Vendor Accent

Strategy for deployment of effective PLM

Avinash Salelkar stresses the importance of aligning strategies and objectives while deploying a PLM solution

A leading manufacturer of consumer vacuum cleaners spent a significant amount of time and money to implement a PLM system that was supposed to IT enable the entire product development cycle. The implementation was completed on schedule and within budget and the system addressed all user requirements including integration with the other enterprise systems. However, a year later, when the company was ready to tap the growing industrial cleaners market, they realized that their PLM system was not configured to handle the new product type. The company had to overhaul the system and make multiple changes resulting in an extensive investment within a year of implementation.

This may seem farfetched, but is a reasonably common situation that occurs across industries. The key to avoiding such mistakes is to ensure that every change implemented addresses the needs of business goals and growth strategies. If the business goals were known, then the PLM implementation could have catered to it.

Organizations today are continuously evolving and, as a means to grow, are looking at various options, both organic and inorganic. While current strategies are more easily factored into solution build, dealing with imperatives that find their origin in future strategy can become pretty difficult for the IT team. Quite often, even the business teams may not be able to envision the implications of future strategic direction on the way processes and systems need to be built.

Strategy alignment usually happens by accident or intuition and the deployed solution is not too far from expectations. However, if put to a hard test, it may fail to deliver on certain parameters. Quite often, these may be critical areas and may put the future business and growth of the company at risk.

Aligning strategies and objectives provides multiple benefits that help a PLM solution support relevant business processes effectively, enabling the achievement of organizational strategies and goals. A structured strategy alignment exercise provides the PLM solution with a complete list of objectives to be met along with targets for each objective. This serves as a framework that can guide project teams to a common goal.

The first step for strategic alignment is to clearly list out strategies, improvement activities, metrics and breakthrough objectives (3-5 years) and the relationship between them. Organizations could leverage SOT Maps (which link Strategies, Objectives and Targets and enables downward deployment) to understand the linkages of what is sought to be achieved (strategies), how it is sought to be achieved (objectives), and how much is to be achieved (targets). This results in:

Clarity on goals and objectives to be met

Organizational strategies are often fuzzy and it is not clearly evident to downstream teams what actions they need to take (and what they need to achieve) in order to enable the business functions and thus the organization, to achieve its goals. A strategy deployment down the hierarchy helps mitigate ambiguity and brings clarity to the PLM teams, setting clear goals for them removing the need to subsequently (and repeatedly) refer to the upstream strategies.

Traceability

One of the major issues related to the implementation and management of PLM solutions relates to the ability to trace as to why a certain decision was taken under a particular set of circumstances. The SOT Map provides that traceability and allows the management to be able to base decisions on a set of clear objectives and (later, if needed) justify decisions taken during execution.

Building the foundation for initiatives to achieve set goals

Clear objectives and targets are essential for success. What cannot be measured, more often than not, cannot be achieved. The SOT Map lays the foundation for the PLM team to achieve success through the setting of SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Timely) goals. Since these goals are directly linked (through the deployment process) with the goals of the business, they enable the business to achieve its goals.

Alignment across teams

Modern PLM solution situations require multiple teams working (quite often) across geographies and units. In a natural state, these teams tend to align themselves to perceived imperatives and, therefore, sometimes end up at cross-purposes, vying for local optima. The SOT Map provides a one-stop guide on the direction that needs to be taken and is an excellent tool for ensuring alignment and focus among teams working towards a common objective.

Enablement of collaboration across systems and processes

PLM solutions need to integrate with other systems and processes, both enterprise wide and point solutions. In the absence of an aligned strategy, it becomes difficult to resolve issues across systems and processes. The SOT Map provides a baseline for discussions and negotiation across the processes and ensures that the eventually agreed solution is aligned to organizational objectives.

Strategy alignment ensures long term success and justifies the initial investment of time and effort that is needed up-front to develop the SOT Map. It helps avoid downstream indecisiveness and iterative problem resolution, helping save dollars and greatly improve the effectiveness of project teams. This is even more relevant for organizations in multiple businesses or those operating globally as it ensures a comprehensive coverage of business requirements before enabling support through information technology.

Strategy alignment may seem to be an additional activity that loads the process, but given the complex business scenarios that exist today, it has become an essential step in ensuring successful execution.

The author is the Vice President (Consulting) at Geometric Limited avinash.salelkar@geometricglobal.com