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www.johnstark.com |
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Corporate planning's ivory tower Full implementation of EDM/PDM will take many years and affect many functions and people. It will cost a lot of money, and should bring a lot of benefits. With these characteristics, it will have to be included in corporate budgets and investment plans. Anyone hoping to implement EDM/PDM had better get some support from the corporate planners. This will not be easy. Many corporate planners have little hands-on experience of what happens throughout the product life cycle, so it's unlikely that they will instinctively support EDM/PDM. It may well be that their only job in the company will have been in the Corporate Planning Department. They might even have joined it after getting their MBA. Perhaps they won't have gone on any 'Introduction to the Company' courses that are on offer. They may have little idea of what the company is, who the customers are, what the products are, or the processes that a product goes through from its conception to its use by a customer. Instead, they will have a spread-sheet view of the company - here are the costs, here are the sales, add some market share figures, some inflation figures, some market growth, some tax rates, and look! By year 3, we will have increased our profits. If we were now to merge our figures with those of Company Y, then we would increase our profits even more. Let's acquire Company Y. This kind of behavior, focusing on mergers, acquisitions, speculation and asset trading, to the exclusion of operations, is often detrimental to operational performance. In recent years there has been a trend towards rotating seasoned business executives through the corporate planning department. Overall, this is a positive change. However, since these individuals have a wide range of backgrounds, ambitions, levels of enthusiasm, and willingness to get involved, as a group they do not show clearly defined behavioral characteristics. It is often difficult to get traditional corporate planners to understand the actual difficulties involved in doing something, or to understand the effects of something as difficult as defining the benefits of 'better control of engineering information'. These are head-in-the-clouds planners, not feet-on-the-ground doers. The seasoned business executives now coming into corporate planning departments are more likely to have their feet on the ground, but are often heavily influenced by past experience. However, if you want to implement EDM/PDM, you have to understand the corporate planners, and find ways to get them to support the EDM/PDM project. This often means understanding their preferred plans, and then aligning the benefits of EDM/PDM with these. It also means closely relating the expenses of EDM/PDM to improved corporate performance. The tough life of the top manager The top manager, running a functional department such as Engineering or Manufacturing, lives in the real world, and is expected to produce instant results. If you talk to top managers about benefits of EDM/PDM appearing in two or three year's time, they will not show much interest. They are often so busy working at day-to-day problems they can not get involved in long-term issues. Their primary concern is to meet the short-term targets set for them by corporate management or by their CEO. At the corporate level, the right objectives may be set for the overall organization. Unfortunately, these may not be translated into lower-level targets that fit together and reinforce each other. Of course, corporate managers and senior business unit managers want to reduce costs, reduce lead times and improve quality, but they don't always translate these requirements into orchestrated targets for top functional managers. As a result, the top managers play as soloists. They don't have control of other functions, so they try to find solutions within their own departments. They will each react differently to a proposal for EDM/PDM. A possible result of corporate management's intention to reduce costs, reduce lead times and improve quality could be that a TQM VP will be recruited. This new function is set up almost as an independent department, although its objective can only be to improve quality in and between existing departments. The TQM VP will be supportive of EDM/PDM as it helps improve quality, but often, lacking a power base and real authority, may not be a key player. The Marketing Department will react to corporate management's directive by identifying more finely segmented niche markets and the corresponding products. They can claim to be listening to the voice of the customer and, 'like the Japanese', customizing the product line. At the same time they will grumble about lengthy product development cycles, and the inability of the sales force to actually sell the products. Marketing is unlikely to be supportive of EDM/PDM as they will probably see it as a tool to suppress their creative abilities. The Engineering Department hears a mixture of messages. Corporate management is telling it to reduce costs, improve quality and reduce lead times. At the same time, it has to meet the product development target dates in the corporate plan. It is faced with a marketing demand for many new products. As the individual requirements of the different requests are different or even contradictory, Engineering has to walk a fine tight rope. It focuses on what it thinks is most important and most likely to be used by corporate management to measure its performance, and looks for ways to play down the other issues, or to pass them on to others. Probably there will be one or two key products that must be produced on time and to specification. Most of the effort will go on these. To show corporate management that serious steps are being taken, the engineering organization chart will be redrawn and some new operating procedures introduced. Marketing and customers will be blamed for not providing full specifications, and for continually changing specifications, and Manufacturing for not being capable of producing the products that have been defined. If all else fails, the Engineering Department can achieve the target of reducing lead times by releasing unfinished work to Manufacturing. Of course, this will come back later in the form of rework, but since no one will have set a target for reduction of engineering changes, hopefully this will go unnoticed by corporate management. Involved daily in this environment, the Engineering VP may not be interested in the future benefits of EDM/PDM. The Manufacturing VP will claim to have been set the objectives of reducing costs and improving manufacturing productivity, and can not see how these targets can be achieved by better management of engineering data. After all, that should be the responsibility of the Engineering Department. This key user of engineering data is unlikely to be, at least in public, a strong supporter of EDM/PDM. In private, the Manufacturing VP may admit that anything that gives some control over the Engineering organization and engineering data can not be wholly bad. |