We’re back after a brief hiatus; Luke was away in Europe, so we delayed our recording and release of this episode. We are excited to get back into the book “Virtually Perfect” and share our highlights and thoughts.
In this episode we discuss the human side of implementing the Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) approach and how data is handled through the lifecycle. PLM is made up of three major themes: technology, processes and people. People are complex and have a vast capacity for greatness. Collaborating to achieve a common goal does not happen automatically. We also investigate the PLM approach of how to best manage data it is on-hand when needed.
Chapter 9: “Virtually Human”
Have you ever found working with others is harder than you thought it should be? You are not alone. Recently I (John) finished reading “How to Win Friends & Influence People” by Dale Carnegie. A best seller that has sold over 30 million copies. It was helpful for me to learn new practical ways of how to genuinely care for others and look out for their interests. This behaviour promotes productive collaboration and benefits the organisation.
People are social and relational beings! We don’t work like cogs in a machine where everything works out just by arranging things in a neat process! One of the great things about people in organisations is collaboration. When we work together, we use resources more effectively to reach our objectives and we also perform better as individuals.
Dr. Grieves points out that when it comes to change, it literally hurts. Sometimes executives think they have complete control over the company to transform it - but they don’t, at least not fully. If there is a thought leader in the business (i.e. an employee who influences a lot of other people) who is not on board with the change, they can have a detrimental effect on others perception of the change. It is worth the investment of time for the executive (or manager) to bring the thought leader along the journey of change, so they can bring others too.
Another aspect of being human is knowledge retention in a business. If you are in a managing director role or above, keeping and growing your company’s knowledge is important. Subject Matter Experts are becoming rarer, and as the baby boomers retire so does their knowledge. One big benefit of a PLM framework is having a safe haven to capture this knowledge.
Chapter 10: “Virtually Informed”
How do you organise all your product information to get maximum benefit from it? That could literally be the million-dollar question for a medium sized business. In the:
Create phase, how do you keep your Computer Aided Design (CAD) parts and PLM software Bill of Materials (BOM) parts synchronised? How do you keep your schematics (abstractions of the product structure) up to date with the latest CAD designs? How do you track requirements have been addressed in specifications? How is your eBOM (engineering BOM) kept in sync with your mBOM (manufacturing BOM).
Build phase how do you manage this?
In the support phase how do you ensure that procedures developed are made accessible so that staff do not need to waste time re-creating them?
Dispose phase how do you manage this?
One answer to this is to make product information contextual to the part or sub-part it relates to. This way it is intuitive to find the information you are looking for. This is one step towards “cued availability,” having the information available when and where it is needed. Modern PLM software helps with this. If you are in the phase of choosing a PLM software, ask lots of questions and try build a vision of how your company would use the software for its PLM approach. That’s what I did, and it helped a lot to form the vision as I selected and setup the software for our business.
Looking forward, I’m sure we are not far away from having AI models where we can put our company’s information, making it easier to access information when needed. I follow Andrew Ng’s newsletter The Batch to keep up to date with trends in this area.
We hope you enjoyed what we learned in these chapters. We’d love to hear your thoughts! Feel free to comment and take part in the poll below.
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