| | September 20169CIOReviewIt is clear that PLM is key to the engineering and R&D efficiency of a global organizationin products has significantly added to the product complexity. This brings challenges for global manufacturers and product engineers to collaborate for concurrent, multi-disciplinary engineering while designing the right and safe products.In a report SAE International has highlighted how General Motors restructured its Global Vehicle Engineering organization to improve cross-system integration. The Harvard Business Review estimated that a typical car contains approximately 2,000 functional components, 30,000 parts, and 10 million lines of software code. Add to this the complexity that arises from each industry's own product characteristics, a space shuttle has over a million unique parts, over 5 years of cycle time, 100+ partners and suppliers from all over the world; capital intensive industries have to maintain the accuracy as the engineering data changes from eBOM to mBOM to Installed BOM to Service BOM. With mass customization coming to fore, there is great value from PLM to manage the product configurations for manufacturing agility.We are looking at business changes across industries where highly competitive companies decide to collaborate with each other for specific products or technologies and need to share their designs, research, technology, infrastructure or suppliers and yet compete in the market place. True global engineering with multiple R&D centres and multiple manufacturing plants contributing towards the same product and variants make the management of the product development process really complex.Engineering Product Analytics and the Value from PLMDuring product development design engineers mostly design for form-fit-function requirements when they should consider parameters like cost of the product, manufacturability, regulatory requirements, standards, supplier capability, serviceability and more. This happens because the digital thread is broken and it is difficult to keep track of and make these requirements available to the design engineers. A PLM backbone further enables the ability to build in analytics and rules that can be made available upfront to the design engineers. The high cost of engineering changes ­ effort cost, process cost, tooling cost, tremendously high cost if a product is recalled ­ warranty and loss of goodwill have put the new age PLM practices on the agenda of the CFO and CEO in addition to the CTO. Product delays, cost overruns and quality issues not only affect the organization but also customer confidence.With Industry 4.0 and IoT there is even more product data available, data from machines and not just form IT tools and applications. There is no better alternative than PLM to correlate this data to the engineering data within the organization. And then put in place engineering analytics that helps to build products that meet the user requirement even more closely, do not create service problems, and even support new revenue models.Leading global companies have discussed with us about PLM as a competitive product strategy - leveraging digital assets consistently from concept to service. By extending the digital coverage, manufacturers will become fully integrated digital businesses and, therefore, well positioned to be more competitive. However to realize the benefits of the order of magnitude promised, it is necessary to have a coherent vision for PLM adoption amongst the stake-holders across the product lifecycle. PLM at the Enterprise· Product Development process management· Innovation process management· Engineering data fidelity for global collaboration· Multi-disciplinary engineering and collaboration· New partner and business model management· Engineering data fidelity for manufacturing agility· Compliance with increasing regulations· Analytics to bring demand, product, and supply chain together
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