IIoT, Small Data and PLM

Big Data and Internet of things is big (sorry about the pun). There is a lot of promise of golden opportunities and discussions on how to get to smart connected products and opening up new business opportunities. And a lot of anxiety among many smaller companies wondering how to approach this. A pragmatic approach and easier start can be small data within industrial IoT (IIoT).

Big Data and full blown IoT can be too intimidating and a too big step for smaller companies. Yet it is possible for them to enter the race without too high investment.

I am assuming that a PLM backbone with all product data is in place. PLM in context of IoT has been mentioned by for instance Beyond PLM and the Virtual Dutchman. There is also an excellent paper from HarvardBusiness School.

The companies that will have the easiest path here is the business to business companies that delivers physical products that are used by another company in a larger system of products. E.g. a conveyor belt that goes into a larger material transportation system. You have control of the conveyor belt while your customer manages the whole transportation system. If your conveyor belt can be a smart connected product we have IIoT.

A large portion of Big Data is unstructured information that you do not know clearly what you will use it for when you design your product. Small data is instead logical additional data sets that you define up front, you know how it is related to other information and you know what the purpose is.

“Small data connects people with timely, meaningful insights (derived from big data and/or “local” sources), organized and packaged – often visually – to be accessible, understandable, and actionable for everyday tasks”

Making a “dumb” product into a slightly smart connected product can give you very powerful information. Define up front what (small) data you want and how to manage it. You can limit the IT infrastructure investment since the amount of data is limited and as a manufacturing company you probably have an IT infrastructure that can manage the additional data. And it is quite easy to know how to relate the information to other information sources. As the small data can be well defined and structured it can easily be combined with your existing well defined and structured data. The typical information sources will be CRM, ERP and PLM. You can combine your new (small) data with your existing product data sources. This can give you new insights.

Aspects that makes IIoT and Small Data attractive

• Sensors are smaller, cheaper and more flexible than just a few years back
• As the data amount is limited it is manageable
• You have a strong product information backbone in place in PLM and/or ERP
• The small data and how it must be related to other enterprise data to give meaning is defined up front. You don’t need advanced analytics tools or experts.

Taking the conveyor belt as an example. Take your existing product and how it is delivered and operated and serviced. Think about: What business benefit do you want if you could get anything from your product in use at your customer? Is it possible to get that data somehow? Then decide what you want to achieve, what data you need and how to get it.

What do you want to achieve?

• Improved service margin – you can do better and more accurate service since you have better insights. Perhaps selling more spare parts.
• You can provide improved operational efficiency for the customer as you can optimize the usage based on the data feedback.
• You can sell a service instead of a product. E.g. you promise a certain output in a certain time period. And you make it happen.
• You can improve the customer experience with new automated functions, remote control or better interaction with other equipment.

Decide up front and design your product accordingly and extend your IT infrastructure to support this. It is still not done by itself, but taking small steps instead of diving into Big Data at once is perhaps more appealing.

Engineering.com has an interesting article about using PLM and IoT in an old industry to create new business opportunities.

Summary

The key is understanding your product, how it is used by your customer and what additional data that could give you an advantage. You have a lot of valuable data already and it can become much more valuable if you add some smart small data on top of it. Use the data and the IT infrastructure you have, add some sensors and connectors and get started.

Tore Brathaug

www.infuseit.com

Change before you have to...!

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.”

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

www.infuseit.com