Initially Engineering Software was developed to assist in calculations. Later as computer technology matured geometry capture (CAD) and analysis (CAE) applications emerged as the dominant engineering application. The “killer app” as it has been called. The problem with “killer apps” is that they eventually migrate to cash cows, eventually losing vibrancy and then to commodities.
About a decade ago PDM was proposed as the new killer app for the Engineering Software market. It made logical sense that storage management of CAD and associated files would be a valuable addition to the market. When Engineering was accomplished on the “board”, there were rooms, file cabinets and even staff specifically established to manage drawings. Various large corporations had already built home grown applications to store the ever mounting quantities of CAD files. PDM was a logical extension to the engineering automation trend for vendors to pursue.
A few years ago Product Life Cycle Management was raised from a mild buzz within the community into the next big thing for engineering. PLM makes sense as various studies have shown that the majority of product costs are established prior to and after product design has been accomplished.
One of the critiques with PLM has been that it has been far away from managing a product and closer to managing data file relationships. While such capabilities are necessary, providing cross references and release status to related geometry-based files has been accomplished by PDM systems already and does little to actually manage the life of products.
PLM to become a viable solution within the enterprise must actually provide the tools and processes to manage a product beyond as a set of interconnected data relationships. This infers that aspects of engineering beyond geometry creation should and will take on more priority. Such topics as Engineering Economics, Sustainability, Production, Maintainability, and Market Life will become top of mind to Engineering Executives in future decades as they are asked to take on a new role as Chief Product Investment Manager.
Today many organizations fragment this role and subordinate it to either a marketing management or project management level. You find the title Product Manager with some of the total responsibilities assigned to them. In the marketing context, a Product Manager title may entail managing the selection and investments into which market segments a product is introduced and may have some P&L responsibility for the marketing investments for those. In the engineering context, a Product Manager may have the investment responsibilities to manage the trade-off of feature development and product cost. This fragmentation is typical and often yields a lack of visibility in the overall understanding of a product’s stage of life. The results of poor visibility are direct causes to poor investment decisions; continuing a product past its time or not investing enough to extend its viability.
Whether organizationally a consolidated role occurs or not, PLM or a system like PLM will need to provide the company the ability to monitor a product from 360 degrees. A robust PLM system will enable a Product Manager to:
· Plan and Track technical investment
· Track product functional performance per Customer Expectations
· Monitor Market Performance and Investment
· Determine overall investment performance of the product
· Report Product Life Cycle status and forecast changes
· Alert the Product Manager to life cycle change indicators
Such activities today can be accomplished using existing enterprise systems; however, this requires integrating financial, marketing, workflow and project management applications into a new application oriented towards addressing products from a holistic perspective rather than pieces of the products information being distributed as constituents of other systems.