Why Manufacturers Should Look to PLM To Boost Collaboration in a Remote World

Product lifecycle management (PLM) software delivers new value to manufacturing executives in the new business landscape, helping them stay agile and competitive in remote, decentralized settings. Mark Reisig, Director of Product Marketing at Aras, explains how PLM software goes beyond spreadsheets and enterprise workplace apps to help teams become more collaborative and responsive in a WFH world. 

The key to an organization’s product life cycle management (PLM) ecosystem is collaboration. The most successful manufacturers possess a collaborative capability to create, manage, and disseminate their product data across design domains, their supply chain, and the product’s lifecycle. Due to the distributed nature of global manufacturing, the ability to accelerate how we work together to innovate, design, manufacture, and maintain quality products is critical. Our ability to collaborate across different domains has also become increasingly important in dealing with the growing complexity of the smart, connected products we make.  

The pandemic, which has forced many of us to work remotely, has amplified the need to collaborate within the context of the products we create. We’re no longer within walking distance of many of our teammates, increasing the need to collaborate on the products we create from anywhere. 

Progressive manufacturers utilize PLM to empower their employees with collaboration in context across their digital thread, with digital twins of their assets in the field, and with enhanced visualization to achieve greater levels of efficiency and team productivityOpens a new window .

Learn More: How AI Can Help Businesses Survive the Shift to Remote Work

Change Management

The most traditional way to communicate change is with formal CM2 change management and dynamic, intelligent workflows. In many companies, these have expanded well beyond engineering changes, including manufacturing changes, supplier changes, changes to parts, CAD and BOM, changes to documents, new part creation, and more. While change management is at the core of a robust PLM system, the ability to socially collaborate in context has extended far beyond.

Collaboration in Context

We’re all accustomed to using many social collaboration tools, such as Microsoft Teams, Zoom, as well as our cell phones. While these tools help to bring us together, they can also be a distraction. Many teams use email and spreadsheets to relay information, which are disconnected from the product, prone to error, and takes effort to connect and reconnect “the dots.” What they lack is context, which is why PLM has become so imperative. 

PLM allows teams to securely collaborate inside the context of the products we create with our teammates, which eliminates divergent conversation and dramatically improves our efficiency. While socially collaborating, we have the connectivity to related items such as simulation, CAD models, quality reports, service bulletins, requirements, or even parameters inside requirements that enables teams to make better decisions collectively. 

Today, any global user in any discipline or work function, with role level access, can take part in a discussion in whatever social channels the PLM vendor provides. This may include the ability to be involved in discussions within multiple PLM applications used with engineering, manufacturing, R&D, quality, maintenance, and others and cross-discipline users concurrently working in different design domains and even cross-company collaboration. 

This allows for threaded discussions in the context of some aspects of the product in question and provides a record of the discussion and linkage between the social interaction and the PLM item. At a future date, if you want to understand why a decision was made, you are a click away from understanding, with powerful features such as “where used,” “bookmarks,” “following,” and other features across all PLM applications.

Learn More: Beyond Virtual Meetings: 6 Popular Collaboration Tools to Boost Productivity

Visual Collaboration

Today, the complex products we create have pushed PLM far beyond using native CAD or CAD viewers to collaborate. Users can now drag 3D CAD or 3D PDFs into a visual collaboration discussion and securely collaborate with anyone that has permissions to see the item. 

Since many downstream customers are not CAD users, some PLM vendors are offering the ability to dynamically render the product, which can originate from multiple CAD products, and allow teammates to filter their view based on PLM attributes such as cost, weight, material, date last serviced, or any other attribute. This allows everyone to collaborate visually, regardless of their job function, with any application and anywhere in the life cycle.

Source: Aras

(picture of the robot) – Dynamic Product Navigation View of the product.  This allows users to inspect a product or a portion of the product that was created from multiple CAD products using PLM and attributes users understand with no CAD experience required.

Digital Thread

One of the most important aspects of a PLM system is the Digital Thread that allows users to have visual traceability from any type of item across the lifecycle to all related items at any point in time. On a platform, this is a very user-friendly way to graphically traverse items across the lifecycle and, depending on the vendor, could be in any application, providing greater collaboration, adoption, and efficiencies across the enterprise.

Source: Aras

(picture of digital thread) Graphical Navigation View of the Digital Thread.  This allows users to bi-directionally traverse the digital thread visually.

Industrial Low-Code

Today, some PLM vendors offer industrial low-code platforms that allow users to build applications based on the same rich set of platform services used in the vendor’s PLM applications. Organizations can easily create their resilient applications that are as sophisticated as any PLM vendor’s software and can seamlessly federate or integrate data into existing legacy applications. By doing so, they bring in users that previously had no insight into the PLM ecosystem, thereby creating close resilient connections and greater productivity and efficiency.

Digital Twin

The Digital Twin is another powerful feature of PLM that allows everyone to understand the configuration of the product in the field for predictive maintenance so that the company can react to failure modes more quickly. It allows you to inspect visually and graphically filter a configured up-to-date replica of an as-running asset in the field with traceability and connectivity across your Digital Thread. In addition to benefiting operations, it is also used in engineering and manufacturing to visualize sequences on the shop floor. This empowers everyone across the enterprise, including your partner ecosystem, to work together to resolve issues faster, to become a more predictive company, to innovate faster and with better quality in an efficient closed-loop system.

Closing Thoughts 

In the new reality, where our workforce has shifted from traditional boundaries to working remotely and globally on increasingly complex products, PLM is enabling us to socially connect and collaborate more efficiently with our colleagues in the context of the products we create. It brings awareness to the challenges we as a team face, harness a more transparent, trusting, and innovative culture. It provides clarity for us to make data-driven decisions much faster collectively. PLM platforms empower teams to collaborate more intuitively across discipline domains, up and down the supply chain, and throughout a closed-loop lifecycle. It not only changes how enterprises collaborate and get work done during the pandemic but will also influence the way we work together in the future.