In Episode 73 of Razorleaf’s Stay Sharp podcast, Tips for Selecting a PLM System, co-hosts Jonathan Scott and Juliann Grant are joined by repeat guest, Razorleaf’s Vice President of Sales, Derek Neiding. The trio discuss a topic they all know well: what customers need to consider, evaluate, and watch out for when picking a product lifecycle management (PLM) system.
Getting the Right People Involved
Jonathan jumps into the discussion with a frequent gotcha he’s encountered, “Are people getting the right people in their organization involved?” It’s a fundamental error, for example, to improve output in the department making the decision by 10%, but reduce it by 30% in a different, more profitable part of the business. “There’s generally one group that’s charged with spearheading looking into this new system,” Derek says. “And if you’re not careful, you may just allow that group to run it, lead it, and not get the right people involved.”
Derek goes on to explain why you need all parts of your organization participating: “You need to recognize that the PLM system is going to touch lots of parts of the business. And as it touches those other parts of the business, do we have representatives helping us to evaluate, get their needs out there? If not, we run a real risk of getting a solution that we regret later.” Ultimately, he says, “PLM is a system that’s mimicking what we do for a living, so in order to select the right system, we have to know what we do for a living.”
If it’s crucial to understand what you do today, it’s also important to consider how your company and products might evolve when you’re deciding what system or partner to work with—because you don’t want to have to implement a different system every couple years or watch a vendor go in a completely different philosophical direction than yours. The counterpoint is not to develop analysis paralysis trying to consider every possible outcome. “Clearly you’re spending more time and detail on the near term,” Derek says, “but if you don’t think about the long term, you could end up regretting that in just a few years.”
Consider Your Requirements
Another tip for organizations, Jonathan notes, is planning ahead for “how they’re going to manage their requirements for the system over the course of … picking the PLM and then implementing.” The point is to get everything down in writing so all parties involved can see, discuss, understand, and organize them. He also suggests being careful how you’re describing needs, but to think of them as outcomes. “I see people make the mistake of thinking about the requirements from the perspective of the system,” he says. “What they need is not software. What they need are processes enabled by software and practices, they need data, and they need all the things.” Creating your needs as use cases, while potentially more time-consuming than people want to deal with, has two benefits: helping you pick between multiple systems that will all basically do what you need and helping you to test a system in later stages, to make sure you got the implementation right.
One requirement you can’t overlook is dealing with your data. Your organization will likely want to migrate some or all of your existing data to the new system, and, at some point in the future, you may want to migrate data out of the new system to yet another system. You need to make sure all of that is doable. Derek says planning for the timing, process, and costs of data migration can’t be an afterthought. “What if the system doesn’t have an easy way to get your data migrated in?” he asks. “That could impact go-live timelines, and are those go-live timelines flexible? They may not be.”
Integration and the Digital Thread
Digital threads require integration, which means you also need to evaluate how easily PLM systems will integrate with other systems to facilitate that. “I definitely think that you have to ask yourself, what does that eventual digital thread look like?” Derek says. “What systems do I need to integrate with? Is it one way by directional? How often, real time, batch, those sort of things? Because that that may certainly help us determine the leaders we’re evaluating.”
Learn More About Leveraging Digital Threads
The full podcast contains more discussion and details on a variety of topics, including why you want your uses cases to be specific but also somewhat flexible, what’s the biggest indication of whether a project will succeed or fail, why the cost of a pilot project might be the best investment you can make, and more.
Check out the full conversation in Stay Sharp Episode 73: Tips for Selecting a PLM System, and join us each week for a new podcast.
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