Book summary “Product Lifecycle Management”: summary

Introduction

You face mounting pressure as product complexity, global competition, and strict regulations stretch your engineering and manufacturing operations to their limits. Information gets trapped in disconnected silos, leading to costly rework, physical waste, and missed market windows.

Michael Grieves demonstrates in Product Lifecycle Management that you can eliminate this waste by substituting digital information for physical prototypes, materials, and energy across every stage of a product's existence.

This book provides a comprehensive framework to manage product creation from initial concept through manufacturing, customer use, and eventual retirement. You will discover how to build collaborative product environments, implement digital manufacturing, and design enterprise strategies that align people, processes, and technology.

• How do you construct a single version of product truth across your organization?
• What distinguishes enterprise resource planning from product lifecycle management?
• How can digital simulation prevent physical waste on the factory floor?
• What steps ensure a successful product lifecycle management strategy?

1. Introduction and Core Principles of PLM

Product Lifecycle Management extends lean thinking beyond the factory floor by managing product information digitally across its entire existence.

Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) is the digital management of product information across its entire existence. While lean manufacturing eliminates waste specifically on the factory floor, PLM uses computers, software, and simulations to eliminate waste across design, manufacture, support, and final disposal. It replaces expensive physical atoms with inexpensive information bits.

Information Substitution

Information systems reduce costs by substituting the use of information for the inefficient and wasted use of time, energy, and material. Physical creation eventually requires moving atoms, but information can replace the waste caused by execution errors and the lack of proper data.

Golf carts equipped with a GPS computer screen instantly display yardages and course hazards. You bypass the time and physical energy needed to hunt for yardage markers or drive ahead to survey the green.

T.P. Wright observed in 1936 that airplane production costs fall as units increase. This follows an 80 percent learning curve where unit costs decrease by 20 percent for every doubling of production units.

Gordon Moore observed that microprocessor computing capability doubles every 18 months. Storage densities and internet bandwidth follow similarly rapid compounding trajectories. Intel's first microprocessor, the 4004 released in 1971, contained 2,250 transistors. The Montecito processor scheduled for 2005 features 1.7 billion transistors.

The Grieves Test

A physical object is successfully virtualized when a human interrogator cannot distinguish between the actual object and its computer representation. The Grieves Test proposes visual and performance standards where computers imitate the physical environment rather than human thought.

Organizational activities exist on a spectrum from deterministic processes to fuzzy art. You must manage this continuum carefully when you deploy new systems.

• Move practices to processes where possible by making tacit information explicit.
• Ensure that PLM will enable and facilitate practices to make them more productive by presenting the right information when it is needed based on search characteristics and contextual situations.

2. Constructing PLM and Its Threads

New system concepts and enterprise acronyms are socially constructed through the consensus and adoption of multiple industry constituencies. The Gartner Group introduced the Enterprise Resource Planning acronym as part of a research report initiative by building upon older Material Requirements Planning concepts.

PLM combines people, processes, and technology around a central product information core while complementing enterprise resource planning systems.

Product Lifecycle Management is an information-driven approach encompassing all aspects of a product's existence from initial design to final disposal. Eighty percent of the cost structure of a product is defined at the requirements definition and engineering stage of a new product's development. Ford Motor Company defined PLM through its C3P initiative as the science of bringing processes, methods, and tools together across traditional and geographic boundaries from inception to end of service life.

You must handle these core practices:

• Treat PLM as about product data, information, and knowledge.
• Address the entire life of the product from inception to end-of-life.
• Treat PLM as an approach that is more than software or processes.
• Cross functional, geographical, and organizational boundaries.
• Combine elements of people in action (practices or methods), processes, and technology.
• Drive the next generation of lean thinking.

The Historical Threads

Computer Aided Design forms the geometric heart of PLM by providing precise math-based representations of physical products. General Motors uses a power wall in its design studio to display life-size representations of cars built entirely from math-based descriptions. Engineering Data Management associates non-geometric characteristics and structural bills of materials with the product's math-based geometry. Product Data Management developed as an electronic repository to organize and catalog the proliferation of CAD and EDM files. Computer Integrated Manufacturing pioneered the premise that information should be shared across functional areas between engineering and manufacturing.

PLM Versus ERP

PLM and ERP are complementary systems where PLM manages the product domain of knowledge across all functions, while ERP manages transaction-based production and sales. At the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, the ERP system handles production on a transaction basis, while any information about the product must be created and contained within the PLM system.

3. Characteristics of PLM

Traditional functional organization structures create isolated information silos that lead to duplicative, ad hoc, and inconsistent product data, causing massive wastes of time, energy, and materials.

Successful PLM requires singularity, correspondence, cohesion, traceability, reflectiveness, and cued availability to eliminate information silos.

On September 23, 1999, NASA lost the $125 million Mars Climate Orbiter because propulsion instructions used English units while spacecraft systems used metric units, causing it to burn longer and crash or drift.

The Information Mirroring Model

The Information Mirroring Model is a conceptual framework that organizes product data by product rather than by functional area, linking real-world physical space with virtual simulation spaces. You can substitute bits for atoms, running simulations and viewing product information without needing proximity to the physical object.

Key System Characteristics

Singularity requires having one unique and socially agreed-upon controlling version of product data across an enterprise to prevent conflicting edits and wasted work. Gustave Eiffel relied on a single set of drawings hanging on the wall of his office for the Eiffel Tower as the controlling reference.

Correspondence is the tight linkage between a physical object and its corresponding digital data, eliminating the need to inspect physical assets to understand their characteristics.

Cohesion ensures that different functional or abstract views of a product remain consistent with its physical structure so that logical changes automatically update physical implementations and vice versa.

Traceability is the ability to follow a product's history and developmental path seamlessly back to its exact origin to ensure teams build upon verified previous successes.

Reflectiveness provides the automated mechanism to update virtual space product information simultaneously or in a timely fashion whenever physical space attributes change.

Cued availability delivers the right product information and processes to users automatically when needed, based on operational context rather than manual searching. The Ford-Firestone rollover debacle saw tire failure warnings remain buried in unanalyzed warranty reports until hundreds of millions in damages and 174 deaths occurred.

4. The Environment Driving PLM

External and Internal Drivers

Over a thirty-year period from 1973 to 2003, major corporations experienced massive increases in scale. Information systems enabled this growth by substituting information for wasted time, energy, and material.

General Motors grew from $35 billion in 1973 to $186 billion in 2003. Ford grew from $23 billion to $164 billion. General Electric grew from $12 billion to $134 billion. Wal-Mart grew from $126 million to $255 billion.

External pressures of scale, product complexity, shrinking cycle times, globalization, and regulation make PLM a boardroom necessity.

Product complexity exploded through diverse model offerings and programmable software. Automobile models grew from 140 in the 1970s to 260 in the 1990s. SUVs grew from 8 to 38 models. Running shoes jumped from 5 to 285 models, breakfast cereals from 160 to 340, and contact lenses from 1 to 36 models. Car software lines of code increased from 1 million in 1990 to 100 million by 2010.

Shrinking development cycle times eliminate operational slack. Automotive design cycles dropped from seven years down to two to three years. Globalization forces you to use distributed teams that follow the sun across continents.

Government regulations force manufacturers to take full lifecycle responsibility. The European Union End of Life Vehicle directive requires 85 percent vehicle weight recovery by 2006 and 95 percent by 2015. It prohibited lead, mercury, cadmium, and hexavalent chromium on July 1, 2003. The TREAD Act passed on November 1, 2000, and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act passed in 2002.

The IT Value Map

Internal drivers focus on productivity, innovation, collaboration, and quality. Automotive suppliers face continuous pressure to deliver annual price decreases of 5 percent.

The IT Value Map illustrates how information technology creates value by tracing its impact on income and assets.

You must prove that capital expenditures increase revenue or decrease costs. Different software initiatives target specific operational areas:

• Lean Manufacturing decreases manufacturing costs.
• ERP acts as a manufacturing and sales cost-reducer.
• CRM attempts a race between revenue growth and data costs.
• PLM impacts all functional areas across both revenue and cost dimensions.

5. PLM Elements

People, processes, and technology must align carefully so that information technology enables rather than automated inefficiency.

Implementing information technology without first developing processes leads to automated inefficiency and low return on investment. Organizations often view technology as a cure-all for poor, ad hoc processes. Automating poorly defined processes merely forces superficial consistency.

Toyota successfully utilizes a low technology approach combined with relentlessly improved processes in its Total Production System, using simple kanban cards while shaving years from its design and engineering cycle.

People and Change Capacity

An individual's capability to execute tasks is determined by experience, education, training, and support. Experience trades information for wasted time, but duration does not equal true expertise if a worker performs repetitive tasks for many years. Some people with 30 years' experience really have 1 year's experience for 30 years in some stagnant job roles.

John Seeley Brown observed that copier repair technicians solving ambiguous problems went to coffee breaks, which served as rich interpersonal support and diagnostic practice rather than wasted time.

People have a finite capacity for change driven by limited attention span and cumulative initiative loads. Driving a stretch of highway while talking on a mobile phone leaves little to no recall of surroundings compared to driving without a phone.

Processes, Practices, and Technology

Processes are structured and algorithmic, whereas practices are messy and judgmental. A Fortune 50 company CIO described practices by stating that they provide information and then leave room to let the magic happen.

You must build deep understanding and appropriate infrastructure before deploying software.

To succeed in PLM, you must follow specific practices:

• Have a deep, not stylized, understanding of actual processes
• Insure that processes are explicitly defined and not tacit
• Re-engineer processes for a digital environment
• Integrate processes across the organization

High school civics flowcharts showing how a bill becomes a law bear only a cursory resemblance to how legislation actually passes in practice.

PLM technology requires an adequate infrastructure and open applications. You must rely on configuration instead of customization. General Motors reduced 100,000 lines of custom code down to under 20,000 lines of code at General Motors by incorporating software configurations.

6. Collaborative Product Development

Collaborative Product Development is the initial stage of PLM that captures and organizes all product information to create a single shared view. By coordinating requirements, geometry, specifications, and manufacturing processes, cPD eliminates wasted time and materials spent on outdated versions or reconciling incompatible product views.

Collaborative product development establishes the digital foundation by linking requirements, geometry, and bills of material.

Maintaining strict linkages between product requirements and specifications prevents function creep and costly functional trade-offs later. Jet fighter short takeoff and landing transition times must consistently take one to three seconds, a stopping distance for an automobile at 100 kilometers per hour must not exceed 40 meters, and pacemakers must mimic natural heart rhythms.

Vaulting and Part Reuse

Enforcing singularity of information via sequential part numbers linked to centralized data repositories replaces problematic smart part numbers. Smart part numbers attempt to encode product characteristics into the digits, but they quickly become obsolete as permutations grow and differ across functions.

Engineering vaulting centralizes product information to drive part reuse and eliminate duplicate part creation across the enterprise. Start parts and smart parts capture organizational expertise and rules to accelerate new designs and minimize waste. General Electric uses smart parts for complex components like jet engine parts, embedding sophisticated rules about heat exchange, tensile strength, and nozzle diameters.

Virtual Testing and Environment

Virtual collaboration rooms provide global project teams with simultaneous visual communication and proactive workflow management. You can establish this capability by applying specific practices:

• Visually present the product simultaneously to all participants under the Grieves Visual Test condition.
• Maintain a project board listing development steps, status, and step responsibility.
• Capture changes to the product as development progresses to retain a history and audit trail.

Virtual testing simulates physical conditions using math-based product information to improve products at a fraction of the cost. Automotive companies use simulation for wind tunnel testing and crash testing, matching physical results while allowing component isolation and slow-motion analysis.

7. Digital Manufacturing

Digital Manufacturing uses PLM information across people, processes, and technology to minimize resource usage from the very first product onwards. You leverage computer technology to turn traditional manufacturing art into fully defined processes.

Digital manufacturing simulates factory floors, equipment, robotics, and worker ergonomics to eliminate physical ramp-up waste.

CIMdata research highlights specific improvements:

• 50 percent improvement in better understanding of requirements;
• 40 percent improvement in shortened manufacturing planning process;
• 65 percent reduction in number of design changes;
• 40 percent reduction in number of work stations;
• 35 percent reduction in more optimized material flow;
• 30 percent reduction in time-to-market.

Early Promise and Simulation

A Chrysler automotive plant successfully reduced its number of weld guns from 180 down to 17 using Digital Manufacturing simulation techniques. General Motors requires that every bid for new equipment include a digital representation to incorporate into its simulated factory.

Factory Flow and Quality

Nissan builds multiple dashboard variations on a single assembly line by using sequential lights on parts bins to guide workers. You capture as-built production data and audit trails to verify quality compliance.

8. Outside the Factory Door

Substantial costs accrue after a product leaves the factory door, shifting from traditional buyer liability to producer liability through contracts, laws, and regulations.

Extending PLM past manufacturing transforms warranty management, product liability defense, repair services, and recycling.

Historically, organizations stopped having liability once title was transferred to a reseller or user under caveat emptor. Today, legal and regulatory changes make producers responsible for operating costs, maintenance, harm done, disposal, and recycling. In 2004, warranty costs for U.S. manufacturers reached 20 billion dollars. Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Ford, and General Motors each saw warranty costs exceeding one billion dollars that year.

Quality in Use

Quality scrap occurs when products meet manufacturing specifications but fail in the field because underlying functional assumptions were flawed. True product quality is defined by whether a product performs successfully in actual use rather than merely meeting factory specifications.

Traceability provided by PLM serves as the primary legal defense against product liability claims and multimillion-dollar judgments. You can no longer rely on a strategy of ignorance regarding whether parts met specifications or were assembled properly.

Services and Disposal

Maintaining physical-to-virtual correspondence enables manufacturers to offer competitive repair services that detect issues before complete failures occur.

On the Joint Strike Fighter jet, computers immediately notify repair groups of problems in flight, allowing them to order exact replacement parts and execute repairs in a single efficient process upon landing.

General Motors offers continuous monitoring through their On-Star system, which detects status changes like airbag deployments. Regulatory changes will make product producers legally responsible for end-of-life recycling and disposal, requiring long-term access to PLM data.

9. Developing a PLM Strategy

People frequently confuse strategy with the goals and objectives they want to achieve, viewing strategic plans as a mix of targets and analysis rather than a clear path forward. You must separate your desired targets from the concrete actions required to reach them.

A successful PLM strategy requires a clear vision, realistic risk assessment, proper resource allocation, and strong leadership.

Strategy and Payback

You can build your plan by following these specific steps:

• Create a vision of the future.
• Perform a realistic assessment of where the organization is today.
• Design a plan of action to bridge the gap between current reality and the future vision.
• Allocate necessary capabilities and resources.

AMR Research outlines that short-term functional projects yield a 1-to-1 payback schedule, midterm projects return a 10-to-1 payback, and long-term enterprise strategies yield a massive 100-to-1 payback. Automotive suppliers face continuous pricing pressure, requiring a 5 percent decrease in cost every year.

Implementation Lessons

Resource allocation faces the Goldilocks Effect, where requesting either too much or too little funding damages the initiative.

You can guide your deployment by applying these core organizational success factors:

• Ensure top management is engaged, not just involved.
• Select project leaders who are veterans and team members who are decision makers.
• Use third parties to fill gaps in expertise and transfer knowledge.
• Ensure change management goes hand in hand with project management.
• Maintain a satisficing mindset.

Lear Corporation, a $13 billion automotive supplier, started its multi-million dollar corporate-wide PLM initiative as a Six Sigma project.

10. Readiness Assessment and Future Universe

Assessing infrastructure, people, processes, and maturity via frameworks like CMM prepares organizations for intelligent products and federated spaces.

Readiness Assessment

Computer and communications infrastructure is a hurdle issue in PLM readiness, meaning excess capacity adds no value while inadequate capacity causes system failure and user circumvention. If capacity falls short, you will see users employ coping strategies like complaining, entering minimal data, batching entry off-hours, or abandoning the system entirely.

At the 2003 University of Michigan AUTO e Conference, Dan McNichols outlined General Motors' approach to upgrading their infrastructure with a high-speed global data network and high-performance computers to support digital PLM environments.

You can ensure your technological foundation works by applying these practices:

• Assess the adequateness of current technology across computing capability, bandwidth capability, and storage capability.
• Check the scalability of the technology to avoid hitting upper saturation limits where performance degrades rapidly.
• Verify the modularity of the technology to allow adding capacity in small increments rather than massive step-function costs.
• Ensure the openness of the technology through interoperability, common data formats, or translators.

Readiness assessments must uncover undocumented informal systems and practice-developed processes, which are vulnerable to loss upon employee retirement. At a major manufacturing firm, a long-time employee monitored weather conditions and added a preservative chemical to the paint to prevent freezing during cold snaps. When he retired, batches froze because management was unaware of his informal process.

The Universe of Possibilities

Federated spaces weave individual shared virtual spaces into a single logical space. Physical products become increasingly intelligent by incorporating computers, sensors, and communication devices that update virtual counterparts.

A crime scene investigation team investigated a fatal hit-and-run where a young man changing a tire was struck. They traced the vehicle using paint samples and DMV records, then tapped into the SUV's internal system which had recorded an impact on the right front bumper and alerted the On-Star-like system.

Conclusion

Product Lifecycle Management ties together every phase of a product from initial creation to final disposal. You manage physical reality by controlling the digital information space that mirrors it across the entire enterprise.

Managing the product lifecycle digitally eliminates waste, drives collaboration, and aligns organizational processes around a single source of truth.

To implement these principles successfully, follow these practical rules:

1. Build a unified digital information core before investing in advanced applications or department-specific tools.
2. Align your people, business processes, and technology simultaneously rather than fixing one in isolation.
3. Establish traceability from initial customer requirements through final manufacturing and retirement.
4. Simulate manufacturing processes and factory environments digitally to eliminate physical ramp-up waste.
5. Extend your information space outside the factory door to capture value from service, maintenance, and recycling.
6. Assess your organizational maturity honestly before attempting enterprise-wide transformation.

10 Key Ideas

1. Product Lifecycle Management eliminates waste across a product's existence by substituting inexpensive digital information for physical prototypes, materials, and energy.
2. The Grieves Test establishes visual and performance standards where computers successfully virtualize physical objects so that an interrogator cannot distinguish between them.
3. The Information Mirroring Model links real-world physical space with virtual simulation spaces to organize product data by product rather than by functional area.
4. Achieving singularity requires maintaining one unique and socially agreed-upon controlling version of product data across the entire enterprise to prevent conflicting edits and wasted work.
5. The IT value map illustrates how information technology creates value by tracing its direct impact on both income and assets across functional areas.
6. Digital manufacturing simulates factory floors, equipment, robotics, and worker ergonomics to eliminate physical ramp-up waste before actual production begins.
7. Extending PLM past the factory floor transforms warranty management, product liability defense, repair services, and end-of-life recycling.
8. Assessing infrastructure as a hurdle issue prevents the user circumvention and system failures caused by inadequate computing capacity, bandwidth, or storage.
9. Assessing infrastructure, people, processes, and maturity via frameworks like CMM prepares organizations for intelligent products and federated spaces.
10. Physical products become increasingly intelligent by incorporating computers, sensors, and communication devices that continuously update their virtual counterparts.