Manufacturing teams often solely use ERP systems, while engineering teams use CAD and PDM systems. The lack of a single, integrated process around a common product definition instead results in the use of separate processes that use potentially different product data or configurations. Implementing Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) requires an integrated and coordinated business process throughout the product’s lifecycle stages, sharing a single source of information about the product, rather than multiple, separate islands of information. Improving internal business processes speeds up operations, making businesses more agile and responsive
Engineers may not have easy access to the ERP system where the information necessary to support the release of engineering definitions is located. For example, part selection based on manufacturing costs is not readily available to engineering. Engineering change is often impacted by costs of parts being changed, inventory in stock, lead time of new parts, stock distributed in the field, etc. Not having access to ERP information during design time makes it more difficult to create cost-effective designs. Time-to-market impacted by inability to leverage corporate knowledge due to isolation of information about the product. For example, engineers are not making optimal product design decisions based on business level knowledge and information. For example, engineers may not reuse parts and would instead design new ones. Engineering models, electronic red-lines, and other key information is not accessible to the ERP user community who must build, understand the revision change impacts, assess cost of change to operations, etc. Downstream processes can’t collaborate during the engineering process, so manufacturing planning gets pushed out and delayed. PDM users may no longer need to directly access the ERP system, as the information needed will have already been transmitted into the PDM system. This reduces the number of user licenses required for the ERP system. Dual data entry introduces an opportunity for human error, which can be expensive to fix. Separate PDM and ERP systems require the Engineering Bill of Material (EBOM) to be recreated in the ERP system, often manually and typically late in the lifecycle, greatly reducing the timeliness and accuracy of the data.
Giving engineers the information they need in the PDM system about available parts from a supplier (that may typically be only in the ERP system) will enable them to improve part reuse using these parts instead of designing new parts that add to the portfolio of parts the business must manage. Even for parts already in the PDM system, having ERP-types of information about these parts (such as the price) may influence the engineers to adapt their designs to reuse an inexpensive part already manufactured rather than add to the portfolio by designing a new part. The need for training employees to use applications can be eliminated or reduced if the processes associated with how the applications interact are automated. Think of reducing the costs of writing and maintaining customized code in even grander terms. This is really about building a simple layer of abstraction between applications that can then isolate the different applications protecting the organization from the effects of change while making the change itself even easier to implement.
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