Thursday, February 7, 2013

How Can You Measure the Value of PLM?

What is the value of your PLM installation? How much value is it providing to the rest of the business? How do your PLM costs stack up against your PLM savings? How will future PLM activities impact your bottom line? Do you know the answers to these questions? The answer for most people is a strident "NO, now go away and stop bothering me"!

Knowing the value of PLM to your business can help in many areas: selling the value to upper management, selling the value to various business organizations, planning your next implementation activity, and maintaining a view on how well you are proceeding relative to your planned PLM value. For all of these reasons, and more, it is important for you to measure PLM value at multiple stages during PLM planning, implementation, and deployment.

The first step is to create a baseline PLM measurement of how you do business today. Use a repeatable methodology that you can rely on to give you information at many stages of your PLM activity (if you don't have one, contact CIMdata; we have one!). How are you doing things today? How much time does it take to search for information, for example? How many steps are involved in implementing changes to a design? There are a whole host of questions you need to answer to create a baseline. This is true whether you are new to PLM, or you have been doing it for several years.

Once the baseline is in place, you can look for areas where you would like PLM to positively impact your business. Start with the "low-hanging fruit" to get the quickest results. Every business is unique, and that is why you must measure YOUR business to get an idea of where to start, or where to continue your PLM implementation efforts. Don't let a PLM vendor tell you what you need and where to start; they do not know YOUR business!

Once you have a methodology in place and a good plan of attack, you can choose metrics that will guide your PLM efforts. Use these metrics to show the value that PLM is bringing to the business. Communicate this information to upper management frequently, and you will soon get a huge raise; and who doesn't want that?

What experiences have you had trying to measure the value of PLM?

- Jim

3 comments:

  1. Where we can get the methodology that CIMdata suggest to measure the PLM impact to the business.

    -Ram

    ReplyDelete
  2. Ram,

    Thanks for the comment! CIMdata has a methodology developed over many years that uses a spreadsheet to track and create reports on all the measured aspects of PLM. Using this spreadsheet is not simple without some guidance, so we come into a company and do some training on how to use it, then we leave it with you to do the work, if you like. Or, we can help with the initial measurement activities to create your baseline.

    Cheers,

    -Jim

    ReplyDelete
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