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Can Windchill help a company to become lean

cc-2
6-Contributor

Can Windchill help a company to become lean

Hello everyone,


This is not the right section to start such discussion but I could not find a better one.


There are many papers and documentation that explain that lean principles can be applied for PLM implementation and/or PLM will benefits of lean thinking during its implementation and deployment.


However, here I am interested in something slightly different.


My company has just undertaken a big cultural change to become a lean organisation. 10% of the staff is going to be green belt by the end of this year and 1% black belt. All executives and local MD will be white belt.


The company has a plm system currently a third party software that drives workflows. It is used to convert eBOM to mBOM, and it is integrated to our ERP and also PDM (which is used as a CAD storage location). We have sharepoint, a few access databases, many copies of the same document in many locations (share drives, harddrives, emails etc....). All this is used quite widely.


At first glance it seems that my company already master PLM but we do not have for instance a product configurator yet nor a project management system.



Therefore, if I promote Windchill as a PLM system the value for the company may be seen as limited as "we already have one" (short of speak, please note I have been using Windchill for over 8years and joined that new company only 3 months ago).



The more I learn about the lean principles the more I realize that Windchill is well fitted to support them. (reduce wastes, improve collaboration) and this would be an opportunity to make Windchill be used outside product development (Finance have to manage documentations, they have approval and change processes), Procurement, sales, quality etc... too



To help me build my case, I am looking at examples, papers etc... where unlike PTC's competitors such as Siemens or Autodesk, Windchill will delivery benefits well behind PLM processes and help companies to become lean. In other words I want to say that Windchill is a Knowledge (Work) Management Systems that include PLM rather than just a PLM system.


Does that make sense ?



What do you think ? Anyone from PTC who was confronted to such situation before ?


Thanks a lot


Best regards




2 REPLIES 2
grocha
1-Newbie
(To:cc-2)

Hi,


Indirectly it sure can help, I'll try to explain myself.


I have implemented Windchill (ProjectLink) integrated with a procurement system (which manages metadata, orders, items/quantities other than documents) but this business generates a huge load of documents each with its own process to be managed and handling it buy network, FTP and email makes it a mess I don't need to explain.


To improve the speed and the collaboration between my customer's buyers, the vendors, 3<sup>rd</sup> party inspection companies and 3<sup>rd</sup> party engineering company


Knowing windchill/java possibilities gives us knowledge to advise/influence the definition of the architecture of the system and data, the level of security and automation/integrations, but most importantly you have to be skeptic and critic about the entire process (lifecycle/workflows/security/time consuming activities/re-work) and you must have the owners of this process at your side, for that you have to be very gentle and measure your words to criticize his process, people tend to defend current process as their child, other people participating in the process tend to not like change.


cc-2
6-Contributor
(To:cc-2)

Thanks Guilherme just a quick word for nowI am also very careful about people suggesting improvement when they do not (yet) understand the technology or have data management skillsEg while capturing the processes (as you disc ribe) someone told me that she uses a dedicated software to create special publication (what arbiter does) as no one can read directly that format she creates manually pdf that see stores in a pdm system (not pdm link or intralink) then in sharepoint, then on a local share drives and finally on another share drive used as archive where the Filename will contain the version
I asked. Where do you see we could improvedShe said: if we could automate the creation and the upload of the pdf that would be perfect...

Sorry wrong answerWith my education clearly and I hope you agree that girl has no clue. One source and everyone reads from the source no more pdf,copies,Upload etc
So if I let the "process owner" improve the process it is generally an incremental improvement. When you are after breakthrough you need the expert do the improvement
I ll come back another day to detail more my view about windchill helping to become lean

Sent from Yahoo Mail for iPhone
At 28 Apr 2015 21:21:39, Guilherme -'> wrote:
Hi,
Indirectly it sure can help, I'll try to explain myself.
I have implemented Windchill (ProjectLink) integrated with a procurement system (which manages metadata, orders, items/quantities other than documents) but this business generates a huge load of documents each with its own process to be managed and handling it buy network, FTP and email makes it a mess I don’t need to explain.
To improve the speed and the collaboration between my customer’s buyers, the vendors, 3rd party inspection companies and 3rd party engineering company I can tell you that windchill with a "little" help of java (and time/money Smiley Very Happy) can pretty much automate any process, you can integrate systems to avoid indirect interfaces and you can structure Windchill to make sure the data security needed by the business is achieved, you can create vendor users automatically via java, ... you can do a lot!
BUT, what really need to be lean is the process…
Knowing windchill/java possibilities gives us knowledge to advise/influence the definition of the architecture of the system and data, the level of security and automation/integrations, but most importantly you have to be skeptic and critic about the entire process (lifecycle/workflows/security/time consuming activities/re-work) and you must have the owners of this process at your side, for that you have to be very gentle and measure your words to criticize his process, people tend to defend current process as their child, other people participating in the process tend to not like change.
I mean, what I learned from this experience is that Windchill is just a tool, the central part of any implementation and even more in improvement initiatives is the business(process for us), if you understand the business, dig/capture the processes and gather real data about the flaws in it you will be able to talk “head-to-head” with the process owners winning their confidence to advise and influence the improvements.

I am very happy I could do all that, from the beginning very quiet just listening to people explaining me proudly their part of the process, with enough studying I could reproduce their processes in Visio and that was a landmark, after that I asked the same people to go over my sketch of the process correcting and filling gaps I didn’t got right before.
This was nice cause people started having ideas for improvement just by going over their own process again, with time I could start questioning and advising some changes to make the process fit better in Windchill and speeding it up too.
It was painful, but in the end we increased collaboration, people are paying more attention at what matters other than trying to control the processes, the interaction between the actors of the process is secure, well documented and archived (less mails, more activities/tasks, only one source of documents), people can actually see the business running via reports and about reports, make yourself a favor and get their needs for reports before defining data structure, I didn't, had some re-work here...

Only after this we started creating formal documents (Technical Specifications) to start defining all the details of the implementation. The solution still have room for improvements but is working great and customer is always asking to automate more adjacent processes.

Process is king!

Good luck!
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