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* Welcome * Welcome to this issue of 2PLM, an e-zine distributed every two weeks on a free subscription basis. This week's lead article Product Information Disorder (PID) is from Menno Huijben. But first a few words about developing a PLM Strategy. * PLM Strategy * A recent issue of 2PLM asked readers about PLM Strategy Development. In reply to the question, "Do you expect an overall PLM Strategy (addressing multiple components - such as applications, processes, techniques, interfaces, data - across the product lifecycle) will be of use to (or needed by) your organization before the end of 2006?", all those replying answered "Yes". In reply to the question, "When your organization decides to develop its PLM Strategy, will lack of resources (e.g. key people already overloaded, funding not foreseen in budget) slow it down?", 82% replied "Yes". In reply to the question, "If your organization is developing, or planning to develop, or will need to develop, a PLM Strategy, would you like to know more about our knowledge- and experience-based approach to PLM Strategy generation?", 48% replied that they would. (The others mentioned various reasons, e.g., they already had a PLM Strategy, had started developing one, had an internal strategy group, ..). We will be in contact with people answering "Yes" to this question to tell them more about the knowledge-based, experience-based approach we are building. We started developing this approach because we see many companies failing to make their expected progress with PLM. Typically, they are faced with several product-related issues (e.g., engineering change management, product innovation, product configurator, product catalog, field failure reporting, etc.) which they try to solve individually, but would be better solved in the context of an overall integrated PLM Strategy. However, as they have difficulties to find the resources to develop a PLM Strategy, they don't develop one. So they try to solve the issues separately, but fail because the issues are intertwined. Often, the result is that the project manager or the application is blamed. One way out of this, that we are working on, is to develop a new lower-resource approach to developing PLM Strategy. Our objective is to build and refine this approach by working with a small number of companies to help them develop their PLM Strategy at low cost. A strategy resulting from this approach should be as good as, or better than, a strategy developed with the traditional approach. The accompanying report and presentation will also be of high quality. If you did not reply to the questions, but expect your company will need to develop a PLM strategy before the end of 2006, and could be interested in a fast, low-resource approach, please contact John Stark. * Product Information Disorder (PID) * Thinking about how to make the business case for PLM, I noted that PLM should increase the degree of order (or reduce the degree of disorder) in an organization. Vaguely recalling some lessons at school in which I was taught something about entropy being a measure of disorder, I thought about developing a business case linking PLM and Entropy. Googling the definition of Entropy, I found the website http://www.entropysite.com/ where I was reminded about the second law of thermodynamics, and that entropy is a measure of the dispersal of energy as a function of temperature (thus not a measure of disorder). Although PLM projects require a lot of energy and PLM discussions can sometimes become very heated, I realized that the subject of my PLM business case should perhaps be the 'Degree of Product Information Disorder', and this could be measured for an organization as the total amount of:
I decided it didn't matter as long as it was a unit relevant for the business and its products. I realized that if I aimed for a percentage then the unit of measure would disappear. And to get a percentage I would divide the 'Amount of Disordered Product Information' by the 'Optimal Amount of Product Information' - the total amount of Product Information required to manage a product, as profitably as possible, through its entire lifecycle. This would give me the 'Product Information Disorder percentage (PID%)'. But what should the PID% be? 
That's a difficult question. To answer it, I'd have to take into consideration factors such as:
I began to see that PID% might not, for the time being, be a very exact indicator. However, it can still be used as a subjective indicator to support the PLM business case. Focusing on the potential for reducing the 'Amount of Disordered Product Information' I saw it can be achieved two ways. 1) Reducing the amount of:
2) Reducing the 'Amount of Product Information' by business process- and product-reengineering activities. This would involve looking at the product lifecycle from a product data perspective, and asking questions such as 'What information should be available when and for whom?' Assessing, defining and making use of a company's PID% will help you to make the PLM business case (and perhaps we should reserve the Entropy Factor for expressing the energy levels and temperature of the PLM project ... ). |
