PLM stories: Square peg and Round hole

Today I will reflect on the question, “Will OOTB PLM solutions ever succeed?” 

Overall the pitch from PLM vendors is to use OOTB solutions which are touted to be built on “best practices” and sold to enable rapid deployment of PLM across enterprises product lifecycle.

Please read the blogs on the topic   Debunking PLM Myths by Stephen Porter and  OOTB versus Open source by Oleg.

I liked the following passage by Stephen 

“…Out-of-the-box started as an initiative to compensate long, complicated and expensive implementation cycle. The fundamental idea was simple- you pay more, but you can take a system and work now. One of the reasons it wasn't successful is in the nature of manufacturing organization."

Stephen suggests to take the OOTB pitch with a grain of salt and adopt a more pragmatic view of what will work for your organization's needs.

Reality check:  Square peg and round hole

We see PLM rollouts struggle to meet its objective despite of years of IT investment. So called “Best practices” cannot meet the dynamics of product development. Question is whether we are trying to force a square peg in round hole ?

Today I will examine this question, understanding product development paradigm and try to find reasons why OOTB solutions fail to deliver the promises.

Product development paradigm:

Product development is inherently different than manufacturing activity.  ERP success stories often show the great benefits of IT applied to operational efficiencies. 

Why it is so difficult to apply the similar pattern to PLM?

The picture from book "Product Development Performance" Clark and Fujimoto shows some answers.

Product Development process characterized by Uniqueness, Non -routine and organic nature 

On the contrary, Mass production paradigm is based on repetitive, routine and mechanistic processes. 

This difference throws new light on why IT adoption of PLM is so challenging.

PLM needs “Flexibility” and “Adaptability” 

We cannot imagine what our tomorrow’s products are going to look like. Every project, product structure, team organization will have certain degree of uniqueness that will impact the underlying systems and tools that support it.

That explains why general purpose tools “Excel” and “Mail” or legacy PLM solutions are so deeply entrenched in today’s IT landscape. It takes lot of $$, effort and promises to displace these silos and place a new collaborative PLM platform.

Why excel exceeds? Ultimate flexibility of “excel” is the secret. There is no need to define rules upfront. That is one of the reason as to why excel adoption is so prevalent. A walk across organization floor will show everyone uses different spread sheet to capture, process and report information.

Response from PLM vendors:

Established PLM Vendors have long list of specialized PLM products that are packaged, and configurable solutions. The real question is whether these solutions ever succeed in the real world scenario with demands of uniqueness, flexibility and adoptive environment. An argument to this point is "change" the business process, adopt standardizations across enterprises,etc.  But how much of this is talk and how much is practical ?

Consequence is trying to fit a wrong solution to solve existing problem is so painful that it is better to live with the problem.

Conclusion

Realization to eliminate silos and excel is writing on the wall. Question is the path .. How to achieve it?

New generation PLM products have claimed to be based more open technology and acknowledge this business reality. So may be there is a hope.

 I like the slide from Aaras presentation captured by Oleg. 

Realization of what is hype what can really work with the product development , needs to be understood by enterprises before embarking new PLM programs.

Please share your experiences and viewpoints.

-Mahesh