It is no longer enough to improve what you have. You have to be innovative both when it comes to your product offering and how you do business. So how does PLM fit into this?
The Innovation Evangelista
“Optimizing business processes and products has been the way to improve margins, and companies and managers are fairly good at making this by improving efficiency and productivity.
Nowadays change has to be done through innovation to create new business value on corporate level.
If you look at companies today and their ambitious goals, and you break down these goals to what you need to achieve you will find that in many places it’s not enough to optimize the current setup of the business. To achieve the goals, you need to make business innovation part of the strategy on corporate level.
Optimizing already made investments will look like a safe bet. But it will not be enough to ensure that you will meet your strategic goals. It has to be the top managers business to make the company shift focus from optimizing resources to change management and business and product innovation, and to find a healthier balance between optimization and innovation to meet the world of today.
There was a time when change within a company was gradual and that you could take them step-by-step within the boundaries of a department. This is not the case anymore…”
The Digital Transformer Evangelista
“IT transformation must be on the managements agenda and seen as an enterprise initiative.
Both simplification and focus is required to deliver the flexibility that digitalization is aiming to achieve. Without it you will lose important business agility.
Digital transformation will also allow you to scale your business as well as experiment on large scale through the usage of feedback enabled by Internet of things and big data analytics.
You need to proactively invest in technology and people, as well as being aware of startups and what is going on.
Make sure to stop fueling “shadow IT” initiatives. This will allow you to push resources towards initiatives which move your organization in the direction stated by your transformation strategy.”
Digital transformation will also allow you to scale your business as well as experiment on large scale through the usage of feedback enabled by Internet of things and big data analytics.
You need to proactively invest in technology and people, as well as being aware of startups and what is going on.
Make sure to stop fueling “shadow IT” initiatives. This will allow you to push resources towards initiatives which move your organization in the direction stated by your transformation strategy.”
So what's this have to do with PLM?
You might have heard all this before and it’s perhaps not new to you but how does it relate to PLM?
I will not go into product innovation strategies and the different trends that you ought to explore because you probably know better than I what is disrupting and trending in your particular business.
Instead we will focus on the affect it has on the way one should mold a PLM system landscape and its strategies?
- Modularize your application(s) so that it can be seen more as a set of capabilities, giving you a healthy flexibility through well-defined interfaces
- Make sure to implement processes and practices on the right level so that you don’t get limited by it (blog)
- Make sure that the challenges are on the managers agenda and that your PLM strategies are on enterprise level; giving you the mandate and the right focus (blog)
- Make sure to have focus on enabling collaboration and feedback loops
- Focus on the consumers of information by making your data available
- Keep benchmarking your business, processes and tool support. Get inspired by others within and outside your industries as well as the consumer world (blog)
- Make sure to use the right technology; suiting your purpose and your path ahead. You need to be aware of disruption and evolution in technology as this can enable your future journey
- Have operational analytics feeding back to your product lifecycle processes (development, procurement, manufacturing, logistics, service), allowing users to make well founded decisions (blog) as well as improving the way you work (blog)
- Make sure that information about your product in the field are fed back to you. Knowing how your products are used is an excellent source for further innovation. You need to have an ear to the ground to listen to what the consumers are saying and doing with your products.
- Have your organization setup for continuous business improvements, and make sure that this is reflected in your processes and tools.
- Implementing PLM is not a one-time thing. It is something that should be a continuous development independent if you look at it as a tool, process or mindset. It’s a journey! (blog)
Summary
Recognizing the bullets? Once again the stars are pointing us towards the same direction. Only this time they are called innovation and digitalization.
Can’t remember who kicked the dust of this quote by Jack Welch, but I read it recently and for me it resonates well with what we need to have in mind at all time when we embark on the PLM journey because that is the reality of today:
“Change before you have to...”
If you understand that the business you support is dictated by this, you will be better suited to make the PLM system something that actually supports the business without holding you back and allowing you to take on new business opportunities. PLM systems should be flexible to adjust to business changes. Too often systems are cementing the current way of working. Instead they should be managed with continuous change in mind – both processes and IT tools.
Robert Wallerblad
