Manage product lifecycle

After a heavy snowfall, Changchun, a major town in the northeast, looked chilling. Opening the door of the "war room" of the FAW Group's technical center, it was a scene of great enthusiasm. People from different departments such as R&D and marketing, production, procurement, sales, and service gathered together to make suggestions for the development of the new Hongqi car. .

This is a way for the FAW Technical Center to develop products, which is called "big development". Involving market, sales and other personnel ensures that the needs of the market and customers are fully considered in the early stage of product development, and procurement and production personnel are involved in the early stage, making the related procurement and manufacturing work easier to complete.

This is also a small shot of their practice of product lifecycle management.

FAW Technical Center is the earliest and largest automotive product R&D and testing base in China's auto industry. He told us that the management of product life cycle is an extremely complex process. As far as automotive products are concerned, it involves the coordinated work of various departments such as planning, marketing, R&D, production, procurement, quality assurance, financial control, sales, and service. The "big development" system is to effectively combine product birth and life cycle management.

For Chinese enterprises, Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) is a relatively new concept

. Everyone may be familiar with management ideas such as ERP, CRM, and SCM. We can understand it this way, the activities of the enterprise are certain, and different management ideas often help the enterprise to improve a certain aspect of management. For example, CRM focuses on customers, ERP focuses on enterprise resources, and PLM focuses on products.

The importance of products to an enterprise is self-evident. The foundation of a great company and brand lies in a great product.

And PLM maximizes the value of a product from a lifecycle perspective. After the implementation of PLM in the FAW Technical Center, the development cycle of engine and transmission products has been shortened by 30%; through the implementation of PLM, Haier has established a whole-process collaboration with front-end channels, customers, supply chains and suppliers, reducing the number of parts and components. Reduced by 29%; Dalian Heavy Industry & Crane Group has significantly improved product quality through PLM, shortened the R&D design cycle by 17%, and shortened the production preparation time by 20%.

In the short term, PLM can help companies reduce costs, achieve rapid product launch, and resist the cold winter; in the long run, it can help companies improve product quality, carry out independent innovation, and improve the competitiveness of the entire company.

What exactly does managing the product lifecycle do? Why does it help the company above? How should companies implement specific practices in their daily work?

Manage data, share and reuse

Products have a life cycle, just like people have birth, old age, sickness and death. Simply put, product life cycle management is to manage the data and processes in the entire product life cycle with a system.

One of the main things in PLM is managing data. This includes all data related to the product and its design, production, use, support, repair, etc. For example, product-related technical documents, drawings, 3D models, Bill of Materials (BOM, Bill of Material), test failures, customer repairs, claim records, etc. may sound simple, but they must be managed completely and accurately. It's a very, very difficult thing to do.

Manage data accurately. For example, a product like a car has tens of thousands of parts, and a part may have dozens of variants in the product life cycle, because on the one hand, there will be a lot of feedback after the product is put into the market, and manufacturers will make changes. Supplier ideas will be added, and parts may be subject to small changes. The parts are only a small part of the life cycle of the car, and the others include design data, test records, fault solutions and so on. It is not easy to accurately manage these massive data and data changes in the product life cycle.

A small and medium-sized enterprise in China that produces large-scale LED display screens with an annual output value of about 700 million yuan. It once encountered the problem of confusing product data. It is mainly faced with large customers, there are many customized needs of customers, and the needs of customers often change, which also causes its BOM to change frequently.

For example, the company made a product design at the beginning, and the customer approved it, so it formed a BOM and put it into the ERP. But suddenly the customer came in with new requirements, so the R&D was done again, some designs were changed, a new BOM was formed, and then it was put into the ERP. After a while, the customer said again, the original one is not bad, I don't want the second version, I still use the first one.

At this time, the company found that the first one could not be found, because the ERP system used by the company did not manage the different versions of the data well. As a result, the company produced a lot of redundant research and development, which also affected the speed of delivery.

Later, the company solved this problem by implementing the PLM system. Every time the BOM is designed and released, it will be released from PLM, and each release will be recorded instead of the original manual release, and through effective control and ERP When connected, the accuracy of its BOM has changed from less than 90% to now basically every release is accurate.

It can also be seen from this that the accurate management of product data is not only the guarantee that the products designed by the enterprise can be produced in the end, but also can save costs. "These costs are mainly duplicated expenditures, redundant expenditures, and unnecessary consumption, which are often the parts that should be saved the most." said Liu Xiwei, technical manager of the high-tech/electronics industry and South China region of PTC, a well-known PLM software company, " Some companies have a BOM error rate of as high as 5%, so the production scheduling is wrong, and many preparations are also discarded. Through the implementation of PLM, the BOM accuracy rate can be increased to more than 99%, and many back-end wasteful things will not be Creates waste."

Share experiences and improve quality. In addition to reducing costs, managing data in the life cycle has a greater role in promoting information sharing and experience reuse, thereby speeding up product design cycles and improving product quality.

Liu Tonglong, vice president of PTC China, said: "Chinese companies have accumulated experience in research and development in the past, unlike Western manufacturing that has a history of hundreds of years. How to accumulate and reuse past knowledge? It is very important for enterprises to continuously improve the R&D capability or the maturity of R&D on the platform."

The FAW Technical Center used to keep the data on the drawings, and newcomers looked at the drawings, but the drawings did not There is no indication of why it is designed this way or what the control parameters in the design are. FAW now manages the data in a unified manner. For example, some good experience, especially the experience of old experts, is put in. The main parameters, main structure and main performance of some platform components are well accumulated, including experimental failures and failures. Failed solution. "It's like you are standing on the shoulders of many people doing development," Li Jun said. "Without a good management tool, it is impossible to accumulate good design experience in the past, and it is impossible to design the current good design methods. The technique is used in several projects."

Because some successful design data are preserved, PLM system can help enterprises to reuse to the greatest extent, especially to reuse successful designs in the past. For example, the design of the mobile phone rolling ball is very easy to use and smooth, and it has been used for a long time without any defects. Enterprises can apply this design to all mobile phones. Liu Xiwei said: "If the research and development of any product takes one time to do research and development, it will take a longer time to do testing, and it may take more time to verify the compatibility between versions. If you can use some mature designs as much as possible, although new products have new functions, they can be realized based on a large number of existing mature technologies, and the quality of new products can be improved.”

Promote the reuse of parts. Another key part of product-related data is the data of parts. A component may be just a part number on the computer, but it will become a procurement process, and new suppliers may have to be certified, it may become inventory, or it may become an unused material for the enterprise. bring a lot of cost. Reducing the scale of parts and promoting the reuse of parts is also where the PLM system can make great use of it.

The LED display company mentioned above used to put parts and components in Excel in a very extensive way. Because it is a company that quickly responds to customer needs, its research and development is very strong. As long as the product is made, customers can Happy, everyone is happy. As for when to use an old part and when to use a new one, there is no control at all, and the company later found that the cost remained high.

With the help of PTC, the company has sorted out its own parts management system, defined all parts by category and put them in the PLM system, making it easy to find and reuse parts in the R&D process. In this way, the scale of its component purchases has dropped by 40%, significantly reducing business costs.

This is also reflected in FAW. Li Jun said: "When our designers do design, an important concept is NPI (new part introduction), which is the reference of new parts. When doing design, why can't we use old parts, why can't we inherit, we must get Clearly. Since last year, we have been examining and approving NPI. A designer used to draw drawings at will, especially when people born in the 1980s came in and didn't communicate. I don't know that a good structural reference for parts is also there. We now have a database of reused parts, which can be borrowed and shared in this way to further improve the life cycle of assemblies, modules, and parts."

Improve the process and promote synergy

Li Jun once said that the most fundamental gap between domestic auto companies in R&D and foreign countries lies in two places: one is the lack of historical accumulation, that is, the family legacy left by the ancestors is not strong; the other is the lack of process , that is, the rules left by the ancestors are insufficient.

In fact, it is not just the automotive industry, but other industries are also facing the same problem. It can be said that managing data well is solving the problem of accumulation. The process is another focus of product life cycle management.

Work together to make the right product. Product life cycle management itself represents a complete set of business processes, covering different stages of the life cycle, including strategic product planning, integrated product development, collaborative product design, digital engineering and manufacturing, supply chain management, global resource utilization, etc. A series of business processes.

One of the core ideas of these processes is to promote the coordination of R&D and marketing, procurement, sales, maintenance, etc., so that everyone can achieve a common understanding on one platform, so that the products produced by the enterprise are the products that the market really needs. At the same time, PLM provides some advanced engineering methods in these processes, such as modular design, concurrent engineering and other methods to shorten the development time and reduce the development cost.

In traditional organizations, activities in the product life cycle are sequential, often beginning with market analysis, followed by conceptual design, engineering design and analytical testing, detailed design, manufacturing engineering, process planning, tool preparation, production Planning, procurement, machining, assembly, testing, packaging, technical documentation preparation, installation and maintenance, etc.

In product life cycle management, this process is not only upstream and downstream, but also partially parallel and overlapping, which makes the birth of products and market demand closely linked.

Song Yun, China Manager of the Automotive, Electronics and Steel Department of IBM Industrial Division, gave us such an example. There was once a mobile phone company. If the business was not good, please consult a company to look at the products first. The product department is proud to say The research and development is very advanced. I took out a mobile phone and threw it on the opposite wall on the spot.

The consulting company went to the marketing department again and asked why such a good product could not be sold. The marketing department said that no one wants to buy a mobile phone because it falls and plays every day. "This shows that the two departments do not have good communication. Not every product, after spending a lot of money on research and development, will be listed. There are many products that cannot be listed, and there are many products that have been developed, but they really need to be produced. If it is related to sales, it will lose money. The company has spent a lot of money on this." Song Yun said.

And PLM can help enterprises form an effective mechanism to straighten out and optimize various processes in the life cycle, so that different departments can truly collaborate. Ensure that the designed product is the product that is really needed in the market, and ensure that a marketable product is designed.

"For example, the marketing department cooperates with the R&D department to let the R&D department know what kind of products are really needed in the market; let the manufacturing department know to coordinate with the R&D department to develop this product, and it is very easy to manufacture , it is helpful to the manufacturing cost; in addition, it has a good coordination with the purchasing department, and the supplier can do the design and production of the purchased parts at a very early time." Song Yun said.

Since 2005, the FAW Technical Center has been implementing the "big development" system, bringing together people from various departments such as planning, marketing, research and development, production, procurement, quality assurance, financial control, sales, and service to make products. development.

Li Jun said: "We had a very good truck project last year, called 5+21, 5 is 5 core trucks, 21 is 21 variants of these 5 core trucks, that is, we will put the entire Jiefang brand The marketing performance of trucks in the market for one year is invested in these 5+21 vehicles. In the past, the models produced by Jiefang Brand in one year were all three or four hundred varieties. We adopted the method of 'big development', and everyone came to me. come from the project center, form a big family, do it together, we have a very good 'war room', designers, production service personnel, etc. are all together in the 'war room'. In this way, the design of a product is truly oriented Structure, process-oriented, procurement-oriented, market-oriented. This project is very successful, and the income is higher than the original three or four hundred varieties of Jiefang brand cars."

Speed up product design time. The synergy of the various departments allows the company to adopt a concurrent engineering approach to speed up product design time. For example, when we used to make car doors, it took a long time to design the car door and hand it over to the back, and then design the mold according to the data of the car door. Now, two things can be done in parallel. This speeds up time considerably.

Another commonly used engineering method to speed up design time is modular design, which is also a widely adopted concept in PLM.

For example, cars, when there was no better way in the past, each car shape was designed from scratch, and each design ran a whole process. Now, first-class car manufacturers can define some design templates, and even embed them into design tools, so that when the product needs to be changed, it can be done on the basis of the template without starting from scratch, which will greatly speed up Design time.

Siemens product management software company Greater China President Yuan Chaoming said that, for example, refrigerators can be made into modules, such as refrigerator doors, compressors, inner tanks, and boxes. Changes and assembly are much quicker. "Standardize the basic design and make them into modules one by one, so that we can combine the diversity of products for customers with the internal standards and simplicity." Yuan Chaoming said.

Long-term focus, short-term approach

Start from the actual problems faced by the enterprise. The data and processes in product life cycle management are very complex, and it is impossible for enterprises to manage them in one step. In specific practice, generally speaking, enterprises start from the problems they are currently facing, and then move forward step by step. Song Yun said, "When implementing PLM, the project is not implemented to implement the project, but must be implemented to solve a certain problem." For example, the failure rate of product design is too high, or the cost of the product remains high, etc.

When a business needs to improve multiple issues, prioritization is required. Whether you want to reduce costs first, improve product quality or speed up time-to-market. Some companies make mobile phones and pay more attention to the time to market, because if they go public ten days later, their profits will drop a lot; some companies make large equipment, and they are more concerned about quality than time to market. , otherwise its maintenance cost will be high.

Therefore, each enterprise must set priorities according to its own actual situation, and then the improvement of the process can be carried out. Liu Xiwei explained: "For example, a process that focuses on quality, this process may be long, with many checkpoints, and it is not very economical in terms of time to market, but its quality may be very good. If I were to design a Focus on the time-to-market process, then it can be short.”

“We help the client prioritize his business, process, and capability priorities. That is, which business goals are the highest priority, in order to achieve this Business goals, which processes should be paid attention to, and then what capabilities should these processes provide.” Liu Xiwei said, “Which processes do general customers like to start with? One is the new product development process, and the other is change and configuration management. Process, the third is the detailed design process, and the fourth is the parts and supplier management process. These four processes are the starting process that many customers like to focus on in the first stage.”

On the one hand, the impact on the enterprise is relatively small, and the process of launching a new version will not be completely different from the original, and the impact on the operation of the enterprise will not be large. In line with the rhythm of rapid enterprise development. For example, PTC recommends that the implementation period of the first phase of the client is generally not more than 6 months, and it is best to control it within 4 months. Why? PTC has also done projects for a long time before, "We often set a goal at the beginning of the project, and this goal is not important at the end of the project. Because Chinese enterprises are developing very, very fast, and now everyone is concerned about reducing costs, Maybe after the economic situation improves, everyone is more concerned about growth." Liu Xiwei said.

Gradually deepen and continuously improve. A short-term approach does not mean short-sighted. On the contrary, an enterprise should have a long-term strategic plan for the management of the product life cycle, which should be a process of deepening and improving step by step.

In the late 1990s, when FAW started to replace its trucks, Li Jun began to understand the concept of product life cycle by communicating with foreign countries. However, he was not in a hurry to introduce it in an all-round way, but started with practical methods such as modularization to learn the application. With the advancement of the replacement trucks, he found that platforms and modules are indeed better engineering methods, and then he began to slowly FAW The Technology Center continues to apply the ideas of PLM.

The first step for them to implement PLM is to use PLM as a management tool based on the current status of product development in the R&D center, using different IT systems to manage various processes and data from product development to production. The second step is to build PLM into a cross-departmental management platform for the entire group, integrate all planned IT products into the PLM platform, create a collaborative development environment, and enable customers, production, procurement, sales, etc. to participate in product development, providing Management of processes and data in the product life cycle. As of this year, they have been working with PTC for 12 years.

Li Jun concluded, "In order to implement PLM, an enterprise must have a correct understanding of PLM, a correct understanding of the current development status and future development goals of the enterprise, and determine the overall plan and specific implementation plan. Out of reality."

Liu Tonglong also agrees with this view: "The implementation of PLM is not achieved overnight, it is a continuous process, and the improvement of the process is also a continuous process."

Of course, there are also companies that integrate the entire R&D organization. Scope reorganization to implement a new process framework for product life cycle management. Back then, Huawei spent huge sums of money to introduce IBM's IPD (Integrated Product Development), which was a revolutionary process change, which placed high demands on enterprises. Which way to take depends on the company's vision and management capabilities. This comprehensive and transformative approach to advancement can only be undertaken if the company's vision and management are strong enough.

Determine the process first, the tool later

When implementing PLM, don't think of software vendors when you think of product lifecycle management.

"Defining an enterprise's process is not to say that it is more important than tools, but it should be done before an enterprise selects tools. First decide what the enterprise's process looks like, and then use some tools to promote the defined process." Song Yun suggested.

Song Yun said, "I think Chinese companies have the ability and financial resources to get the best tools, but having a tool doesn't mean you can play all its functions. The key is the process of an enterprise, the entire design and manufacturing process. How to string together the processes, how to be more effective, and what role the tools play in it, think clearly about this."

Define the process first. There are many tools in PLM to support some specific tasks, and there are tools to support the best process, but to use it effectively, you must first establish an environment to match.

For example, when everyone used 2D tools to design, there were many coordination meetings during the design process to see if everyone's designs could cooperate with each other. If not, there would be quarrels, persuade, change.

With the 3D tools, associative development can already be achieved. When an engineer designs the part he is responsible for, he can call out the parts designed by others around him to know whether it can be matched or not. to go together. But if an engineer's drawings are not used by others, even good tools cannot play their due role.

So, the first thing to do is to formulate a collaborative process for everyone to follow.

“If you implement a system and your process doesn’t change, then I can say you have failed,” Liu Xiwei said.

How is process improvement going? Song Yun said that IBM once helped a large telecom equipment manufacturer to improve the process of product development. For example, consider how many important decision-making meetings must be done during the period from concept design to final design preparation for a product.

There are many ideas in the beginning, some will not work halfway, and some will fail. For those wrong or outdated solutions, I hope that it will die as soon as possible, because the later the cost will be higher. In the entire development process, this is a slowly closing process.

How to close the middle? There are many decision points. When the R&D process reaches a certain point, when it is necessary to suggest input, who can be invited to make a decision must be clearly defined in the process.

“For example, the early entry of the manufacturing department and the early entry of the procurement department are all defined in these processes. It does not mean that when I think of it, I will call the procurement department and ask if something can help me find a supplier. Instead, at this point, the purchasing department must sign and make joint decisions." Song Yun said. Embed these cross-departmental collaborations into the process. After doing this, consider how to use tools to solidify the process.

PTC has also established its own value roadmap for how it can help companies improve their processes. Start with the business goals of the enterprise, see which business processes it affects, and evaluate which processes need to be improved, adjusted, and which do not need to be adjusted.

In short, enterprises need to remind themselves when implementing PLM, not to set the system implementation as the goal, the real goal is to improve operational performance.

All departments need to reach a consensus. The change of the process may involve different departments of the enterprise. At this time, the support of the leaders is required, and each department needs to reach a consensus: the problem to be solved this time is the problem of the whole enterprise, and it is also the problem that my department needs to cooperate with. The leaders of the enterprise should let everyone understand that sometimes even if the department makes a small sacrifice in the short term, how many times the success rate of the enterprise's research and development can be increased, and how much profit it can help the enterprise create in a year, which is beneficial to everyone in the long run. Departments are relatively easy to accept.

Liu Tonglong said: "Before an enterprise implements PLM, first, project participants and associates should have a relatively consistent understanding of the problems that the enterprise needs to solve, the expectations and goals of the implementation of the PLM system, resources, and personnel allocation. In this way, in the future process changes, the higher coordination of various departments will greatly improve the project efficiency."

Product life cycle management covers the entire process from the birth of a product to its demise, just like a person's life cycle. It is rich and colorful, and the systems and ideas contained in PLM are also very rich. Specific to individual cases, each enterprise has its own emphasis according to its own situation. For example, the hotspots such as global collaborative product development, lean product development, and environmentally friendly product development that are currently attracting more attention can actually be answered in PLM.

It can be said that PLM provides a new idea for manufacturing. It is of great significance not only to an enterprise, but also to the Chinese manufacturing industry, which is currently undergoing transformation. In the past, China was positioned as a global manufacturing center, and now it is in the process of transforming from manufacturing to research and development. In this process, PLM can show its talents.

Why PLM focuses on R&D

Although PLM involves all aspects of the product life cycle, in practical applications, its focus is on the early stages of the product life cycle, that is, the design and R&D stages. "Because, no matter the characteristics of the product, how it is put into manufacturing, and how it is recycled, all related links are research and development." Liu Xiwei said.

For example, according to the requirements of an environmental protection directive in Europe, when an ordinary electronic product is disassembled and recycled, its recyclable parts shall not be less than 75% by weight, so who decides 75% recyclable or 80% recyclable? It's a R&D decision. For example, if a metal shell is painted, its recycling process will take a lot longer, because it must melt the paint surface through a high-temperature process, and harmful emissions will be generated during the melting process. If you want to recycle quickly and environmentally, then in the design Do not design the process of painting metal surfaces.

For enterprises, doing things right in the early stage will make things easier in the later stage. If a mistake is made during R&D, the error will become bigger and bigger in the later stages of the life cycle, and it will be done later. Repair costs can increase significantly and even become unmanageable. Therefore, for most enterprises, the early part of the product life cycle is the part where the enterprise invests more energy to pay attention.