PLM, EBOM, MBOM, single version of the truth?
Hello. It is a while I did not write. Sorry about it!
Recently I had the chance to discuss the BOM topic in the real life, with people in a plant, as we were deploying our PLM/ERP interface into a new plant. This interface supports the concept of a unique product structure for all functions needing to get it, including manufacturing. PLM is the master system for it, the interface transferring the product structure to the ERP in order to launch/update MRP calculation. An ambitious challenge.
So we started discussing with the people in the plant, until we reached an interesting point. People asked how to manage regrinded raw material. For information, in plastics industry, products are sometimes manufactured not only from virgin raw material, but manufacturers are reusing scrapped parts from runners ans sprues, regrinding the plastic raw material, and adding a given percentage of this reused raw material. This practice initialy dedicated to decrease the cost of procurement, is used as well to leverage green products initiative. This percentage is taken into account in the MRP calculation. People interested in such practice can look at this link.
Plant people were telling me that they were using a specific item, added this item in the BOM close to the virgin raw material, and added the right quantity to virgin and regrinded material.
I was starting to think that our beautiful concept of a unique BOM was not so appropriate! Because I was thinking that our BOM, built by Engineering people was never entering into this kind of “detail”.
I then started discussing this topic with quality people. And she told me that at plant serial kick-off, a certification was given to the production, and this certification was based on some characteristics to maintain during serial production. She told me that not only this certification was including the fact that regrind material was used, but the manufacturer had to tell which percentage of regrinded material was used. The certificate was given based on this information. In case of change in the percentage, a derogation process was launched to autorise temporarily the production with a different percentage.
It means that people in charge of product definition needed to identify upfront which percentage of regrinded material should be used in production, and not simply the quantity of raw material needed to manufacture the part.
I was really surprised to discover that our unique BOM concept was still valid. PLM is traditionally advertized as the way to maintain the product definition. ERP is advertized as the master system for production data, and separation of both means that there is usually a misalignement between both. Through that little story, I see a clear benefit of merging both concepts while using two different IT applications.
What do you think?
Complexity of data model – Which solution?
PLM data model is usualy a huge topic. In order to have an idea of the situation, take an average user, and explain him why we should think about where to put a property, on the object or on the connection between another object. Or ask him the question of cardinality. Usually you get a big question mark from the end user, on which you should not spend too much time to interpret…
The point is there: while the PLM data model usually represents very well the business process, it is quite impossible to expose the data model itself to the users. The bad news is that our PLM solutions, built on standard applications, are by default presenting this data model. An important exception here is SAP in my view.
Consequence of that situation, is when you want to report data to the end users, or build KPI, to provide for example the same rendering as in excel sheets, you have to deal with the data model, which usually leads to complex queries, browsing a network of objects. A big network. At that time, you realise the complexity of your data model, having, as a simple example, to use the last released version, or the last version, or the current one, or…
Have you experience this situation, and if yes, how you deal with that situation? Is there another view to bring, which may be disrupting, but solve the situation?
I feel that another data layer is required, to provide a user view of the situation, implementing another data model, more suited to provide a more user oriented data representation. It is for example a view built in search engines and BI applications.
I am as well wondering about the solutions implemented for big network of objects, for example social networking application. Never in facebook the network is exposed to the user, while for sure it is behind.
What do you think?
Should PLM apps be jealous about Facebook?
I usually think I have nothing to add to discussions about comparison between PLM and social networking. Two facts have contradicted this opinion recently:
- I had chance to test the Facebook app for iPhone
- I read the article about Facebook connections as a map
I see here 2 facts:
- Facebook propose a high level of ergonomics in his iPhone app, far away from ergonomics proposed in our favorite PLM applications
- Facebook fosters a level of collaboration that any PLM application owner should be jealous about
Is there a link between those facts?
Useful or full featured?
I found a recent post from Oleg with a funny picture. This picture is better than a long discussion about what it is better to get:
- a full featured PLM application
- a useful application
Examples are:
or
I don’t know for a camper, but as a PLM user I am sure which one I may choose.
Unfortunately, most of the PLM applications we meet are of the first kind. Why? Some quick thoughts:
Complex business processes
BP are so complex that implementers simply choose to display everything to all users, having not the information about restricted usage per user or per group of user.
IT design
PLM is supported mainly by IT department which don’t know the BPs, or choose to mix many different business processes in the same application.
New capabilities
Introducing new functions without killing the previous ones which might be obsolete are increasing the volume. Always try to kill existing functions!
Lack of user feedback
I believe user feedback is not at the level today for enterprise applications, compared with what can be found on the web. Today, the smallest shoe vendor in the US provides a way to post comments about its products on his website. PLM vendors are far away from that practice. Even if some surveys are sent once a year into a company, the level of feedback provided is not at the level where it could be used.
What do you think?
Monitoring PLM data
Hello
I would like to talk today about PLM data monitoring. This activity is a real activity into a company, from simply examining dead data by a data administrator, in order to cleanse it, to producing dashboards on data to figuring program follow up, data usage across programs or countries. There is a numerous amount of examples where PLM data monitoring is required.
On the other hand, a PLM system has a complex data model, which may be partially known by the monitoring user, so the monitoring activity requires the usage of dedicated tools, dedicated methodologies, and so requires time to develop, test, deliver, explain… So this activity becomes difficult to sell to a manager, while it would bring a lot of information on:
- PLM application usage
- PLM data usage
- Product data trends
- Project convergence
How to solve this challenge? I guess that modern search engines could help solve this challenge, being able to provide more information to the user to discover not only the data, but as well the real trend on business which is behind the data.
What do you think?
Semantic search, Classification and Data migration: the winning team
Seven years ago, I had a mission to perform data migration from one system to another. One of the major challenges was to import parts inside a hierarchy of categories, which have been designed in the new system. Analyzing the legacy data, another hierarchy had been set, but this hierarchy had more than 900 entries, so users had mostly used a wrong category, making this information totally unreliable.
So we estimated we could try to use the description field of parts to classify the objects, guessing that the users had used meaningful words to describe their objects. The method had to be found.
So I imagined an algorithm to do so. The method was to analyze the words of the description, and to compare those words to a dictionary, providing as well a multiplication factor to each word depending on its position in the description. In parallel, I built the technical dictionary analyzing the description of roughly 500 000 parts, founding the most used words.
I shown that more than 75% of the parts could be automatically migrated using this algorithm. For the remaining 25%, I built an application which was providing the list of parts to classify, and the possible categories available in the new system, and we asked to experts to manually classify the remaining parts. Having done that, I enriched my dictionary with some new words that I had not been able to imagine the meaning (including some funny ones…). With the new dictionnary, we could be able to automatically classify more than 90% of the parts.
Then we set up an automatic procedure using this algorithm in order to migrate data at night from the legacy system to the new one, as both systems were decided to run in parallel for a given period of time. This system ran for one year, until all project data was migrated to the new system. Then the migration system was stopped, and put on archive. I created a semantic search engine without knowing it.
Years after, I have now to implement a search engine based on Exalead search engine. This technology implements semantic options, and hopefully I can reuse the dictionary I built seven years ago to provide more value this new technology.
My conclusion today is that there are several lessons I learnt from this experience:
- semantic search can help migrate data
- semantic search can help classify data
- data migration activity can bring value for future activities
- companies should pay attention building technical dictionaries, compiling words that users are using everyday
Quick pick: look at inteview of John Alpine on Deelip.com
Hello
I had chance to read the interview of John Alpine, VP of R&D at Spatial. He is telling interesting things about collaboration in CAD domain.
Do we need SBA for Product data?
I had chance recently to work for a project to refund part of the IS system. This project was accumulating several applications serving different user communities like engineering, program, purchasing and more. One of the objectives of that project was to enhance access of data across different applications. Indeed, it is a common need for an average user to find quickly the data he is searching, even its own data. Working with an increasing number of applications, generating more and more data, users start to feel anxious simply finding the data they generated some month ago. And for sure this is even truer with the data generated by others.
This was strange at the start to admit that most of the existing applications were containing their own search engine, but was not able to satisfy people, and only basic search methods were used because they are known and safe, like searching by numbers. This method is a bit frustrating for most people, don’t knowing the numbers. The other method is to build classical search methods, based on navigation paths across the application, which paths are simply not manageable by users if they do not use the application everyday. A solution consists in implementing those complex search paths into specific search functions, but this is not satisfying all needs and constrains.
So we turned our head to a new technology, which was Exalead. This application was coming from a completely different world, the web world, trying to solve the issue managing huge volume of data, from different sources, and providing not a perfect result like any existing search engine, but allowing to the user to filter data from qualifiers found in the indexed data.
Then it brings back to me numerous old situations were I was trying to figure how to design data models, and associated business processes, but when at the end I wanted to retrieve data created, I was simply not able, because the way used to search data had to be the one used when designing the application: by number, by state,…
With that application, I could imagine search data from a transversal way, which was not the way the application was designed, but the way the users had used the application to enter data, which may be different. Do they enter the name of a customer in the dedicated field or in the description of the object, it does not matter. And we know how much time we spend defining methodologies and control methods, telling the user to enter data following very specific rules, with dash and no space, no slash, with # between the first and second terms, and so on.
Then it brought to me confusion, and make me do a step back. For sure, Google experience has passed before, and we are used to use now for personal usage one search field to find anything. But one of PLM applications objective is usually to provide ability to reuse data, and search capability is a key tool for that purpose. This new way retrieving data could be a source of innovation for product development activities. Because when we think re-use, we think reusing the exactly same data. In fact, today a lot of data exists, and while in the past it was natural to start brainstorming between a group of experts to design a new product, and get ideas from those experts, now a part of the building blocks for a new product are clearly available in the cloud, private or public. The important thing is now to have the right tool to find this data or at least similar data, and not spend too much time searching for it, to finally recreate it.
But the most exciting characteristic of Exalead was to be able to investigate simplification of the semantic challenges that a company with many sites worldwide has to manage everyday, with many languages and many different wording. This may lead to a new trend, building CPI, Cloud based Product Innovation.
So I see clear opportunities implementing SBA for Product data in the future. What do you think?
SOA for PLM applications (and others?) – Is it really a good idea? Part 2
I would like to come back on that subject initiated in the first part some weeks ago. I exposed my vision of what is SOA, and how this could change the way we design an application.
I would like now to make a step back and look at the entire network of applications used by a given community. CIOs have to manage that network, and to work with business departments to manage the data flow between these applications. It is a tough subject, especially in big organizations, and CIOs have to focus on the right way:
- to support business processes
- to master the cost of the whole network
Numerous methods have emerged in the past years to target those objectives, and it can be resumed by BPM (Business Process Management or Modeling). For my point of view, there are three topics to address:
- which data to export (business data and business decisions)
- how to transport that data
- where to transport that data
The benefit of SOA is for me to try to forget the last topic. Why? Mastering the whole network means trying to reduce the number of connections between systems. Several ideas come up to reach that objective: define the right data flow, eliminating the small paths or the bad path, which leads to business process reengineering initiatives.
In today’s world, this kind of schema definition has a short life time, and the business decisions can have changed when the whole schema is ready to be implemented or enhanced.
So for me, CIOs should focus on the two first points:
- to establish a communication standard over the network, to support data and decision exchanges
- to ask to application owners to publish which information should bring value to other communities.
This leads to published data. If one or several application owner needs this data, or only a part of it, up to them to take it, or to filter it. It will not change the connection point.
System architects will then have only to define which system masters which data. That’s were the mindset has to change, because it is unusual to publish data without knowing who will use it. It may be a first pragmatic step trying to kill silos, ie pushing people to think about which part of their data could interest other communities.
What do you think?
Paris at Whitsun – A life experience
Hello
The post of today is about Paris. As I whished to get some pictures for my next post, I played the tourist in Paris for the Whitsun monday, as the weather was really nice. And I would like to share these images with you. A real experience!
