Is Your PLM System Meeting Your Needs?

By Hilary Char Cook, Kalypso: A Rockwell Automation Business

What comes to mind when you think of your product lifecycle management (PLM) system? It should be a powerful foundational tool that serves to drive your development.

If you've had PLM for longer than 10 years, it might be showing signs of strain, unable to connect to tools that teams are actually using to do their work, taking significant technical load to update, or otherwise failing to keep up with your business needs.

Adding to the pains of this current state are the emerging complications from your organization, customers and the business environment at large, which can include the following:

Pressure for leaner, faster teams. Teams are being asked to be more responsive to their end consumer, bring more innovation, cut time out of the development cycle and accomplish more with less.

Workforce expectations and tech-native talent. The wide availability of advanced consumer technologies that we use in our private lives raises expectations of tools in the workplace. People are accustomed to social media and shopping experiences that automatically come with suggestions on related products or how to make the content more engaging.

Your workforce will increasingly expect their tools to be seamless while allowing them to do their best, most innovative and value-adding work.

Reduced resources for PLM. As companies realize the latter phases of their PLM roadmaps, budgets are sized for maintenance as the focus shifts to other tools. This shift affects both the scale of feasible system changes and the allocation of resources. Maintenance budgets accommodate minor enhancements but fall short of addressing substantial improvements or larger transformations.

The budget reduction also translates to a loss of the change network that previously supported PLM. Because PLM is one of the few enterprise tools that touches cross-functional teams end-to-end, the loss of support is felt end-to-end, too.

External evolutions in the marketplace have their own set of impacts, including:

Regulatory effects. Environmental and social awareness and the regulatory landscape’s increasing complexity obligate brands to expand data capture within their product development process and supply chain partners and look at scalable ways to reach further into the supply chain to harvest the information they need, manage risk and ensure growth.

The rise of savvy consumers. The consumer-product data gap is shrinking. Consumers are more informed and discerning about what they buy, how it’s made and how it came to them. The transparency they expect about the product creation process includes increased interest in materials and dyes, fit measurements, product quality, sustainability claims and vendor and extended supply-chain ethics. Adapting to serve up this information is key to maintaining relevance.

Software innovation. Like you, PLM software vendors and emerging point solutions are reading the market. They’re introducing suites of tools designed to enhance user productivity, adapt to more flexible product creation models, bring decision support front and center, and integrate more easily with the extended ecosystem end to end.

Why is this a problem?

All of this has created an environment where mature PLM clients and capability owners are scrambling to respond and comply with data requirements, adapt and modernize their ecosystems and decide where to invest to keep up with the pace of change.

This puts pressure on companies who aren’t positioned to respond, have limited budget, or need to make the case for new investment. Brands who choose to build their own solutions have an additional choice to make: Do they double down and invest in their own IT product support teams and operate them like a mini software company, or do they start fresh with an off-the-shelf PLM and leverage the innovations of others?

So where do we go from here?

You’re at a decision point. During implementation, strategy was clear and attention and investment in PLM was high. Then, system changes stabilized as you finished out your roadmap and entered the maintenance phase (see chart).

Emerging internal and external pressures have converged to bring you to a decision point: Do you stay on your current maintenance path? Do you look for incremental improvements and ways to stretch your existing resources? Or do you recognize the need to invest again to get ahead of emerging pressures, to modernize, connect and really transform at scale?

Taking no action requires no additional investment and still includes maintenance enhancements, but it’s hardly the safest route. This option doesn’t help you respond to emerging pressures and will ultimately put your ecosystem on the road to obsolescence.

Achieving transformation at scale requires a larger investment, so explore going out of the box. If you purchased off-the-shelf software and then heavily customized it, explore if some of those functions might now be available out of the box. De-customizing lowers the overall cost of ownership and makes you more capable to absorb enhancements from your software provider.

If your foundation feels too fragmented to move forward, but the thought of ripping and replacing feels daunting, know that most established PLM software vendors now offer more value-oriented, preconfigured solutions that allow for growth and are ready to plug in. The days of extended projects with traditional requirements gathering and customer-led solution design have long passed.

Make it seamless. PLM doesn’t need to be the home for everything, but connecting your planning, dynamic process control (DPC), PLM and collaboration tools reduces errors and manual data synchronization from teams. It also creates a backbone for collaboration, visualization and analytics tools to help you pivot to a modern work environment.