PLM process

I have recently seen a few blogs posts about the importance, need and value of standardizing CAD practices. Here's a recent example: CAD Standard: - Part One: Getting Started

Anyone who has followed my various musings over the years will be aware this is a particularly keen topic for me. I am really enthused to see this topic getting attention.

You may have read my various musings over the last few years about the value of standardizing your design approach. I often hear from manufacturing management about their difficulty getting product designers to engage in the standardization process and to work with other downstream functions, like manufacturing engineering, to agree on and standardize common processes. I think a blog entry on this topic might be apropo…

As you walk onto the factory floor of your next manufacturing operation, years of experience have prepared you to quickly assess the health of the site. Over time, you’ve developed “eyes for waste - eyes for flow.” You know the mission – production processes create customer value through the transformation of labor & materials. You have honed your observation skills, and you’re instantly clicking through your mental checklist of symptoms to quickly assess the health of the operation. Personal knowledge, experience and practice guide you as you walk among the machines and their operators, providing feedback and direction. You know that a key to eliminating waste is standardized work practices; every operator performing tasks in the same way. Standardized work practices enable manufacturers to win.

PLM is an intriguing vision indeed. Marketing departments worldwide buzz with the latest claims of the virtues and value of their software and the brave new world of productivity and profit enabled by the PLM vision. But successful PLM has proven elusive. Not only are the processes embodied in the vision highly complex, but successful PLM depends in large part on effective communication and collaboration, which is proving quite hard for manufacturers to do well.