Design To Manufacturing Process: Bumpy Road?

June 12, 2011

Integration between design and manufacturing is one of the topics that normally hits a lot of discussion in the product development and PLM space. To support this process becomes more and more important in a modern enterprise manufacturing organization. You can ask me why? Let me put is simple – this is one of the most important processes that can drive cost optimization in the companies. Everything a company is making need to be first designed and later manufacturing. If it breaks – nothing can help.

Design to Manufacturing Connection

One of the numbers that always amazed me is what percentage of product cost is defined actually early in the design process. Do you want to guess this number? Well, it is around 70%. I think, this is an amazing number. At the same time, the initial cost planning is something that poorly can be done without getting information about manufacturing, supply and other related elements. Efficient transferring of the information between a design system (CAD, PLM) and manufacturing system (MRP/ERP) is an important element of streamlining of manufacturing processes.

Integration Challenges

Despite the high importance of the integration between design and manufacturing, the reality of many companies shows that few of them can show successfully implemented integrations. There are several reasons for that. The top three, in my view, are as following: 1/ high diversity of engineering and manufacturing processes; 2/dependencies on CAD, PLM, ERP and other home grown systems; and 3/ significant cost of implementation and changes. Each vendor develops his own strategies and relies on multiple technologies and partners to deliver that.

Design to Manufacturing Integration Examples

To illustrate the need and the level of complexity, I decided to pull together few videos that present some elements of integration solutions. The first one is the integration solution between Autodesk Inventor and SAP. The solution developed by Autodesk partner – CIDEON Software.

The next one is the solution developed by CORDYS, Holland based company, which focuses on the development of business process management middleware and tools. What is interesting in this solution is complete Independence of CORDYS from both software vendors manufacturing solution CORDYS integrates.

The following video presents TeamCenter 8 integration with Microsoft Dynamics AX developed by Microsoft’s partner To-Increase. This is another example of "a process like" integration between two packages – engineering and manufacturing.

The last examples show a different approach of integration. Dassault 3DLive solution is providing an interesting approach to access manufacturing information from ERP and other systems via the native 3DLive user interface.

What is my conclusion? The space of design to the manufacturing solution is complex and not covered well, in my view. The demand from customers is significant and the same time the requirements are complicated and solution in a most situation needs to be tailored for every customer. Most of the software vendors are talking about design to manufacturing processes and, at the same time, moving integration to partners, service providers and 3rd parties. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

2 Comments | Daily PLM Think Tank | Tagged: , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by olegshilovitsky

5 Things To Know Before PLM-ERP Integration Project

May 4, 2010

Yesterday, I had chance to read the new paper by Jim Brown: Issue in Focus: The Integrated ERP-PLM Strategy. There are lots of things I agree with Jim. They are mostly in the area of strategic need for PLM-ERP as well as growing level of awareness about such need on the side of companies. However, the issue of integration cost is somewhat, I think, is a very critical. Unfortunately, because of complexity, manufacturers are facing the issue of PLM-ERP cost very late in the implementation process.

In my view PLM-ERP integration never comes as out-of-the-box product. The diversity of product development and manufacturing practices, product versions and many other factors are making PLM-ERP integration very complex and expensive project. I want to breakdown possible decision points related to PLM-ERP integration.

What data do you want to integrate?
It sounds obvious, but before you want to integrate systems, you need to understand what data you are going to integrate. It seems to me as an important topic is to break down data in both systems into very granular pieces and see how this data will be combined, transferred and integrated. Don’t move forward until you don’t understand what data assets do you have.

Where is data located and how it controlled?
The enterprise data management is a complex task. PLM and ERP systems are two the most complicated in the modern manufacturing. Data can be distributed in different locations, organization can use multiple ERP and, sometime, PLM systems. The ownership of enterprise systems and, in the end, control over the data assets can be very complicated. You need to see a full picture of data control by different people in the organization.

What processes influenced by integration?
There are lots of advantages in implementing PLM-ERP integration. However, such integration will introduce a change in the organization development and manufacturing process. As every change, it may bring some problems or simple additional cost in adjustment of work in the organization. You have to understand the influence from the different standpoint – people, software and processes. The cost of adjustment needs to be include into overall estimation related to your PLM-ERP integration project.

What API and development skills do you need?
It sounds like a completely technical. Nevertheless, it is very important. Your organizational systems can provide a different set of techniques and tools to develop integration. In most of the cases, enterprise systems are heavily customized. You need to understand and validate what tools and API you can use and how you PLM-ERP integration will be adjusted to all existing custom developments you have in place.

How to maintain your integration?
This one is last, but extremely important. Your PLM-ERP integration is not a single shot project you are doing once. Your organization becomes heavily dependent on this integration. PLM-ERP integrations are very often belonging to the class of “mission critical systems” in the organization. Therefore, you need to validate how you will be able to maintain this integration from all possible standpoints – people, technologies, system upgrades. The last one is also important. You obviously will manage upgrades of your ERP and PLM systems. You need to take into account that since you have PLM-ERP integration in place, this upgrade process will always be dependable on how you maintain your integration.

What is my conclusion today? PLM-ERP integration is a very expensive project. It can bring lots of benefits, but also drain a significant amount of resources. You need to understand how to make a right estimation of work and validate this project before it starts. I’m interested to discuss your experience and listen to your feedback.

Best, Oleg

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15 Comments | Daily PLM Think Tank, PLM+ERP | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by olegshilovitsky

PLM+ERP: How to Prevent a Divorce?

June 1, 2009

I’d like to start new discussion this week with this challenging topic. In my post about “Top Five Disappointing PLM Technologies” last week, I mentioned PLM/PDM -ERP integration as #2 and actually got lots of interesting comments on this. And as I mentioned, this topic, in my opinion, has remained the same for at least the last 5-10 years. So, I came to the conclusion that there is something fundamentally wrong and it will be really good to make open up a more detailed discussion on this.

So, I’d like to put the reasons that have brought us to our present situation regarding the PLM/PDM and ERP world into 4 groups:

  1. Bill of Materials Management. The way a Bill of Materials need to be managed in both systems is different. While PDM/PLM is more oriented on “work in progress”, such as the design Bill of Materials and Engineering stuff, ERP is more of an “effectivity-oriented” model. The bridge between these two models is the Part Number, but this is not always simple to coordinate between multiple manufacturing facilities and different Engineering /Design views. So, the fundamental models are different. Therefore, the connection and mutual life of these systems together is very problematic.  
  2. System and Process product supports. PDM/PLM and ERP support a different community of people (and processes) in the organization. Their work goals are unfortunately defined separately, and processes are not always well integrated. When they belong to different organizations, it’s very hard to make them work together since they are disconnected sequentially (input-output) and not designed to work in parallel. This causes major dissatisfaction and loss of interest among people, followed by #4.
  3. Concurrent Management. In many cases, people get the feeling they are working ‘on the same’ topic (BOM, Product, Part etc.). In this concurrent mode, systems (or people working with systems) are trying to establish a way to say their “final word on change”. Although the overall process spans across PLM and ERP, this process requires concurrent work.  In order to work concurrently, the integration between PLM and ERP needs to be robust.  If it is not robust enough, the process is not optimal and becomes a bad and unnatural process.
  4. People’s nature and various organizational issues. As you, probably know, in the end it’s all about people. When we have all the problems I just mentioned in #1-3, it causes people in the organization to resolve problems in the way they think will be appropriate – they do not always take organizational goals into account. They are driven by their position in organizations, organization political influence and various short and long trends. This is normally ends with organizational failure or one system dominance.

So, will the PLM/ERP marriage end in divorce or end-up as a happy partnership? What I see for a long future is happy ERP and PDM/PLM relationship, if they can find a good find way to live together. If this happens, it will provide huge advantages for customers from the standpoint of streamlining organizational processes and the ability to decrease the cost of the products they manufacture. Alternatives are very complicated and in most cases can be separated as 1/competitive dominance – one of the systems will be dominant in organization; 2/an extremely high price will be paid to integrate systems: 3/inefficient organizational processes.

I’m sure there is potential to solve this problem and that the solution can come from the technological side as well from the organizational side. I’d like to hear your voices and it will be great if you will share your experience and opinion on this problem.

10 Comments | Daily PLM Think Tank, PLM and organization, PLM+ERP | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by olegshilovitsky

Should Engineers Take Care of ERP?

May 20, 2009

I’d like to discuss the relationship in the organization between two major classes of software - PLM (CAD, CAE, PDM) and ERP. I think that the integration of PLM and ERP is not a new topic. There are many blog posts, researches, products and implementations done in this space. So, before deciding to go and discuss my ideas about how we can improve this relationship, I’d like to ask a question in a slightly different way: Should Engineers take care of ERP? In my view, there are two major patterns happening today in the PLM-ERP world which I’d identify as follows:

Pattern 1: Close Space. Engineering Systems is a closed environment focused on their specific engineering tasks and limiting their communication with ERP space. These systems send/receive very essential information such as product design (CAD model, drawings) and identifications such as Part Numbers. What is typical for this pattern is that both these environments (PLM and ERP?)  seems to have a status quo (an unwritten agreement) about not crossing borders and feel very comfortable with this agreement. It looks like the people responsible for both implementations are saying “don’t touch me and I will not touch you”.  I’ve seen people defending this position by saying that enterprise organizations need to be managed by siloes.  So, Engineering and ERP are different silos and need to be managed separately.

Pattern 2: Open Space. Engineering Systems see ERP as an essential part of their business relations in a very closed manner. It means that both system classes are focused on how to leverage information and processes between these two spaces. ERP can provide the engineering environment with business insight on how they need to design products – business and manufacturing information, customer info, logistic and supply chain data. On the opposite side, if engineering processes can introduce product to manufacturing already in the early stages of development, these can be greatly appreciated by manufacturing and their ability to optimize product design using manufacturing feedback.

In my view pattern 2 is something to which the future belongs. Engineers are the most important source of IP (Intellectual Property) in the company. They design products and create IP. Companies need to focus on how to get this IP out of engineering use it downstream. In addition, engineers need to take care and find a way to deliver the right ERP/Manufacturing data for CAD/PLM. In this way  they will be able to optimize product design already in the early stages of development.  In my opinion, PLM should take a leading role and engineers need to take care of ERP. I know it sounds strange, but only engineers know how to use information they create. Therefore, PLM needs to create a language and create tools and processes about how to take PLM IP downstream and integrate it with the manufacturing environment in your organization.

I’d be interested in discussing this topic and learn from your experience.

10 Comments | Daily PLM Think Tank, PLM and organization | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by olegshilovitsky

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