By Peter Schroer, President of Aras
Change management is the toughest thing inside of PLM. It's also the most important.
How important? It's about the patient not dying, the plane not crashing, the missile landing where it is supposed to. You get the idea.
Take safety out of the equation, and enterprise change management is where companies can lose all their profit margin. It's as simple as ordering a truck load of the wrong parts, choosing a "fix" that isn't cost-effective, taking too long to make a change, or making a change that engineering wanted but didn't make sense to manufacturing and/or the customer.
Real change management goes beyond the instruction to make the change and answers the questions: Who ran the cost numbers on the change? Who validated the change? Approved it? Does the customer agree with the change? If you're regulated, how about the FDA?
If all you're managing is MCAD files, you've got things like tooling and fixtures with a slow steady rate of change. You'd be hard pressed to manage all that manually, but you might be able to get by with a PDM system.
Add in electronics and the rate of change quickens. There's no tooling, so you can send a circuit board change to your contract manufacturer today and tomorrow your circuit boards are coming out different.
Now add software, where you have firmware changes happening daily, even hourly, and they're being cut into the units on the shop floor on the fly. You literally have continuous change.
How do you harmonize that into your build process for real products?
There are quite a few PDM / PLM companies that would like there to be one standard out of the box change process. Not because it's good for their customers, but because it makes their lives as software developers easier. It's infinitely harder to create a system that implements the customer's change process correctly and fast.
Many of these providers offer only linear workflows. The problem is I've never seen a company with a linear workflow. They're always branching, looping and doubling back on themselves. That's a real customer process for getting a change validated and then communicated out to the organization. It's not simple. It's probably the hardest thing to get right in PLM.
These vendors will tell you their systems are based on "industry best practices". The fact is there is no such thing as the best change process. The "best" really depends on the company, their customers, their product lines, their compliance mandates, etc.
Aras is the first PLM solution with a whole series of out of the box options for change management. We're also the first PLM company honest enough to tell you that there's no silver bullet and you shouldn't expect to use any of them without optimizing for your specific process requirements.
They're not hard coded system solutions, they're application templates. We've captured change processes from different industry standards - aerospace, automotive, high tech, consumer products, FDA, etc. We have 3 that come in the initial Aras install today. We might have 5 or 10 a year from now. It's a matter of creating accelerators to help companies with specific practices.
What makes Aras unique is that we've taken the business rule behaviors of change workflows and driven them down into the core of our platform so you can implement a secure, validated, very fast change process that is unique for your business then, typical Aras, we ensure that it is upgradeable and we do the upgrades for you.
In the real world, a company may be running 3 different change management processes under a single umbrella. The software guys may be operating at an entirely different pace than the team working on hardware, with their own rules and different workflow. With Aras, there's one system level change process that incorporates everything and keeps the configurations correct.
Learn more about Aras Change Management and the out of the box options we offer.
Product Change Management: Know Your Options Wednesday, June 19, 2013 - 11:00 AM Eastern Time Registration: http://aras.com/plm/001936