PLM Processes, Lists and Implementation Confusion

December 7, 2010

I read the following blog post by Christine Longwell – Do we really need structured workflows if we have visibility and status? In my view, the question asked by Christine can be heard very often from customers trying to decide about PDM or PLM process management. I specially liked the following passage from Christine’s post:

One of the major objections to implementing a PLM system is that it is going to tie a creative organization into a structured workflow that can slow down their process and ability to react. If the process is too strictly structured, people start looking for ways around the process when “special situations” arise. A major deadline, build stoppages on the manufacturing floor, unexpected audits, or irate customers can all be reasons to go around the process and not wait for the standard Friday Morning design review meeting to get designs released.

What if we assume that every design change is driven by a special situation, and allow them to all “flow” naturally? I believe it’s possible to use tools that facilitate real time, collaborative communication and status on issues to treat each problem differently, and come to the right solution more quickly.

I found very interesting to comparison of two opposite things – structured workflow and real time collaboration. The confusion between them, actually, leads to some implementation difficulties and potentially wrong conclusions about tool selection.

Design Collaboration
Product development has many different stages. On the very early design stage, people can collaborate freely without any special constraints and dependencies. This is a time when "designer" is a king. Designer can make any change. However, if a team of people involved into this processes, they definitely need to collaborate (=work together). So, this type of "design collaboration" can be characterized by a very non-formal relationships and communications. The most widely used tools for such communication is email. I don’t think that email is actually the most optimal way to collaborate, but ease of use and wide spread of emails make it an obvious choice. Managing of the emails can be a difficult task for every person. In addition, email becomes very inefficient when you work with CAD systems. Because of technical constraints, you cannot always use attachments, and it causing losing of context in communications.

Change Processes
When product development moves to the next maturity phases beyond the design, communication between people in the organization becomes more complicated. It, obviously, requires more people to be involved to the processes of changes. At this time, changes are controlled by a group of people and requires some synchronization before any change may occur. It may happen when a product is actually already manufactured or, for example, during the advanced stages of "engineering to order" manufacturing. Such situations require more coordinated work between people in different departments, which normally is going beyond just "raising hands" or "sending emails". The most often used procedures at this stage are "approval processes". PDM and PLM systems have an ability to make such implementations.

Processes and Tasks
One of the obvious outcomes of processes and workflow implementations is the need to manage lists of tasks for people. When it comes to "change approval" or "change implementation", the need to manage tasks becomes critical. The important element of process management is the ability to make tasks visible and transparent in the organization. It includes task assignment, task distribution, follow up and changes. A good process or workflow tool needs to provide ways to accomplish that. User interface is an important element in the process implementation story. As a user, I need to have my tasks to show up. List views are one of the most obvious ways to do so. That’s why, Microsoft Excel becomes popular. However, the ease of list creation in Excel is combined with a complicated way to maintain collaborative changes, assignments and follow up. Microsoft SharePoint with Excel Services provided an interesting approach to manage Excel lists. Other alternatives can include "work management" or "task management" tools. Lists are still a very important element of user interface there.

People and Processes
The most complicated element in all process implementations are people. To capture processes is not a trivial task. Processes can be undefined, fuzzy and even conflicting. Process Management, normally, cannot solve problems related to the process capturing and organization. The flexibility of tools is an important factor here. However, even with a full flexibility, this process can go wrong.

What is my conclusion? The requirements can be different depends on a type of communication. Design team can collaborate via phone, email or Excel spreadsheets. When it comes to more complicated communication, process management and workflow tools need to be involved. However, ad-hoc collaboration, structured workflow and even a very sophisticated processes management tool, can use a simple list-based user interface concept to communicate with users and provide task visibility. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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

PLM Philosophies Collide

September 29, 2010

Somebody asked me last week about how I see th future of PLM… Does it look like-BOM or like-Workflow? I found this question very interesting. Bill of Materials and Workflow (or process management) are fundamentally two most important pieces of PDM and PLM systems for many years. So, we have them already in place. However, thinking about the future – what will be a dominant solution? Do we need re-invent the wheel? Is there any conflict here? I want to elaborate about both to see what future PLM looks like.

Bill of Material World

BOM is considered as a foundation of design, engineering and manufacturing. You can see it everywhere – design BOM in CAD system, Engineering BOM, Manufacturing BOM, Support and Service BOM. You can follow a product lifecycle by discovering different bill of materials. You can find lots of methodologies and systems that help you to handle your Bill of Material world. These things are really complicated. Bill of Materials represents many issues related to product development and in the end of the day you can think about a virtual Bill of Material representing everything.

Workflow World

Processes (or how we can simply call them Workflows) are very important for an organization too. They are a life blood of every manufacturing organization. Organization is running business processes and making overall execution of the business. We can classify them as local and global cross-department. Local are mostly focusing on departmental processes. The more interesting and challenging thing are cross-departmental processes. These processes are connected people working in different departments. Cross-departmental processes are very important if you think about the overall product lifecycle.

PLM Philosophies Difference

So, why I put BOM world against Workflow world? You can draw your organization in terms of Bill of Material and, at the same time, in terms of organizational processes. Is it about philosophy or about real development practices? In the early days of PDM and PLM, the main focus was absolutely on files, data management, revisions, Bill of Materials. Later, PLM system discovered “process world”. This “discovery” was part of the competition between PLM and ERP world. PLM systems made an upscale to compete in the high society. The “process approach” presented organic change to fit product development processes in organizations.

What is my conclusion?

I think, this question represents one of the biggest philosophical collide in engineering and manufacturing software. What will be the winning behavior in the future? It is hard to say. In my view, the end-game solution will need to provide answers to both sides of the problem. BOM and Worklow need to be equaly included into PLM solutions. Only together they can keep an organization to manage efficiently product lifecycle. Just my thoughts. What is your take?

Best, Oleg

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

What is the right time to implement PLM Workflow and Processes?

July 23, 2009

PLM-process-workflowEvery time I’ve been talking with customers about processes, work flows and PLM, the conclusion was that one of the important factors of process implementation is to choose right timing. You need to have company ready to think about process improvements. So, the point was very clear – to change business processes in organization is not simple. To make it happen you need to have all stakeholders on board and do it with timing, which will be aligned with overall organizational changes.

In today’s turbulent time, many companies are thinking about rationalization, improvement and changes. So, I think this should be right time for companies to think about PLM processes in organization. I want to propose a possible 3-steps plan to achieve it.

Step 1: Make analyses of existing organizational processes. To focus on these processes that require improvement first. Capture existing process definitions with process/workflow tools you have in your PLM systems.

Step 2: Plan your data and IP management for these processes. Your processes and workflow can work efficiently only in the case they will have access to the right data. Without accessing right data, your processes will not reflect reality, and you will not be able to follow them as well as use them for your decision support. So, by creating right data modeling and/or connecting PLM system to right sources of data, you will prepare solid basement for good process orchestration.

Step 3: Optimize and run your process/workflow environment. As soon as you existing processesand data in your hands, you can start planning process optimization and executing. This is time when you will need to analyze captured processes, make improvement and right first pilot and second production environment.

What is my short conclusion? Use right timing, capture and improve your PLM related workflows and processes now. You will  be able to optimize your organization now and be prepared for future growth.

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

PLM Process Management – How many Workflows do we Need?

April 20, 2009

In one of my previous posts, I already discussed PLM process management: Should PLM develop its own process tools?. In reality, I see that companies have many products that have process management and workflow capabilities. Some of them are part of IT platforms (Microsoft SharePoint, IBM WebSphere etc.), while others are part of PDM, PLM and ERP tools. With such a large number of capabilities, I noticed that companies often develop multiple solutions to manage these processes – and these solutions are tightly connected to existing products. From a particular standpoint, it will let customers maximum the reuse of product capabilities and organize a dedicated process management and workflow solution integrated with data managed by a particular system (PDM, ERP etc.). But, one of the biggest drawbacks of that kind of situation is that organizations have multiple silos of disconnected solutions, with multiple process/workflow management implementations.

So my question is how many ”workflows” do we need in an organization? More precisely, I’d like to think about how to organize separated and disconnected workflow and business processes management solutions. Following are the priorities needed to organize this solution:

1. Establish a single process modeling environment

2. Multiple process deployment

3. Immersive access to process /workflow execution in a built-in user environment

A single process modeling environment would user to organize and maintain a single picture of the organizational processes. My preference in this case is IT platforms. Organizations normally chooses one IT platform, so having an environment in which to model processes makes a lot of sense to me. Consolidation around popular notations such as BPMN can let you use 3rd party tools, in some cases, if they provide additional benefits in managing of single process model.

Multiple process deployment can resolve the procedure of integrating processes into many existing systems. This depends on the specific system deployed by the company, and can be done in different ways – but the goal here is to keep the process connected to specific solution as much as possible (i.e. product data management and/or any vertical solution in the organization). This will allow existing systems to maintain the connection with data management using this system/sub-system. Access to this data is very important since most of process logic, in many cases, depends on this information.

Most of the processes require user involvement for control and data submission (i.e. document approval, ECO management etc.) Immersive access to process/workflow execution and control from the regular user daily environment is critical – because this is what guarantees the user’s acceptance. A process solution will be live only when customers will use it rather than bypass it.

So, where do you start? 1- Analyze what system can be used to keep overall control of processes in the organization; 2- Choose process modeling tools; 3- Analyze how to connect multiple workflow and process management solutions that already exist in the organization; 4- Give priority to solutions that have immersive integration in the user environment.

As usual, I’m open to discuss this and am interested to know what type of solutions you have and how you organize workflow and business processes within your organization.

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

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