In smaller companies, email + Excel spreadsheet combination is a killer tool to synchronize, but also a place to introduce mistakes.

Real time collaboration between engineers in multiple departments and supply chain professionals can eliminate mistakes and streamline the process. Bill of materials is a key element to make this communication efficient and compare multiple options.

What is my conclusion? Modern manufacturing environment is increasing the bar to enable transparency and collaboration between people and departments. To have system that can enable real time collaboration using updated bill of material can be a great enabler. Unfortunately, many organizations stack with “synchronization” of data between systems. This is a core of significant inefficiency. The opportunity to improve it is huge. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

Bill of Materials (BoM) is a vital part of every product definition. In engineering and product development everything starts and stops with the development of BoM. It is essential for complex products such as aircraft and automobile. But BoM is equally important for small hardware startup just getting off the ground to develop prototype and manufacturing first initial product batch. Read more in my earlier article  – 5 elements of PLM for hardware startup. But BoM just looks easy from the beginning. As you are moving forward into product development, lifecycle, configurations, maintenance, support, you can discover multiple dimensions of BoM management complexity.

BoM management is an essential part of every PLM system today. At the same time, complexity of existing PLM tools and high cost are creating difficulties to manage BoM using PLM tools. As you can see from the following two reports, Excel is considered as #1 BoM management tools by CIMdata – leader analyst company in product lifecycle management.

I captured results of another research made by manufacturing consulting and service company – Dragon Innovation. The research shows that majority of their customers are using Excel spreadsheets to manage BoM and even don’t know what “PDM” stands for.

So, spreadsheets vs. PDM / PLM tool? This is a dilemma for many companies of any size – small hardware startups and large global manufacturers. If you are a small company, Fictiv blog article – How to build a BoM? gives you a recipe to follow explaining how to create BoM and what tools to use. In a nutshell, the recommendation is to use spreadsheets and migrate to PLM tools within time, as you product and development process is getting more complicated.

Keeping track of BOM spreadsheets is bearable with 1 product, but when you have multiple products, it can become a headache quickly. A PLM (product life management) system is a BOM, master parts list, and process management tool all in one. Before you get ready to do a pre-production build, have all the engineers review the latest BOM together, then lock down this version for the build and communicate its version number to the manufacturing partner.

The number of articles about BoM management and PLM is large. But of the less known resource could be Teamcenter blog about BoM management. I found the following article specially interesting if you are focusing on complex products – PLM BOM and the Next Generation Design Paradigm for the World’s Most Massive and Complex Products.

PLM BOM systems poses many challenges. The current approach relies on hierarchical product structures consisting of many levels in a tree-like structure that captures organizational nodes as well as nodes with associated product data such as CAD files, documents and usage specific attributes. However, for defining a massive and complex product consisting of millions of parts and welds, where each individual node as well as parent nodes consisting of a collection of individual nodes that can have their own lifecycle and revisions, the traditional PLM BOM data management techniques reveal a significant number of challenges.

At the same time, migrating to PLM system can cost hardware company agility and speed. I captured the following video with Scott Miller of Dragon Innovation speaking about BoM add-on template Dragon developed for Google Spreadsheet. Watch the video from the <3:30> min where Scott is speaking about his PLM experience back in iRobot.

My favorite quote at 3:30 of the video. “Nothing stops us faster than Windchill. PLM can put us in a dead stop when we are trying to get product out”.

PLM vendors are making progress meantime and you can find BoM management tools in every PLM product portfolio. These tools are various depending on your requirements and product environment. You can consider  mature tools like Teamcenter, Windchill and Enovia to manage complex product configurations (especially if it involves lot of 3D CAD work associated with BoM). At the same time, newer cloud based tools such as Arena and Autodesk PLM360 can be a better alternatives won’t require significant IT resources and provides a nicer user experience.

What is my conclusion? Spreadsheets are easy to start. You can pull data, make changes and keep it flexible. But within time, spreadsheet management will add an additional cost and complexity on every change you want to do. Companies are considering to hire Chief Excel Officer to manage BoM spreadsheets. At the same time, PLM tools are complex. Even the most flexible cloud tool can put you in a dead stop on your way to make a progress in product engineering, manufacturing and delivery if don’t put enough resources and plan it upfront your PLM implementation. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

Excel is the world’s number 1 tool for PLM and BoM management. Excel is beloved by engineers for its simplicity, flexibility and ability to absorb any type of data. Excel ownership and control is easy to get – just save Excel file on your disk and you have full control of your bill of materials. I recalled one of my first blog posts – Why do I like my PLM spreadsheets back in 2009. But Excel is getting complex within time and you need hire CEO (Chief Excel Officer) to modify Excel spreadsheets used for BoM and product lifecycle purposes. One more blog from 2009 – PLM Excel Spreadsheets – from odes to woes can give you few cons why Excel is expensive and complex as a strategy to manage product data and lifecycle.

Cloud is changing our working environment. No surprise, cloud is coming to change Excel spreadsheets too. While PLM vendors were making numeral attempts to explain users why PLM tools are better than Excel, developers are quietly discovered the power of Google Spreadsheets. Over the past few months, my attention was caught by few new tools developed as add-ons for Google Spreadsheets.

The following two examples can give you a better idea of what I mean – Dragon Standard BoM and Onshape BOM Add-on.

Dragon Standard BoM is a Google Spreadsheet Add-on developed by Dragon Innovation – manufacturing consulting outfit in Boston, MA. Dragon Innovation is focusing on helping hardware startups to scale up their manufacturing efforts in China and beyond. Dragon Standard BoM is a tool to prepare and to make analysis of bill of materials for electronic products. The link to the tools is here. You can read more information about Dragon Standard BoM in the following blog. Dragon Standard BoM is very helpful template-like tool that can be used hardware entrepreneurs to prepare data for manufacturing RFQs.

Onshape just a made a big splash in a news by announcing its commercial release and beta for Onshape App Store and API. Read more in my previous post here. Onshape BOM is Google Spreadsheet Add-on that can help you to extract part list and additional metadata from Onshape documents. Onshape BOM connects to your Onshape account and extracts bills of material (BOMs) from your assemblies. Once extracted, all important metadata from the assembly is populated into the Google Sheet. It also can synchronize updates of metadata back to Onshape. More information about Onshape BOM is here. Written by Lou Galo of Onshape it is a great demonstration of Onshape APIs and a useful part list creation tool. I specially liked the way some of metadata can be updated using Google Sheets.

You can certainly see the power of Google Sheets when you need to extract and manipulate data in the web and mobile environment. I guess Excels are falling short to do the same, unless you will move into Office 365 environment. Onshape is a great tool to demonstrate the power of full cloud application with REST API to access data, which reminded me why PLM needs to learn Web APIs.

What is my conclusion? Cloud brings an interesting transformation into engineering environment. Many desktop (and not only) versions of CAD, PDM and PLM customization and application are using Excel. You can find them everywhere. Cloud, web and mobile transformation will force everyone to re-think the way we use Excel. New patterns will be coming to engineering apps. It is a reminder for PDM and PLM developers to take few web development and Google Sheet online courses during holiday season. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

Picture credit makeuseof blog.

One of my best blogging buddies in product lifecycle management and President of Lifecycle Insight Chad Jackson open 2016 with a very provocative statement – A Single Source of the Truth for the BOM Still Doesn’t Exist. The article speaks about complexity of BoM management between different engineering disciplines – mechanical, electronic, software. Chad brings awareness to the need of having integrated product development tools. The topic also known as system system development. Here is my favorite passage in the article:

When planning and modifying designs, mechanical engineers, electrical engineers and embedded software developers must work together and collaboratively to come up with holistic design solutions. That means that satisfying a system level requirement will often be broken down and assigned to hardware and software components. It means that if a new material in that mechanical component can’t satisfy that requirement, there might need to be a change to the requirement on the software component, which might flow down to an API or function library. These types of trade-offs and coordination plays out in hundreds of different scenarios, like change orders, modified requirements, failed prototypes and so many more, in engineering organizations on a daily basis.

The most interesting part of this passage is related to collaborative work between engineers working on different aspects of product development. Collaboration is such a vague word. PLM vendors were preaching to the need of collaboration between engineers for many years. However, as Chad noticed, the integrated development across engineering disciplines matters more today than ever.

The roots of integration development are going to multidisciplinary data, which is one dimension of BoM management complexity. Few months, I shared some of my thoughts about why PLM is failing to manage multi-disciplinary BoM?

In my view,technical difficulties and disagreement between people often can lead to problems in establishment of cohesive BoM management solutions. PLM fails to provide a way to manage multi-disciplinary BoM and changes. Manufacturing companies are using high diversity of design tools these days – mechanical, electronic, software. While specific data management tools are well equipment to manage a particular discipline of data, there is certain lack of versatile tool that can be adapted to all requirements and integrated with design tools. It leads to limitation of BoM management tools and complexity of integration and UX.

However, the key question, in my view, is who needs the tool capable to manage multiple disciplines of design information? The best tool will be dead without people that want to use it. The collaboration is fancy word, but very often engineers are working in silos (mechanical, electronics, software) with not much interesting to interconnect. Chad Jackson article gives us a hint – requirements. Requirements (or maybe system definitions) can intertwine data and bring engineers to collaborate together.

What is my conclusion? The complexity of products and development processes is creating a demand for tools capable to handle multi-disciplinary product data and supporting better collaboration and data tracking between engineers. The challenge is that CAD and PLM vendors are already providing tools to manage design data, BoM and requirements. Is there a place for another layer of tools for System Development? Maybe… What is clear to me that to manage product information across multiple disciplines, product lifecycle and product development processes is challenge manufacturing companies are facing every day. PLM vendors need to think how to solve it more efficiently. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

Part numbers are hard. What started as a simple number and references to a part company usually purchase from a supplier, turned out as a complex data management problem with high level of integration complexity.

Part number is a fundamental element of all processes in manufacturing company – started from design and engineering through the manufacturing, maintenance and services. Part numbers are used across departments of manufacturing companies and globally between manufacturing companies and suppliers.

When drawing boards and cork-boards were a foundation of engineering and manufacturing process management, intelligent part numbers used to link piece of information. Was it ideal? I don’t think so. But it worked for many companies. New database driven software came to improve inefficient processes – MRP, ERP, CAD, PDM, PLM. These systems introduced database-driven approach and new problems.

The nature of database is to use a stable identification system. Intelligent part numbers introduced a high level of complexity to all these systems. The ideally database should use internal ID to identify data. Intelligent part number is not a number that databases can use easily and it is a weak link in a chain of data relationships.

At the same time, the reality of most manufacturing companies is multiple part numbers and variety of intelligent solution to map identification attributes between multiple systems and databases.

Jos Voskuil blog The impact of non-intelligent numbers part numbers came to my attention yesterday evening. He speaks about advantages of non-intelligent part numbers and long term ROI of solutions using such part numbers. At the same time time, he acknowledges the need of human-readable properties that are required to work with non-intelligent part numbers. The following passage speaks about that:

Introducing non-intelligent part numbers has it benefits and ROI to stay flexible for the future. However consider it also as a strategic step for the long-term future when information needs to flow in an integrated way through the enterprise with a minimum of human handling.

So when a company decides to move forward towards non-intelligent part numbers, there are still some more actions to take. As the part number becomes irrelevant for human beings, there is the need for more human-readable properties provided as metadata on screens or attributes in a report.

So, king is dead. Long live the king. You can ask what is a difference between intelligent part number and human readable attributes? Jos brings few examples that explains the idea such as multiple classifications, etc.. But at the same time, he acknowledge that a decision to switch into non-intelligent numbers will impact many downstream systems. If you think about non-intelligent number as a database ID, in order to make all systems work, manufacturing company will have to force the same non-intelligent part number to used as an internal database ID in all systems (PDM, PLM, ERP…) or used a unique key to integrate data across multiple systems.

A potential solution can quickly turn into a discussion of standard set of attributes that can be shared by multiple systems. Standard set of attributes will lead us into debates about product data standards, which endless as we know for the last decades. Recently I shared my thoughts about that in my blog – Why standards is not a silver bullet to create a product innovation platforms? which shares some of my thoughts why data integration is hard and standards is not always the best solution.

What is my conclusion? A real problem is data and process integration. The problem is not internal for every manufacturing company, but also comes outside as manufacturing companies are working with suppliers and service partners. Replacing intelligent part number by non-intelligent database ID doesn’t solve a problem, but moves it to the level of systems used to manage information. The introduction of classification schema used by PLM system won’t solve a problem of data management across multiple departments unless everyone will be using the same system. Even imagine company using PLM system to manage everything, the question about suppliers, contract manufacturers, service and maintenance providers is remaining open. It must be a better way. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg