Mobility in PLM: Getting the Definition Right

In continuation of my previous blog and huge demand from folks across to know details on mobility, I decided that it is time to tell the story. Honestly, I was planning to publish this part sometime next week.

A fortnight ago, I was conducting a session on Mobility for Product Lifecycle Management. While I was preparing for the session, I thought of doing a search on the terms which define mobility for PLM. Checked up in Google trends and results are published .

What caught my attention was increase in interest for similar looking terms and change of interest over period of time. Interestingly, PLM Mobile is the term which is getting attention (increase of 35% over time) and the one which I choose ‘PLM Mobility’ seems to have zero records. Well, this did not discourage me as I still could not figure out the right definition behind most searched terms i.e. ‘Mobile PLM’ and ‘PLM Mobile’. Hence, I rest my case here for the term which I think rightly defines what we expect from PLM and Mobility i.e. ‘PLM Mobility’.

To understand PLM Mobility, we first have to start from defining what Enterprise Mobility is and then see how PLM Mobility fits. Yes, this is how we need to start rather than looking directly at PLM level and kill the essence. The reason for that is very simple. PLM is an enterprise level not an IT initiative. Although, how different it may sound to people and some may argue that PLM is an IT function, I must say that they need to take a step back and look at PLM ecosystem. PLM has a business case which is enabled by IT not the other way round.

Further, PLM enables product innovation and adding mobility to it effectively means enabling mobility in product. Now, this is interesting because mobility in product has many dimensions and most of them are based on business and strategic roadmap of an enterprise. So moving from top to bottom, Enterprise Mobility makes sense to be the right starting point to define PLM Mobility - which is at Level 3 as shown in picture below:

Level 1- Enterprise Mobility: To put it in simple terms, it is about converging business process, technology, and people on a mobile device (Tablets & Smartphone) either provided by an enterprise or by BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) policy. BTW, we should not confuse laptops and notebooks as mobile devices. Laptops and notebooks are considered portable device and not mobile devices.

Level 2- Enterprise Product Mobility: is innovating product by extending internal view and capturing external view via mobile device (Tablets & Smartphones). We extend the Product information which is stored in various systems to internal and external collaborating partners in Enterprise Product mobility.

Level 3- Enterprise PLM Mobility: is about developing & managing product’s life cycle via mobile device (Tablets & Smartphones). We extend the data that is stored in current PLM system to mobile devices. Native apps provided by the PLM Vendor can be classified as Enterprise PLM Mobility. These apps have limited use cases and focus on key out of box process approvals and consumption of data. Organizations have not fully adopted these native apps as these out of box use cases do not meet the organizations product development processes.

So I hope with this structure PLM Mobility will find its due credit in organizations who are thinking about it. Well, the business case for PLM Mobility needs to be envisioned because as organizations mature, new thinking has to seep in. 

Let me know what you think!

Product Innovation is getting attention..!!

Last week, I attended my 2^nd Product Innovation Conference (http://us.picongress.com/) in Chicago. This year’s conference focused more on Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) than Product Innovation. Or, I should say it was portrayed as if having PLM is in itself sufficient for Product Innovation. This is of course not true. Product Innovation is about letting innovation come from any aspect of product development, whether it is customer feedback which forces you to think differently, supplier’s new IP driven part which would revolutionize product, design engineers working on completely different – never heard before – design  and feature set or an idea which sparked out during a conversation over coffee with friends. All this have no relation to whatsoever with PLM, except the fact that PLM can help manage, organize and track this information, once stored. The conference did have a few participants talking on Product Innovation. Overall the conference was a huge success with so many insights into Product Development across various industries that made me write about it.

Day 1 - The key note presentation was led by the Commissioner and CIO for City of Chicago, where she talked about collaboration between cities, counties and communities and how they rely on expertise developed by each other when there are limited resources (human and financial). She talked about future of technology and mayor’s vision to use data analytics, mobility and social platforms to take information closer to society. Very impressive indeed!

The presentation by SVP of ETAC AB where he talked about 12 advises on changing status of PLM from mere an IT function to Enterprise PLM. His insight as to why most of PLM projects overrun and are not successful is because PLM is perceived as IT project and not business transformation program and hence a lack of alignment between IT & business.

Pharmaceutical companies shared insights into their product development facts. It was interesting to note the amount of investment needed to bring a new product is over 1 billion and with over 90 % failure rate at stage 3 (which is one of test stages before FDA approval). The best part was the future perspective where medicines will be about personalization, based on our body structure and weight. The rest of Day 1 had sessions spread across industries ranging from process centric, to manufacturing to automotive to pharmaceutical and so on.

Day 2 - The key note presentation by the Director at New Harvest was an eye opener. She talked about cell cultured leather and cultured meat which will change the future about meat and leather. The cultured meat (beef) is created by extracting & harvesting naturally occurring stem cells from living cows and requires only 1% of the land, 4% of water, 50% of the energy than farmed meat.  She also gave an example of a company using plant extract as a substitute for egg for making mayonnaise, which made it vegan. The company instead of marketing at vegan / vegetarian mayonnaise is marketing as cholesterol free mayonnaise as it could target a larger market segment. Amazing!

There were also some new vendors at the conference who participating for the first time. Two of vendors caught my attention; the first was a software vendor on Engineering Knowledge Lifecycle Management which talked about preventing knowledge lost during product development and reusing it next time.  And the second vendor was on PLM Mobility demonstrating some of the apps built for Engineering and Retail, Footwear and Fashion and how they are being acknowledged and demanded by clients.

One thing that was missed at conference was lack of any case studies / presentation about Organization Change Management (OCM). OCM is mostly overlooked on any Product Development business transformation programs.

Well, I was conducting a think tank session on ‘Enterprise Mobility’. We defined “what is mobility” and proposed an initial maturity model. There was consensus that Mobility is not another jargon or fad but reality near term. Stay tuned for more on this.