InFlow Technology

The Importance of Product Data Management (Part 2)

Posted on behalf of John Holub.

QUESTION: How important is Process? Consistent process. Process, allowing Companies to define policy and procedures.

In part one of “The Importance of Product Data Management”, we discussed the importance of being able to find and reuse a company’s intellectual properties. Now that the data is secure and accessible to those that need it, when they need it, let’s put process in place to add controls to how we use/reuse this information.

A company that we once worked with called us in to assist them in revamping their Engineering Change Process. This was a manual process that they said had really become a bottleneck. Their goal was to try and automate the process with the aide of their new data management system. They felt that they could reduce the time that it took to process an engineering change by 20%. In Dollars, this broke down to about $1,000,000 per year. As we started to dig a bit deeper into the situation, there seemed to be an inordinate number of  Engineering Changes per week. We suggested that the Engineering Change bottleneck might be the result of a greater problem. We then asked about the design and approval processes. Our client went on to say that there have been a number of serious issues with regards to manufacturing product to the wrong revision. He also added that he had just received a “Nasty Gram” from their biggest customer. For the second time in 18 months, they had shipped to the wrong revision of the design. The customer stated that if this happened again they would take their business elsewhere. We asked what impact that would have on the company and we were told that this customer represented 40% of their annual business. We told the client that we certainly could help them improve their Engineering Change Process, but first let’s figure out how we save 40% of your company’s business.

The keys are consistent process and visibility of that process. Controlling access based on where designs are in their development process. Restricting access to certain areas in the organization until all approvals have been applied.

In the third and final installment of this series, we will discuss what I refer to as the “One – Ten – One Hundred Rule”.

“For more information, contact InFlow Technology at www.inflow-tech.com

The Importance of Product Data Management (Part 1)

Posted on behalf of John Holub

QUESTION: Is data/document management important? Is having “ALL” the documentation secure and easily retrievable key to your business, or just nice to have?

The first nineteen years of my career were in manufacturing. It was this background that prompted a change into the CAD/CAM Industry back in the Mid-80’s. My initial exposure to PDM was in 1989. The company that I worked for was instrumental in the development of IGOR. IGOR, named for the founder of Sykorsky Aircraft, was one of the very first production PDM Systems to come into existence. Eventually, the people involved with this PDM System got together, and using this knowledge and many lessons learned, developed a PLM System that is today has become one of the Enovia Solutions from Dassault Systemes. As we enter 2008, with all the advances in technology, companies are still wrestling with the same issues that faced Businesses over 20 years ago. “Get the right information, to the right people, at the right time”.

Some time back, a study was conducted that focused on Engineering Organizations. Like most of these reports, there were considerably more words than substance. However, a couple of the metrics really stood out: First, they determined that, on average, an Engineer spent more than 50% of his or her time searching for the material they needed to accomplish their job and, in some cases, as much as 70% of their time was spent finding what they needed. Secondly, once they determined that they had everything that was needed, they were still not certain that they had the right information. This problem still exists in the majority of product development companies today. Vital information and documents are stored randomly. It’s often times easier to redo a design rather than spend the time finding existing data for design reuse.

A company that I have worked with in the past, manufactures office furniture had this exact issue. They designed and manufactured a wide variety of office chairs, and each of these chairs used the same casters, yet it was easier to create a new part than to find the existing one for the next new chair that they designed. This resulted in the same part with 24 different part numbers. They got the job done, but this is hardly an efficient approach and not very economical from an inventory perspective.

Sounds like pretty basic stuff, right? So basic, in fact, that the justification for implementation of a PDM System can be based on getting the data secure, easily and quickly retrieving the data, and establishing methodologies for design reuse. This is really the ABC’s of PDM.

“For more information, contact InFlow Technology at www.inflow-tech.com

No one wants to buy PLM…Part 6 of an infinite series

I am a PLM sales person…and the title of this blog entry may imply that I am whining about my job. While I am not immune to the occasional emotional episode / mild tantrum, the title of this blog entry has a purpose. I assure you that this purpose has nothing to do with my emotional state.

Companies that contact InFlow are generally not looking to buy a PLM solution. Rather, they are looking to solve complex issues in their organization. Often times, the connection between the issue and the definition of PLM is somewhat cloudy. Therefore, my goal in this series is to discuss some of these challenges that InFlow has addressed with PLM and some of the measurable success that our customers have achieved.

"Change, for lack of a better word, is good"

Excuse the cheap Gordon Gecko rip-off...but who else would you expect a sales guy to quote?  Change in any organization can be viewed as a good thing.  That is, unless you are the poor sap that has to deal with all of this change.

ECRs, or Engineering Change Requests, are the way that many companies request product and design changes within the product development group.  ECRs are product development’s answer to the corporate suggestion box:  They allow anyone from any department to recommend a product change in a formal manner.

ECRs are encouraged.  Many companies believe that their people should have as much input into product line improvements as market research studies and customer demand.

One of InFlow’s customers encourages this type of input from its employees…they posted sheets outside of the VP of Engineering’s office that were filled out and dropped in his mailbox.  This encouragement was not ignored…the VP processed an average of 15 ECRs per week.  The unfortunate part of this story is the process by which these ECRs were…well, processed.  The VP had to complete 50 manual steps before beginning the approval of an ECR.  These tasks included attaching documentation to support the change, reviewing inventory levels in the ERP system, filling out his form that mirrored the employees’ request, and determining the approval route.

Recently, this InFlow customer implemented PDMWorks Enterprise, a Data Management solution developed by Solidworks Corporation. Working with the InFlow team, the customer formalized the ECR process, created submittal and approval forms inside the system, and has created an automated notification system that routes the forms to the proper approvers.  This was completed in a little less than 3 weeks, and the results have been fantastic:  All 50 manual steps have been eliminated from the ECR process.  Furthermore, the submittal process happens online and is much easier for employees to access and complete.  The result:  The customer is completing 3 times as many ECRs.  However, their backlog of active ECRs has decreased by over 50%.  The company is generating more ECRs and processing them faster and more efficiently.

Gordon Gecko also said, “Lunch is for wimps.”  Be that as it may, our VP of Engineering certainly now has more time to take a well deserved lunch.  Enjoy.

No one wants to buy PLM…Part 5 of an infinite series

I am a PLM sales person…and the title of this blog entry may imply that I am whining about my job. While I am not immune to the occasional emotional episode / mild tantrum, the title of this blog entry has a purpose. I assure you that this purpose has nothing to do with my emotional state.

Companies that contact InFlow are generally not looking to buy a PLM solution. Rather, they are looking to solve complex issues in their organization. Often times, the connection between the issue and the definition of PLM is somewhat cloudy. Therefore, my goal in this series is to discuss some of these challenges that InFlow has addressed with PLM and some of the measurable success that our customers have achieved.

“I can’t make my car payment if you guys can’t help me get my quote done!!!”

You have 250,000 production drawings. Your genius sales person calls you from her VW Passat (not making judgments here…it is what I drive and thus my basis for stereotypical sales-folk transportation) and explains what her customer is looking for on a new order. She then asks you when she can have a quote.

Once again, you have 250,000 production drawings…not that the genius sales person in her VW knows this.

Chances are that if you are in the business of making products, you try to base new designs on something that has been done before. However, if you had to search through a standard folder structure or (heavens forbid) a stack of file cabinets the size of Manhattan, you might not be able to provide feedback fast enough for your genius sales person to win the business that she needs to bypass public transportation.

This conversation was very typical for one of InFlow’s customers. Even with the implementation of a PLM system, it was difficult for them to search for project data that was similar to previous projects, and still more difficult to understand whether or not that job had been profitable for the company. Still more painful was the need for a customer service engineer to compile all of this data in order for a sales person to provide an accurate quote. Therefore, the company lost a lot of deals due to long lead times and chose not to bid on a large number of jobs because they simply could not quote fast enough.

Recently, the InFlow customer implemented DriveWorks, a Design and Sales Configuration Solution. With DriveWorks, the customer will add design and business rules to its configurable product line and allows sales professionals to present design options to a client in real time; pricing, specification documents, and even 3D models are immediately available for a client’s review. The rules used in DriveWorks are to be based on project history…the customer is able to present product options that are profitable to the company. Quotes will be generated in minutes and hours rather than days and weeks, increasing revenues and assuring an acceptable level of profitability on projects that the customer wins.

With quotes being generated quickly and easily, the genius sales person should now be able to make her car payment. Now if we can figure out a way to get her to forecast more accurately…

Before 3D for Beyond 3D

We just completed a seminar series called "Beyond 3D"that reviewed ways to put the great models we can now create in SolidWorks to work in new ways. My talk was reviewing where we had come with CAD as a preview to what is next.

I was doing some research for my presentation and I remebered from my Engineering Comptuer Graphics Class at Purdue in the early 80's hearing about the research that Ivan Sutherland did for his PhD Thesis in 1962. His program called Sketchpad had many of the concepts we use in modern CAD systems prototyped out more than 40 years ago.  In my research I found this video in the Internet Archive.

It reviews the origins of computer User Interfaces and shows a video of what Sketchpad could do. It is very interesting to see how far things have come, but at the same time how little is new.

No one wants to buy PLM…Part 4 of an infinite series

I am a PLM sales person…and the title of this blog entry may imply that I am whining about my job. While I am not immune to the occasional emotional episode / mild tantrum, the title of this blog entry has a purpose. I assure you that this purpose has nothing to do with my emotional state.

Companies that contact InFlow are generally not looking to buy a PLM solution. Rather, they are looking to solve complex issues in their organization. Often times, the connection between the issue and the definition of PLM is somewhat cloudy. Therefore, my goal in this series is to discuss some of these challenges that InFlow has addressed with PLM and some of the measurable success that our customers have achieved.

"Getting the right info…to the right people…at the right time"

It is a wonder that engineers don’t wear shoulder pads to work.

This statement has nothing to do with the dangerous nature of product development or the other cool thoughts that come to mind when considering shoulder pad imagery (Note to self: set TIVO for the NFL draft on Sunday).

Engineers are constantly tapped on the shoulder at work, both literally and via electronic forms of tappery: purchasing asking for a PDF to send out to a vendor for a quote, sales requiring an ISO view to share with a prospect, marketing looking for images for the catalog, manufacturing confirming that they have the correct revision, etc.

In many ways, traditional PDM systems have caused a lot of this tapping: The software keeps all non-engineers locked out for security reasons OR licenses are just too expensive to roll out the rest of the organization. Therefore, those outside of engineering are forced to continue tapping on shoulders.

One of InFlow’s customers called after extensive shoulder surgery. This particular customer has nearly 1000 employees in 3 locations, and they had gone through several pilot programs to test 3D viewing technology. They found several holes in these solutions.

First, they were too expensive to roll out to everyone in the organization. At an average cost of $400 - $1500 per floating license, the company would have had to invest a minimum of $40,000 in software to obtain a bare minimum number of licenses to support their user base. Second, all of the 3D viewers were too complex for what most people needed: a 2D drawing to review, email, or print. Lastly, the 3D viewers often require a better graphics card than many users had on their current computers in order to work effectively.

Between pilots, the company had one person that was responsible for document control, and he would send out an average of 7 copies of each print. This added up to a lot of wasted paper and a lot of confusion (for example, which copy of this drawing is latest version?).

InFlow recommended that the customer add Connexus to its current SmarTeam PLM system. Connexus serves as the bulk printing, publishing, and data distribution solution for all company employees that do not have access to PDM. Connexus is set up to automatically generate a PDF file upon a file’s release in PDM. No matter which location the employee resides, s/he can search for a drawing, ECO packet, or spec sheet on the web, then simply choose to view it, print it, or email it. Each item is time and date stamped to coincide with the company’s ISO standards. Best of all…Connexus does not require a license any user licenses. Therefore, it was economical to roll out to the enterprise.

In the 2 years since InFlow’s customer rolled out Connexus, they have seen a 40% increase in the availability of prints, a 58% decrease in the paper wasted on the shop floor, and increased employee satisfaction based on the availability of data…and their collective shoulder is making a full recovery from the incessant tapping that it had endured for years.

No one wants to buy PLM…Part 3 of an infinite series

I am a PLM sales person…and the title of this blog entry may imply that I am whining about my job.  While I am not immune to the occasional emotional episode / mild tantrum, the title of this blog entry has a purpose.  I assure you that this purpose has nothing to do with my emotional state.

Companies that contact InFlow are generally not looking to buy a PLM solution.  Rather, they are looking to solve complex issues in their organization.  Often times, the connection between the issue and the definition of PLM is somewhat cloudy.  Therefore, my goal in this series is to discuss some of these challenges that InFlow has addressed with PLM and some of the measurable success that our customers have achieved.

“Maintaining your largest client”

When your largest and most important client tells you that “you will outsource your design work or you will lose us as a client,” you have 2 choices:  You outsource the design work, or you lose the client.

If anyone is calling me “Captain Obvious” after reading that statement, you are probably not alone…

Outsourcing is a reality for many InFlow customers…we run across very few companies that are not designing, manufacturing, outsourcing, or assembling outside of the US.  This particular customer was no exception.

InFlow’s customer was bidding on a multi-million dollar contract to design large automation equipment for their primary client.  The client had received other bids:  If the customer were not willing to outsource a share of the design work to a lower cost labor pool, they would simply be priced out of the contract.  However, the project management had to remain stateside, where the bulk of the product/customer familiarity existed.  The company was lucky enough to have a large labor pool in India.  However, this did not solve the issue of collaborating on the project.

As many of us know, CAD files are big, especially when you are dealing with assemblies made up of thousands of parts.  They are too large to email in most cases, and opening them up from a remote server can take several hours.  Furthermore, making and sending multiple copies of these files to disparate locations can cause divergent data sources and destroy the ability to collaborate on a global project.

InFlow has assisted this customer in setting up a centralized PDMWorks Enterprise data vault in Wisconsin and replicated file vaults in both Wisconsin and India.  Using this methodology, the design intent can be formed in Wisconsin, working closely with the client; CAD files can be created, specs can be written, and data can be life-cycled through its change process.  When ready, files are replicated to the server in India, and the files can be updated while they are constantly connected to the database in Wisconsin.  All changes are recorded in real-time, and designers are not able to copy over each other’s work.  The files are replicated upon check-in from India, and updates are reviewed with the client at key project milestones. 

InFlow’s customer is now 6 months in to this project, and it is going extremely well.  It seems that working with InFlow turned out to be the “obvious” choice.

No one wants to buy PLM…Part 2 of an infinite series

I am a PLM sales person…and the title of this blog entry may imply that I am whining about my job. While I am not immune to the occasional emotional episode / mild tantrum, the title of this blog entry has a purpose. I assure you that this purpose has nothing to do with my emotional state.

Companies that contact InFlow are generally not looking to buy a PLM solution. Rather, they are looking to solve complex issues in their organization. Often times, the connection between the issue and the definition of PLM is somewhat cloudy. Therefore, my goal in this series is to discuss some of these challenges that InFlow has addressed with PLM and some of the measurable success that our customers have achieved.

"Reducing the number of pizza boxes on your desk"

…yes, this was a real problem for one of InFlow’s customers.

This customer could not easily track engineering changes throughout their organization. This company filled out a standard engineering change form and routed the form, stuffed in a manila envelope with accompanying drawings and documents, to the next reviewer/approver in the process. However, no one had any visibility as to who had the folder or how long it took him or her to get to the associated tasks.

To solve the issue of tracking where the change was in the approval process, this company bought a few pallets of large pizza boxes from a local restaurant. The manila folders were then glued to the bottom of the pizza box and routed inside the box. That way, anyone involved in the process could look around the facility at the desks that were cluttered by pizza boxes. Furthermore, it was a distraction (and somewhat of an embarrassment) to have a number of pizza boxes sitting on top of your desk, so there was additional incentive to address the change and move it on to the next person in line.

This idea worked…to a point. While it did speed the change process somewhat, the company was still unable to track the time that the change took in each department, discover methods to make the process more efficient, and someone was forced to scan all of the documents at the end of the process so that they could be filed on a server for future retrieval.

InFlow stepped in. Together, InFlow and its customer documented the existing change process and easily translated it in to an electronic workflow in Enovia SmarTeam PLM. This reduced the time the company spent in retrieving engineering changes by over 90% (from 2 days to 2 minutes). Since that time, the company has added over 30 workflow processes in to SmarTeam, creating a system that provides electronic notification, tracking, and history for processes such as, PPAP, Expense Reports, Vacation Requests, Corrective Actions, etc.

With less pizza boxes on their desks, this company is also helping to save paper. This in turn saves trees, which in turn make more oxygen, which in turn makes this a better world for all of us. So…is PLM the answer to the world’s environmental predicament? While there is no conclusive evidence, this PLM salesman believes it with all his heart.

PLM - What does it REALLY Mean?

What is PLM Really? It has been defined and redefined by the marketing departments of many companies. The definitions chosen depend on the definer. The ERP (MRP II (MRP)) companies like to push PLM in the BOM direction, a position of strength for them. The CAD companies lean toward the file management & workflow, topics more in their wheelhouse. Personally, I think the term has been rendered useless. So, I will bravely step into the void left by so much marketing effort on three little letters and declare, with apologies to our president, "I am the definer". What can I hurt at this point?

Product Lifecycle Management (PLM)

The way in which a specific organization manages the definition of the products and processes that, in turn, define the organization from product conception, to end of life is that organizations PLM system.

PLM is NOT:

• Software
• A product

 PLM IS:

• As unique as the organization.
• As unique as the people who make the system work.
• ALWAYS changing as the individuals that make the system work change in their knowledge and behavior.

 PLM can be changed by:

• Changing the knowledge and behavior of the people who make it work, for better or worse.

Every product driven organization has a PLM system. Some are good, some are bad. Some are completely manual, some are automated. Some are effective, some are ineffective, but EVERY product driven organization has a PLM system.

How do you affect positive change in your PLM system? Improve knowledge and/or change behavior to make the PLM system more efficient. How that can be done is the topic for next time.

No one wants to buy PLM…Part 1 of an infinite series

I am a PLM sales person…and the title of this blog entry may imply that I am whining about my job. While I am not immune to the occasional emotional episode / mild tantrum, the title of this blog entry has a purpose. I assure you that this purpose has nothing to do with my emotional state.

Companies that contact InFlow are generally not looking to buy a PLM solution. Rather, they are looking to solve complex issues in their organization. Often times, the connection between the issue and the definition of PLM is somewhat cloudy. Therefore, my goal in this series is to discuss some of these challenges that InFlow has addressed with PLM and some of the measurable success that our customers have achieved.

"Creating a platform for centralized purchasing"

One of our largest customers came to us before they decided to consolidate 12 locations on a new ERP platform. In the mean time, they desired a way to consolidate purchasing power. This company decided that by reporting on materials and parts that were being purchased for existing product, as well as those planned for newly developed products in all locations, they could receive deeper discounts and save a great deal of money.

In order to do this, InFlow has consolidated 8 (soon to be all 12) of the locations in to a single SmarTeam PLM database. The company has not yet established a central purchasing group. However, when this is established, they will have the power to search all existing engineering projects, plan more appropriately for inventory levels, and negotiate greater discounts with its suppliers.