Presenter: Charles W. Krueger, PhD, BigLever Explore how PLE support for PLM across engineering and operations enables organizations to use feature-based approaches for managing BOMs for a product family — such as Engineering BOMs and Manufacturing BOMs or as-designed BOMs and as-delivered BOMs — across the entire lifecycle.

1. Product Line Engineering
Meets
Product Lifecycle Management
Feature-based BoM Family Management with the
Aras Innovator / BigLever Gears Bridge
Dr. Charles W. Krueger, CEO
BigLever Software

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Product Line Engineering (PLE) Defined
• Product Line: a family of similar
products with variations in features
and functions
• Product Line Engineering: the
engineering of a product line using
a shared set of engineering assets,
a managed set of features, and an
efficient means of production…
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- taking advantage of the commonality shared across the family
- efficiently and systematically managing the variation among the products

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Common Motivation in PLE Success Stories:
Competitive Advantage
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BigLever’s Role in PLE
• Industry leader in Product Line Engineering solutions
- 15 years of commercial practice with PLE tools, methods & organizational change
• Industry standard PLE framework, ecosystem & methodology
- Gears PLE Lifecycle FrameworkTM and PLE Ecosystem of third party integrations
• IBM, Aras, Microsoft, ANSYS, Open Source, MadCap, Sparx, No Magic…
- BigLever 3-Tiered PLE MethodologyTM
• Industry’s only service provider with proven success in
organizational change management for transition to PLE practice
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Live Training Transformation (LT2) training systems for US Army
General Dynamics teamed with BigLever (twice) to create
the winning proposal for the US Army Live Training
Transformation “Consolidated Product-line Management”.
• US Army audited $800M in cost avoidance
over 10 years and 300 training ranges
• 80% reduction in source code maintained

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An Efficient Means of Production
for Product Lines
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Shared assets are like the factory’s supply chain.
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Features describe capabilities that vary among products.
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• Feature Catalog
- Driven by Marketing, modeled by Feature Engineering
• Bill-of-Features
- Driven by Portfolio, modeled by Product Engineering

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Assets are configured according to the
feature profiles of the products you want build.
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Features come in.
Assets
are configured.
A product comes out.
Just like a factory.

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This is a move away from the traditional
product-centric development silos.

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The communication and coordination that has to occur
for a portfolio of N products is proportional to N2.N2

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Problem Statement
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• Processes, tools and techniques
cannot overcome the
exponential complexity
• A new approach is required...
Time
Engineering Complexity
Complexity is making it intractable to engineer
Features for a product family in terms of an
interacting and variant Bill-of-Materials from
mechanical, electrical, and software.
A new approach is required...

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Feature-based Production Line Engineering
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Shared PLE Asset
Supersets
Product A
Asset Subsets
Product N
Asset Subsets
Product B
Asset Subsets
…

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The Evolution and Convergence
of Product Line Engineering & Operations
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PLE & PLM – A Shift in Perspective
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Rather than use a Bill-of-Materials to determine Features,
use a Bill-of-FeaturesTM to determine Materials*
*Materials == requirements, designs, software, mechanical, electrical, tests, documentation, …
M.C.Escher, “Metamorphosis,” 1937

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Transition from PLE EBOM to Downstream xBOM
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Shared PLE Asset
Supersets
EBOM Superset
Product N
Product B
…
Product A
EBOM Subsets
(As-designed Instances)
Product N
Product B
…
Product A
xBOM Instances
• As-deployed
• MBOM
• As-maintained
• …

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Demonstration of the
Innovator/Gears Bridge
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19. www.biglever.com