In today’s consumer oriented environment order to manufacturing systems becomes more and more popular. I see growing number of customers are interesting in the organization of “order to manufacturing” processes. Looking on exiting PLM systems, I’d like to discuss what are potential pitfalls in selecting PLM for such as “order to manufacturing” organizations.
Pitfall #1 Product Configuration Modeling
A typical order to manufacturing system need to be “configuration oriented” in front of potential customers or sale persons in the field. The first and the most important for such as the situation is to organize support for handling of configurations in multiple systems – sales, manufacturing, design and product management. This is not an easy task. Most of the systems have a very specific way to support configuration and because of difference between these implementations engineering, manufacturing and sales systems may not fit.
Pitfall #2 MRP synchronization
In order to handle smooth processes of orders and manufacturing, be able to synchronize data between CAD/PLM and ERP/MRP systems is crucial. So, to think about bi-directional data integration and synchronization between PLM and ERP must in your checklist.
Pitfall #3 Cross System ECO management
Because of cross-system organization, ECO organization needs to be fully supported in the same way in all systems and automated. Manual and half-manual ECO processes and monitoring probably will not be enough.
Pitfall #4 Support Organization
Because of very diverse product organization, you will need to be able to get up-to-order/configuration product information for support organization. It will require global information access between multiple systems in different organization departments.
I’m confident, future of manufacturing will be even more customer-oriented and to manage order to manufacturing processes will become even more important. What is your opinion on that? Do you face similar problems in your organizations? What type of the solutions you found as an efficient to handle that.
Best, Oleg
