PLM, BOM, Excel – How To Make It Right?

Oleg,
Send them a bill. I think it is a clever move on their part. Especially since they are focused on smaller companies that hopefully one day will move to a PLM. As you pointed out most PLM vendors offer some sort of export functionailty to Excel. Windchill still is very cumbersome in this operation from my experience. I can’t help but wonder if I am missing something when the technical resources go through numerous steps to export to Excel. Obviously the big drawback is there is no way to control the information once it migrates to Excel but again as you point out everyone like the low cost. PLM vendors should take note and do more optimization or develop alternatives to render it unecessary.

All enterprise solutions are, in the end, replacements for Excel :).

I’m fond of this saying: the hallmark of a broken enterprise business process is a proliferation of excel spreadsheets.

I think apparel PLM solutions are the closest to what you describe. Because of the wide variety of data that is tracked, many Apparel PLM solutions looks like hierarchical or nested Excel managing BOMs of seasons, products, colors, materials, measurements and so on.

Some quality planning solutions do this as well. Dyadem, my prior employer, has a product called Stature which is insanely configurable and operates like a hierarchical spreadsheet with a lightweight data-model constraining it. It’s pretty amazing for taking the simplicity of a spreadsheet and scaling it to enterprise needs.

We took a different approach to managing BOMs via Excel by creating a Sharepoint-based application that is automatically fed BOM structure from Teamcenter and uses a spreadsheet control tied to a Sharepoint list. This methodology elminates the requirement to manually reconcile the BOM while providing the cross-functional organization the ability to manage thier own attributes without file share issues. We’ve posted case studies about the solution at mercuryplm.com.

As an tier one EMS provider, our PLM needs differ from an OEMs and our PLM system is configured to have the the ability to quickly digest and understand all of our customers bill of materials formats; txt, csv, Excel, XML, etc … Jennifer’s comment on consistency is the only thing we request from our customers – we find with established customers there is enough complexity in interpreting the business rules in the average BOM that the parsing of the format itself. That complexity drives our decision to have developed automation in the parsing so we can consistently apply the business logic.

Oleg – thanks for your response. It’s actually an interesting combination of many different situations; a) customer has a set of business rules configured in their system, and they want us to audit against their own rules to make sure their process/tools are working effectively; b) customer has a set of business rules but it is not configured in their PLM system, and have asked us, as their supplier, to perform these audit rules on their behalf; c) we recognize issues with data integrity and build our own rules, based on our experience, to improve the incoming quality to a level we are comfortable with to ensure our own efficiency in executing for our customers. Our EMS (electronic manufacturing services) business, which our PLM system supports, margins are razor thin so we need to be ultra-effiicient thus we have made significant investments in configuring our PLM tool to perform the configuring I am describing as every BOM error caught downstream in our purchasing or manufacturing processes can have significant impacts on our profitability.

Oleg I expect even companies that have the most sophisticated PLM tools are still heavy Excel users. What do you think? The reason for this has to do with the type of management required over the life time of an part. What I mean by this is in the front end of the process the team is more interested in rapid change and flexibility and therefore they have not established their part in PLM, which means they are tracking their parts in Excel. I will go on to define front end of the process to be upwards of 80% or 90% of the overall design process. This means PLM is used in the last 10% to 20% of the development timeline. I will go on to say that even during manufacturing the team is still using Excel for part and change tracking. I am not saying they release in excel, of course they release in their PLM or BOM tool. But if the team is charged with implementing a set of changes and therefore they need to track what is being done against the objective then I expect the team has an excel file that is tracking each part undergoing a change. Once the work is done, excel goes away and the part is released using PLM.

The facts are PLM tracks results. PLM has been created to manage very complex relationships, configurations and versions and therefore is not effective at tracking work or helping people relate and communicate (I remember FORD saying at COFES this year “People do not work in these tools”). If we look at the evolution of the product development market we see that the market focused on “define” tools for 20+ years (ECAD, MCAD, FEA…). These are tools that help people capture what they are thinking in a faster and more complete manner (value prop = TTM and Cost). During the tail end of the define portion of the market there was a push to collaboration which petered out with little to no value being provided. The next market phase focused on “control” based tools (PDM, PLM, BOM…), which is a market phase that has been around about 15 years with some overlap with the define phase of the market. Again collaboration has tried and failed during this market phase. The only new personal productivity tools of any significant market size that we have seen in recent years are the product documentation tools like 3DVIA Composer. But these tools have been somewhat pushed to be subservient to the PLM solutions, or a feature of PLM (to the extent this is true it is a mistake, as these tools target non PLM users and provide a massive value to individual who do this work, without being tied to PLM).

If we look at the define segment of the market we do not see much new there. If we look at the control segment of the market we again do not see much new. So what is the next value opportunity and market segment? I expect the new segment to also target TTM and Cost. If you back away and look at what define and control tools have done you will see that they have provided great value of TTM and Cost but they have not changed how people manage work, connect to each other or relate to the parts they are designing. TTM and Cost improvement will be provided through a new segment. This new market segment is about people and how they connect and manage their work and the solutions in this market segment are called Enterprise Social Systems for Manufacturing.

The tools are what they are and just dropping a few extra “socail” features onto tools like PLM will not solve the problem of how people work or how people connect in the enterprise. Take the simple case where an engineer connects with a marketing guy… the marketing guy will never be a PLM user. ESS is a new enterprise solution that addresses how people work and connect.

Just scanning the Arena post, it misses what i think is the main reason for Excel (and Access) – reporting. PLM systems are fantastic at consuming information but they have poor reporting capabilities, or they have expensive and complex reporting capabilities. An export to Access or Excel means all those ‘can you show me it this way?’ requests can be accommodated quickly and without asking IT to create a new report.

I am not sure it matters how many. That said I expect they will not have that many. But being true web solutions users will be able to take feeds from one into another. The more important question is “What makes a social platform effective / valuable in the enterprise”?

People certainly manage more than one channel. I bet you email, IM, maybe BBM, Facebook, Linkedin, Blog, read feeds and maybe one or two more and besides how many email addresses do you have…

On the personal level, I agree with you. In the enterprise, as I can see, people have a tendency to unified their communication channels.