The Step-by-Step Journey to a Digital Thread: Stay Sharp Episode 114

In Stay Sharp Episode 114, Building a Digital Thread One Problem at a Time: Sea Box’s PLM Story, co-hosts Jonathan Scott and Juliann Grant talk with John Salyers and Korey Greene from Sea Box, a Razorleaf customer that transforms shipping containers for a variety of applications. John, who’s led Sea Box’s PLM integration efforts for the last six years, and Korey, a mechanical engineer and PLM system admin, offer podcast listeners a case study of Sea Box’s organic journey to product lifecycle management.

John Salyers and Korey Greene tour finished containers in the Sea Box yard.

On the Road to PLM

In 2018 when John started at Sea Box, the company was using an in-house Microsoft Access database as their engineering part number (EPN) system, despite nearly daily crashes. Sea Box began working with an integrator (not Razorleaf) to find a robust PLM system, but after a few months, John says, “The project was dead in the water.” At that point, he took over the project-lead position, searched for a new partner, and found Razorleaf. The new challenge? “We’d already sunk a lot of time and therefore cost resources into this project due to our failed initial standup,” John says. Sea Box’s approach changed from “let’s do it exactly right” to “just get something stood up.”

With Razorleaf’s support, Sea Box spent a year implementing a system that basically replicated their EPN system—minus the crashes. The good news was that they began exploring other PLM modules and working to add capability that Sea Box could definitely use. John reflects, “This became an opportunity for us to say, Hey, all right, now over time we can expand, start to add things.” Jonathan notes their experience proves, “You can start with something simple. As long as it’s a business need and you’ve got to get it done, that’s what will motivate and drive things.”

At this point, the bad news for Sea Box was they realized the out-of-the-box Aras Innovator configuration might actually have been a better solution than the custom code Sea Box carefully built into their PLM system. John cautions other manufacturers about falling into the same trap of trying to make PLM mirror what you have in place. “Don’t be afraid. Just because something looks a little different. People can adapt to that,” he says. They now recognize the cost of rushing to replace the current system instead of starting with a vision of where they want to be and thinking about how a new system could help them get there. Korey notes, “In a lot of ways it sometimes feels like we’re trying to change a flat tire on a moving car. You have an entire engineering department that’s trying to use these tools while you’re trying to make changes and updates to it and test stuff.”

Slowly Building the Digital Thread

As Sea Box settled into their new PLM system, they began identifying major pain points in product operations. The first was CAD file organization so that files had standard names and were searchable. “This is something that we struggle with day to day,” John says. “And an example of, hey, we pay for this subscription. There are tools we can utilize in here to try and simplify that.” They solved that problem, which exposed the next pain point: creating BOMs and connecting to an ERP system. Implementing those processes pointed out the improvements that could be made to Sea Box’s revisioning process, and so on.

Korey explains, “Now the CAD connector pushes all that CAD data to PLM. So not only do I know what the revision level is, I also can see the model and I can see the drawing. I can see the history of this part and how it’s evolved in one place.” As they kept tackling new problems and adding capabilities, John and Korey were actually creating Sea Box’s digital thread. “Each step along the way you guys saw a problem and said, well, I have something that’ll solve it. Lemme just wire that up and connect it and get that into my process,” Jonathan says. “Basically you guys were building out a digital thread as you went. You weren’t calling it that, but it was that connection of the pieces that needed to go together in a certain way.”

Learn More About Sea Box’s PLM Story

The full podcast contains more discussion and details on a variety of topics, including why John says they touched the hot stove of PLM implementation, how the power of the community they found at the Razorleaf Aras User Group Conference gave them new insights on their PLM problems, how the multiple perspectives John and Korey brought to Sea Box’s PLM implementation made their system stronger, and more.

Be sure to check out Stay Sharp Episode 114: Building a Digital Thread One Problem at a Time: Sea Box’s PLM Story and join us each week for a new podcast.