Page 1 - Welcome Page 2 - Update Page 3 - News Page 4 - Brief lines |
* Welcome * Welcome to 2PLM, an e-zine distributed about every two weeks. This issue includes :
(1.1 Global Products and You) Global Products offer the opportunity of billions of customers, greatly increased sales and vastly increased profits. But, from the above questions, it appears that developing and supporting products worldwide may not be as easy as talking about billions of dollars. There's an awesome number of questions to answer. Apart from all those questions, what if something goes wrong? If something does go wrong, billions of potential customers could hear about it, billions of dollars could be lost, and large numbers of people could lose their jobs. For example, the whole world seemed to hear that, in 2006, Airbus had a problem with the development of its A380 aircraft. In June 2006, the share price of EADS, which had been close to 36 euros in March 2006, dropped under 20 euros. The problem was the delivery date for the A380. In July 2000, Airbus had announced that first deliveries to customers would take place in the last quarter of 2005. In October 2006, Airbus announced that the first Airbus A380 series aircraft would be delivered in the second half of 2007 - two years late. The A380 is a Global Product. At first glance, Airbus looks European. EADS is headquartered in Schiphol, The Netherlands. Airbus has major facilities in Toulouse, France and Hamburg, Germany. However, in 2005 the US was the leading supplier country to Airbus - with $8.5 billion of parts, components, tooling and services. And the first A380 delivery was expected to be for an Asian airline, Singapore Airlines. And an Australian airline, Qantas, was near the top of the delivery list. The problem with the A380 occurred well into the development project. However, problems with global products can occur even earlier in their lives, for example during their specification. An example is the Airbus A350. Its commercial launch was in December 2004. At that time, it was expected to enter service in 2010. The initial specification was based on an extension to an existing aircraft, which implied rapid availability and a relatively low development cost. However, in view of limited interest from potential customers, an aircraft with a new design, the A350 XWB (Extra Wide Body), was proposed in 2006. Entry into service was announced for 2013, three years later than previously expected. Problems can also occur during product manufacture. For example, in 2006, computer makers such as Apple Computer, Dell, Hitachi, Lenovo and Toshiba announced the replacement of Sony-made lithium-ion batteries that could overheat in certain circumstances and pose a safety risk. Problems with products can involve big numbers. In October 2003, Nissan Motor Company said it would recall 2.55 million cars at an estimated cost of 15-16 billion yen ($138-148 million) due to an engine defect. In November 2003, Chrysler recalled 438,000 Jeep Libertys due to a suspension problem. Problems can also occur at product end-of-life. For example, the French Ministry of Defence had problems in 2005 and 2006 with Q790, previously known as the Clemenceau, an aircraft carrier launched in 1957 and taken out of service in 1997. Dismantling the hull for scrap was never going to be easy. It was known that there was a large amount of asbestos on board - variously estimated at between 50 and 250 tons. (Asbestos has interesting properties - long fibres, strength, resistance to heat and fire, etc. It was widely used in the early twentieth century until it became clear that inhaling it was dangerous, and could lead to mesothelioma and other diseases.) A failed attempt to dismantle Q790 in Turkey was followed by a decision to dismantle it in India. As a result, Q790 left Toulon in France at the end of 2005 to be broken up at Alang in India. Several weeks later it was refused entry to India. Q790 was then towed 10,000 miles back to France. It berthed in Brest in May 2006, awaiting a decision about its future. At the other end of the scale from an aircraft carrier are all sorts of shapes, sizes and colours of solids, liquids and vapors produced by the pharmaceutical industry. Merck voluntarily withdrew VIOXX, an arthritis and acute pain medication, in September 2004 because a trial had shown an increased relative risk for cardiovascular events. There were millions of users worldwide. VIOXX had been launched in 1999 and marketed in more than 80 countries. If products don't meet the rules and regulations laid down by government and international authorities, there can also be problems. For example, in 2001, authorities in the Netherlands found that some peripherals for a game console contained cadmium levels above the Dutch limits. Sony Corp. temporarily halted shipment. The estimated impact on sales was about 100 million euros. Coca-Cola rates high on most lists of corporations with Global Products. Another type of product-related problem was highlighted in 2006 when it was announced that the FBI had thwarted an attempt to steal and sell Coca-Cola's trade secrets, apparently including information about a new product. While the above examples of problems with Global Products got widespread publicity, others may only be noticed by a few people. I travel a lot, so I get the opportunity to see a lot of Global Products at work. Quite a lot don't work well - coffee machines in hotel rooms, hotel elevators, electronic keys for hotel room doors, sensor-operated doors on buses, toilet-door locks on trains, vending machines, rental cars that unexpectedly stop working, aircraft that don't start, aircraft that hit another object while being towed to take-off, jetways that don't extend, aircraft seats that should recline but don't, etc. But those are trivial problems compared to some others. For example, you probably saw the pictures of NASA's Columbia Space Shuttle breaking up during re-entry on 1 February 2003. That was the second Space Shuttle disaster. If you were born before 1980, you may remember seeing the first disaster, on the morning of 28 January 1986, when the Challenger Space Shuttle was destroyed 73 seconds after launch. The crew included Christa McAuliffe, who was to have been the first teacher in space. On 25 July 2000, the crew of an Air France Concorde noticed a loss of power and a fire under the left wing soon after take-off from Paris. The aircraft went out of control and crashed onto a hotel. Problems don't just occur with high-tech products such as aircraft and space shuttles. They also occur with apparently basic products such as cattle feed. It's thought that the BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy) epidemic in the UK in the 1990s originated when an animal developed BSE in the 1970s. The carcase of the animal was mixed into cattle feed. Animals that ate the feed were infected. In turn, their carcases were mixed into cattle feed and infected others. The deaths went more or less unnoticed until 1986 when the disease, also known as Mad Cow Disease, was identified. BSE cases in the UK rose from a few hundred in 1987 to over 35,000 in 1993. Millions of animals were slaughtered, and the European Union banned UK exports until 1998. Some of the examples mentioned above are high profile and got global publicity. Many others are only known to a few people. For example, one company I worked with wanted to buy a batch of machines. The order was worth a few million dollars, and it took more than a year for the project team to decide exactly what they wanted. Eventually they ordered. "Sorry", said the manufacturer, "we can't deliver from that two-year-old product catalogue. We adopted Japanese manufacturing techniques and have Kanban and Zero Stock of machines. We don't even have the parts to make the machines you want. We purchased them, and the supplier doesn't make them any more." Another company I work with did receive the brand-new high-tech machine it ordered from another continent, only to find that it didn't work. Somehow there had been a mix-up concerning the hardware components of the machine and the software controlling them. Apparently, the version of the software that was delivered didn't work with the hardware that was delivered. By chance, in a restaurant one evening, I met the service engineer sent to fix the problem. He told me that he was on the road every week fixing similar problems. The customers wanted customized products, but his company hadn't implemented the systems to make sure all the parts for a specific order fitted together. What worried him even more was that, when he filed an error report about a part, it took more than a year before the problem was fixed. During that time, the plant went on making the wrong parts and Logistics delivered them to customers. And he had to go and fix them and pretend he didn't know what was wrong. The above examples show that problems can occur at any time in the life of a product. Sometimes the problem occurs while the product is being developed, sometimes while the product is being manufactured, sometimes while it is being used. Sometimes the problem occurs while the product is in conception, just an idea. Sometimes it happens at the end of the product's life. Making sure that such problems don't occur for Global Products is a major challenge. * 1.7 Mixed Fortunes * Global Product: Strategy, Product Lifecycle Management and the Billion Customer Question 
* 1.4 Implementing PLM * (1.3 The Need for PLM ) If a company decides to implement PLM and get control of its products across the lifecycle, where does it start? The first steps towards implementing PLM are to understand what it's all about, and that there are many ways in which it can be implemented. Different companies focus on different parts of the product lifecycle, and many different strategies are possible. A feasibility study should be carried out to find out what type of approach, and what level of response, is appropriate:
If an enterprise-wide initiative is proposed, then the first step will be to develop and communicate a Vision of the proposed new environment so that everyone knows where they are going. The following step will be to define a Strategy to achieve the Vision. Then a plan has to be developed to implement the strategy. Once the plan has been implemented, the benefits can be harvested. If there isn't the need for an enterprise-wide initiative, then the Vision, and even the strategy, may not be needed. In all cases though, a plan will be needed to show what has to happen, when it should happen, and who does what to make it happen. Often the feasibility study will highlight the need to :
* 1.5 Responsibility for PLM * Product Lifecycle Management: Paradigm for 21st Century Product Realisation |
