Recently, Graham McCall at AESSiS wrote a pretty good blog post titled “Why Some People Don’t Like PLM”. It’s a good re-post here and figured I’d include my own 2 cents as well. First, here’s Graham’s perspective:
I thought it might be a good idea to examine why quite a few people don’t like PLM.I highly recommend clicking over to his original post and reading the Comments as well because there’s a good discussion that builds on the points he makes.I mean on the face of it the case for PLM is pretty clear. After all, engineers, designers and product developers (in fact anybody involved in product development) spend maybe 50-60% of their time on ‘information management’ and a much smaller percentage creating products. So why the push back?
I’ve heard lots of complaints about PLM. ‘It’s too expensive’ (I’ve got some sympathy with this line but costs are falling thanks to new technologies and business models like Aras), ‘It’s too complicated’ (yep, some solutions are indeed bizarrely complicated...way too many buttons...but again they’re getting better). ‘It will stop me being creative’ which is the idea being that PLM puts you on railway tracks and you can’t deviate from them therefore you will be less innovative (indeed with some older PLM technologies where you can’t get good alignment between a rapidly evolving process and the PLM technology this might be true..)
But I think most of the above complaints are increasingly invalid. I think the bottom line is that PLM requires people to change their behaviors. This is hard to do. Just look around you. People continue to do all kinds of things that are bad for themselves and others. And managing information poorly, not sharing it, not organizing it etc...seems pretty benign compared with some things I could mention... and yet it costs organizations billions.
People don’t want to change despite obvious benefits to the wider organization. Why?
So I’m thinking it all boils down to incentives. The incentives for the organization to get a better handle on product information are huge (and well documented...elsewhere). But the incentives for one person, a cog in the machine, to change their behavior? Well they might be pretty low. Indeed if you are a highly experienced engineer or technician you might derive much of your soft power by ‘bargaining’ with the information you hold. In that context, why would you spend that extra time codifying information for PLM and then giving it away and giving away power at the same time. The negative effects of this hoarding are not felt by you. It’s one of those negative externalities economists talk about...the costs of your actions are picked up by others.
So any really successful PLM initiative must change behavior (perhaps the hardest thing of all to do) probably by creating incentives that work. And by incentives I don’t mean education. This is different. Worthwhile for sure...but much less effective.
So I’m interested in finding out what incentives work in the context of a PLM initiative. Real hard edged incentives. What’s your experience?
As we look at the state of affairs in PLM, it seems like Graham is on the right track. There’s a misalignment between the people that make the PLM system decision (i.e. Executives), the people selling the PLM system (i.e. Salesmen) and the people that actually use the PLM solution (i.e. end users across the company).
There’s little incentive for the people that matter to use the system. And the PLM providers don’t really even try to address these issues because they really only care about the “decision maker” (those Executives who never logon). And those Executives have been burned one too many times by the enterprise software salesmen that promise dramatic productivity increases, ease of use and fast implementations (it’s the same pitch whether PLM, PDM, ERP, SCM, CRM… you name it). Oleg had a good post on a similar point as well on his Daily PLM Think Tank blog that was titled “PLM and A Single Point Of Disagreement”.
At the end of the day everyone has different motivations, none of which are aligned.
What if…
- the PLM provider actually wanted people to use the system?
- only got paid when people used it?
- went out of their way to make it so that people wanted to use it?
This is something we think about all the time. Our format is based on adoption (as opposed to ‘deal closing’). Something to consider when you’re putting together you’re company’s PLM strategy.
More on this in the future... stay tuned.
What’s your take? Are we stuck with “impossible to use” PLM systems forever? Or do you want a PLM solution that you can’t stop using?