If innovation is the 
highest priority, then integration is not far behind. Integrating the business processes and information flow across the enterprise and the supply chain is a key component of enabling PLM. Many of the benefits from a PLM implementation come from better communication between departments and trading partners and the integration of different people and perspectives on the new product introduction processes. An enterprise level view of the design process promises to result in a design that takes into account the strengths and possibilities of all departments and business partners involved, and a design that can be efficiently and effectively introduced into current operations.
While some business processes rely solely on the PLM system, others cross the line between innovation and execution. Let's explore the engineering change process, for example. Assuming that some simple file transfers between ERP and PLM are in place, it is a relatively easy task to populate the PLM system with the current Bill of Material or Recipe, if it is not already there. As the new design is developed, many tools provide a compare utility that will show the net change between the new and old structure. That defines one important aspect of the engineering change, the changes in materials used in production.
The next aspect of change is the timing of when the change should be implemented. In order to plan the execution of the engineering change, information about levels and locations of inventory, costs, planned production, planned purchases and current demands for the product must be taken into account. This information resides in the ERP application, and is critical to making the optimal decision on when to introduce an engineering change. Without that information, the impact of making this change based on a set date, the date when existing inventory is consumed, or for a particular production run could not be understood.
Integration is more than just transferring data between two systems. Integration requires that both information and business processes be supported across multiple systems (see What's Wrong With Applications Business Processes Cross Application Boundaries). One of the key challenges of integrating PLM with other enterprise applications is semantics. "Semantics" is a term that is sometimes not very well understood, but a semantics problem could be summarized by the phrase "It's not that I didn't hear the words that you spoke, I just don't understand what you meant". Different systems have different ways of representing concepts, and associate different meaning with their data. In order to integrate systems, you have to know more than how the data are stored; you have to know what it means. While standards efforts like RosettaNet for the discrete industries and ISA S95 for the process industries have helped to standardize data structures, they still do not guarantee semantic compatibility.
highest priority, then integration is not far behind. Integrating the business processes and information flow across the enterprise and the supply chain is a key component of enabling PLM. Many of the benefits from a PLM implementation come from better communication between departments and trading partners and the integration of different people and perspectives on the new product introduction processes. An enterprise level view of the design process promises to result in a design that takes into account the strengths and possibilities of all departments and business partners involved, and a design that can be efficiently and effectively introduced into current operations.While some business processes rely solely on the PLM system, others cross the line between innovation and execution. Let's explore the engineering change process, for example. Assuming that some simple file transfers between ERP and PLM are in place, it is a relatively easy task to populate the PLM system with the current Bill of Material or Recipe, if it is not already there. As the new design is developed, many tools provide a compare utility that will show the net change between the new and old structure. That defines one important aspect of the engineering change, the changes in materials used in production.
The next aspect of change is the timing of when the change should be implemented. In order to plan the execution of the engineering change, information about levels and locations of inventory, costs, planned production, planned purchases and current demands for the product must be taken into account. This information resides in the ERP application, and is critical to making the optimal decision on when to introduce an engineering change. Without that information, the impact of making this change based on a set date, the date when existing inventory is consumed, or for a particular production run could not be understood.
Integration is more than just transferring data between two systems. Integration requires that both information and business processes be supported across multiple systems (see What's Wrong With Applications Business Processes Cross Application Boundaries). One of the key challenges of integrating PLM with other enterprise applications is semantics. "Semantics" is a term that is sometimes not very well understood, but a semantics problem could be summarized by the phrase "It's not that I didn't hear the words that you spoke, I just don't understand what you meant". Different systems have different ways of representing concepts, and associate different meaning with their data. In order to integrate systems, you have to know more than how the data are stored; you have to know what it means. While standards efforts like RosettaNet for the discrete industries and ISA S95 for the process industries have helped to standardize data structures, they still do not guarantee semantic compatibility.
0 comments:
Post a Comment