The COVID-19 pandemic is bringing key business activities to a near absolute halt. If you work at a product organization, activities that used to be routine such as a team meeting for a critical design review or sending a team of experts to walk the plant floor to investigate a product manufacturing quality problem are no longer possible.
Overnight, overly lean single-source supply chain strategies and hyper-speed agile product development practices exposed the fragility of many organizations’ supply chain practices.
Granted, criticism of overly lean product design and supply chain operations is hardly new. The huge 2011 earthquake in Japan that was followed by a devastating tsunami has not quite faded from the memory of many automotive company executives. The disaster temporarily crippled massive parts of Japan’s auto supply chain and exposed the vulnerability of a system pioneered by Toyota after World War II and adopted by practically every automaker and supplier.
Ironically, Toyota is one of the many companies experiencing the effect of the coronavirus outbreak that requires employees to work from home. At a recent news conference call, Toyota Motor Corp. President Akio Toyoda acknowledged the company was caught by surprise: “We were not ready for telework. Work-style reform has been the buzzword. And now, we can afford no further delay in implementing it.”
But do we really need a global stress test of the magnitude of the COVID-19 pandemic or the Tohoku earthquake to remind us of the fragility of today’s product development practices and supply chain operations?
Product lifecycle management activities are essentially a process of tight collaboration and careful alignment between value chain functions. For instance, design engineers must take input from manufacturing engineering and incorporate manufacturability considerations in the design so that volume ramp up is as rapid and as smooth as possible.
When collaboration isn’t harmonious and efficient, the issue isn’t merely a matter of poor communication, frustration and annoyance with colleagues, although these, too, can have an adverse effect on the organization. Ineffective value chain collaboration and suboptimal short-terms decisions can have very expensive consequences. They lead to project delays and budget overruns. It results in excessive ECOs and runaway warranty costs.
Single Version of Truth?
From its early days, PLM software was heralded as the keeper of a “single version of the product truth” that gives individual stakeholders complete and objective product information curated exclusively for their function-specific role and information needs.
But the notion of single version of truth is challenged by the fact that stakeholders come into design collaboration sessions informed by practices and methods that are unique to their business function. For instance, a mechanical engineer may not detect serviceability and manufacturability warning indicators in simulation results or early quality reports. Similarly, service planners aren’t necessarily conversant in the intricacies of design and manufacturing. Individual value chain participants using the very same data set can easily reach different conclusions and make incongruent decisions.
So instead of acting as a centralized information system responsible for the single version of the truth, the PLM environment resembles the blind men and the elephant. In this ancient Indian parable, blind men feel a different part of an elephant’s body, such as its leg, tusk or tail, and then each describes the elephant based on their limited experience as a tree trunk, a spear or a rope.
Even when teams are composed of highly skilled specialists, their expertise can get in the way, as each team members brings a different business perspective. Individuals from engineering, manufacturing, supply chain and other value chain experts are often susceptible to reach conflicting decisions from the very same data. Paradoxically, the very qualities that make individuals successful undermine collaboration and team success, especially when ad-hoc teams are formed to deal with a short-term assignment such as addressing a product quality problem.
The Connected Enterprise
Studies of organizational and behavioral traits that make highly effective collaboration teams also advises: ‘‘Don’t underestimate the power of giving people a common platform and operating language.’’
Companies must connect product stakeholder network digitally and provide collaboration frameworks to enable digital collaboration between globally distributed teams as well as individual employees—effectively, reliably and, when necessary, in real time.
The connected enterprise is changing the way in which stakeholders receive, perceive and act on information. The organization’s digital thread enables each stakeholder to analyze data from many relevant sources, develop solutions and conduct impact analyses that address all product lifecycle functions and phases and drive better product lifecycle decisions.
A distributed digitally connected workforce is able to collaborate both asynchronously and in real time with remote teams, across time-zones. Frictionless evidence-based collaboration can be more inclusive, incorporating previously excluded or downplayed value chain functions in the discussion.
Moreover, digital collaboration leaves digital trails. Those who missed an event can go back, review what has been discussed and continue to enrich the organization knowledge repository and capacity for co-creation and co-innovation.
But Will They Remember?
But will companies remember the lessons of the COVID-19 crisis once it is over? Post crisis, will it be too easy to go back to the old habits of excessive travel, endless meeting and ineffective working lunches? As highlighted in a McKinsey report: “Establishing robust working norms, workflows, and lines of authority is critical, but all too easy to skimp on.”
Companies must ensure that COVID-19 is not only a one-time catalyst and serves to create a permanent change in product development culture and the use of digital tools for a distributed workforce and manufacturing operations.
Ask Yourself
The following are key questions to consider when examining your future-proof product lifecycle management environment. These are not designed to serve as a simple requirements list for selecting PLM software. Instead, they should serve as outline of the vital areas that govern your PLM environment. For that reason, these points are not discrete. Rather, they are linked and affect each other.
- Where are your CAD files? Where are the rest of your files? Despite efforts to consolidate datastores and manage multi-format files within a single tool, the number and types of files used to manage a product lifecycle is large. Moreover, these files are found all over the place, from enterprise ERP and PLM software to individual’s desktop computer.
What to look for
- A cloud-based environment that makes all product data accessible by any authorized value chain participant, from any location, at any time, using any device.
- How reliable and efficient is your design change processes and product revisions management? Product lifecycle management requires constant updates and revisions that can be done by any authorized value chain participant and is visible to all value chain functions.
What to look for
- Cloud-enabled ability to track who made changes, when, and why. Ensure the process meets compliance and can be easily rolled back in case of an error or revision.
- Are you able to access and share information for planning and impact analysis both upstream and downstream? Again, the key to effective collaboration is the ability to analyze the impact of decisions on relevant value chain functions. It should connect datastores and engineering tools within the organization and the extended supply chain.
What to look for
- A cloud architecture to support efficient and secure integration with multiple enterprise systems to serve rich multidomain information used by advanced analytics for multidisciplinary decision making.
- How flexible and agile is your collaboration process? Do your product teams have the IT infrastructure and PLM tools to allow them to pivot quickly in response to change? Whether a global disaster, a short-term supply chain instability or a localized quality spill, the organization needs to support remote onboarding, training, updating and support.
What to look for
- Ability of your cloud-based PLM environment to operate throughout the extended supply chain and support integrations with outside suppliers and partners. The product management tools should provide a robust data and IP management environment and, at the same time, allow quick and safe mechanism to onboard new design and supply chain partners when needed.
- Who protects your data? The need for secured data access is obvious. However, the new reality of remote workers using multitude of devices, access points and consumer-level Internet services demands higher level of diligence and data security software. Additionally, you should pay attention to managing and protecting data rights, intellectual property, and, in some instances, end user privacy.
What to look for
- While “designed from the ground up with security in mind” may sound like a non-specific commercial, you do need to ensure that cloud-based PLM and other enterprise systems do support an integrated cybersecurity processed throughout the lifecycle that does not break when users access spans multiple datastores and design tools.
Weathering the Storm
In 1976, M. F. Weiner wrote an article in the journal Medical Economics titled “Don’t Waste a Crisis — Your Patient’s or Your Own.” Since then, “No crisis should go to waste” has become a contemporary meme that is sadly very apropos today.
Crises are, indeed, catalysts of innovation. While the COVID-19 pandemic is a transient catalyst, many of the changes it caused will persist. It is imperative that we heed the lessons we have learned.
Low probability black swan events seem that have devastating effect on the global economy seem to be almost a regular occurrence. Given the scope of today’s elongated global supply chains, no organization can predict and be fully protected against such volatility.
Today, collaboration is key to rapid recovery. As I am writing this, century old behemoth automakers GM and Ford, after idling their manufacturing plants, are diverting resources and knowhow to help ventilator manufacturers with manufacturing, logistics and purchasing issues.
Once global manufacturing goes back to pre-pandemic levels, systemic and effective design collaboration among value chain partners—both established and ad-hoc—will continue to be the cornerstone of a supply chain strategy to minimize disruptions and improve supply chain resiliency.
This article was sponsored by Upchain.