Prove the Value of PLM
Once there's buy-in on PLM from the business units, it's up to CIOs to help determine where the biggest opportunities lie. Susan Kampe, vice president and general manager of IT for the $US15 billion Automotive Systems Group of Johnson Controls, focused her early PLM efforts on product design and launch, her goal being to keep up with the time-to-market pressures of the major carmakers.
When Kampe came on board in December 2001, a more narrowly focused PDM project was a year behind schedule. She and other executives made sweeping changes, bringing in a seasoned IT program manager (who was also a former CIO at another company) to oversee the bigger PLM strategy. To the all-engineer project team, Johnson Controls added representatives from different business functions, such as purchasing and sales units, and established a cross-functional steering committee, which included senior managers. The biggest challenge was getting stakeholders across functions to agree on common business processes, Kampe says. "These are gut-level changes. It's not about IT telling business what to change, but about IT and business teaming together to work through how things should run."
With the screw tightened on spending, IT leaders should keep PLM activity focused on immediate results. Senior management wants nothing to do with multimillion-dollar, multiyear deployments. "Things are tough at the moment, and while you're trying to invest in new capabilities, you've got to do so within the boundaries of profitability," says Mike Webb, senior vice president of information technology and CIO at Flextronics, a $US13 billion electronics manufacturing services provider.
Flextronics' customers, mostly high-tech and electronics manufacturers, face extreme time-to-market pressures. As their design and manufacturing partner, Flextronics can't afford the weeklong delay that used to come with approving every engineering change, which can number several hundred for a single product. "All the [product information] was nonintegrated and prone to a lot of error," Webb explains. "We needed to cut back the processes for ECOs to less than a day, and that gave us a very focused point to start with." Using a PLM application from Agile Software, Flextronics has accomplished just that. The next steps are to integrate some supplier management capabilities, such as requests for quotes and quality tracking tools, across the enterprise.
Webb, like other CIOs leading the way on PLM, is charged with creating and enforcing data standards so that information can flow freely among systems. He has appointed a team to make sure that the 80-plus Flextronics facilities adhere to PLM nomenclature detailed in a corporate data handbook.
But data standardisation doesn't have to be a constraint. At Ford, the goal is to choose an architecture that allows different data standards to coexist, says Richard Riff, a Ford technical fellow overseeing the company's PLM project. A large, decentralised company like Ford would be mistaken to insist on a single PLM database, says Riff, who reports to CIO Marv Adams at Ford headquarters. Ford is in the early stages of architecting its PLM data - but regardless of how the task is accomplished, responsibility for data clearly falls on the CIO's shoulders, says Riff. "A major task of the CIO is to reconcile silos of information into one set of cohesive requirements and product descriptions."
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