In Episode 82 of Razorleaf’s Stay Sharp podcast, PLM At Scale: The Digital Engineering Journey, co-hosts Jonathan Scott and Juliann Grant build on a previous episode—Scaling PLM Worldwide: What Works and What Fails—to tackle the complexities and challenges involved in implementing PLM for large organizations. They’re joined by Bob Maffia from BAE Systems, a multinational aerospace, military and information security company. Bob brings to the conversation 30 years of experience in global technical support and enterprise application development, as well as, Juliann notes, “a unique perspective around the intersection of business and technology.”
The Size of the Challenge
Bob’s 10-person team is tasked with supporting several thousand U.S. users on a diverse set of products that includes integrations with other enterprise systems. “We’re responsible for the complete 3DEXPERIENCE environment on top of the IT components we request,” he says. One of the biggest challenges for a large organization is that it’s likely to have formed through mergers and acquisitions, and is therefore “an amalgam … of many different mindsets and processes. The question becomes, when you come together, can you jettison all of the preexisting ones or do you attempt to support myriad processes? And I think we strike a balance.”
Moving to Large-Scale Digital Engineering
“The challenge is for companies of size to figure out which applications they need to integrate, what those requirements are, what the right data and the right time is to do it,” Bob says. “I think, with a large enterprise, you need to be able to break down the work effort and not get hung up in doing everything all at once.” He notes that the depth of experience his own team has in managing PLM makes it easier to take what they already have and implement it. Their knowledge of the company and the systems also helps their timing—from knowing the right time to introduce a capability, rather than doing everything all at once, to understanding when data needs to flow from one application or process to another.
Something else that can be more complex in a larger organization is getting the right business leadership involved. “When you look at digital engineering, you want to bring in many different processes and tools—but I think that can be overwhelming,” Bob admits. The first task he suggests is balancing a long-running roadmap with the need to pick one part of a process and prove it out. The other piece of the puzzle is securing stakeholder buy-in early. “If you’re going to have a project lasting three, six, nine, 25 months, it’s going to be very easy to have that derailed or slowed,” he says. “It’s so easy, six months into it, for a stakeholder to show up that hadn’t been around before and throw a wrench into the works. So stakeholder agreement, clear requirements early on, and a reasonable size task to prove it out are critical.”
Perspective on the PLM Space
One of the positives that Bob has seen in digital engineering and the PLM industry is that companies, like his own, have knit together functional frameworks to meet the demand for digital engineering. What surprises him is that organizations mostly focus on connecting PLM to other systems—ERP or MES, for example—without recognizing the integration potential inherent in a PLM platform. “You might have a ton of opportunities inside of a PLM system that you’re not leveraging,” he says. “I think they would’ve been further along in their digital engineering journey.”
Bob goes on to describe what else he thinks can be improved on in the vendor-customer relationship. First is software openness, allowing organizations to connect different platforms together to facilitate digital engineering. Second is better support for upgrades or transitions to new releases and new architecture. As Jonathan notes, we want software vendors on the leading edge of digital engineering to keep evolving, but we also need their help to get from the old iteration of models to the new. We need “tools and automation to make upgrades and transformations to new paradigms easier,” Bob says. “If a company is going to evolve their architecture, they need to have robust support to be able to migrate quickly with maybe some semi-automation. It shouldn’t have to be a major data migration effort.”
Learn More About Large-Scale PLM Implementations
The full podcast contains more discussion and details on a variety of topics, including why Bob’s advice to companies just starting out in digital engineering is to just get going, how customers can make their systems more sustainable through fewer customizations, why he’d like to see PLM vendors offer more support and ideas for just-in-time data migrations, and more.
Be sure to check out Stay Sharp Episode 82: PLM At Scale: The Digital Engineering Journey and join us each week for a new podcast.
