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Unfortunately for those wanting to implement EDM/PDM, there are many people in the company who will not understand why EDM/PDM is necessary. Among those who won't understand, there will be many whose support is essential to implementation of any long-term, cross-functional computer-based system that will have significant effects on company performance and organization. Those who may have difficulty in understanding the need for EDM/PDM will probably include corporate management, corporate planners, top management, engineering management and other engineering staff and IT professionals. Their reactions to talk of EDM/PDM will include:
Understanding before implementing The mountain facing anyone wanting to implement EDM/PDM is not the Implementation Mountain. It's the Understanding Mountain. Many of the people whose support is necessary, and who control the resources needed for success, just don't understand. Their level of understanding will be close to 0%, and it will take many months, or even years, to get it to a level where they will become supportive. It's not possible to implement EDM/PDM without support throughout the company. It's not possible to go it alone. EDM/PDM is cross-functional. It is as much an organizational approach as a technological approach, and it needs positive involvement from many levels of people in many functions. A local, go-it-alone approach in one function will generate extra costs without providing the hoped-for benefits. The only approach that will succeed in the long-term is to fully understand the issues and convert the skeptics, and then implement across all functions. As a first step, it may be possible for one department to implement a prototype addressing one specific EDM/PDM problem, but this should be seen only as a local, short-term demonstration of potential capability. Incomprehension The exact reasons for the initial lack of understanding will differ from one company to another, but the basic causes are usually fairly similar. Many are due to the departmental organization in which people become so focused on their small part of the company that they are unable to understand wider issues. Others are due to people failing to understand the value of information. The importance of information varies from industry to industry. In the development of new chemical entities in the pharmaceutical industry, the information is almost as important as the drug itself, since it has to be approved by the FDA before the drug can be marketed. In the aerospace industry, traceability is essential. In the automotive industry, if a car manufacturer doesn't maintain information on which airbag is fitted in which car, it may have to recall many more cars than necessary should an airbag fault occur. If design information is available for re-use, it may be possible to reuse it and thus reduce design time. If it is not available, then tasks that have already been carried out once may have to be repeated, and valuable time wasted. Information must be given its proper value, and treated as a valuable corporate resource, otherwise it soon becomes worthless. The reader will find many people in the company who underestimate the value of information. Corporate management - a different wavelength In large corporations, corporate management clearly has a role to play. Focused on the long-term, it plays its textbook role of setting directions, objectives, strategies, organizational structures, plans and budgets. Corporate managers also play a role as leaders of the company, acting as figureheads for employees, shareholders and customers. Once corporate management has set the targets, the market plays its role, and corporate management has to wait to see the results of its chosen strategy. It can then decide whether to continue in the same direction or to change course. Provided that corporate management plays its textbook role, and either maintains its understanding of the product life cycle, or completely delegates the management of the product life cycle, there is no intrinsic reason for it not to be supportive of EDM/PDM. Many large corporations have been shifting much of the responsibility for business unit strategies and objectives to the senior management of individual business units, while focusing the corporate management role on overall capital, resource and return management. One of the objectives of this switch is to give business unit responsibility to senior business unit managers who should understand their customers, products and processes. However it is not infrequent for corporate management to fail to play its correct role, or to fail to delegate sufficient responsibility to the business unit managers. In such cases, it often pays little attention to the product life cycle, yet fails to clearly delegate product life cycle responsibility. The resulting environment is unlikely to be favorable for the EDM/PDM debate. Similar problems can also occur in business units if senior managers play a traditional corporate management role, and not the expected business unit management role. |