PLM Interest Group

The PLM Interest Group is the leading industry body for PLM. It was formed in 2003 as a proactive, global interest group for PLM and now provides a wide-ranging set of neutral PLM tools and best practices, including a new standard for PLM Governance published in December 2011.

The PLM Governance Standard is the first international standard to be created specifically for PLM, and enables any company to establish effective management and communication between the Board and the PLM Team.

The PLMIG is a highly proactive organisation, and will generate more knowledge and material during 2012 as it runs the first ever global PLM benchmark.

Global PLM Development

PLM Standardisation

The 2011 global programme set out to capture the best practices that have been learned in real implementations over the past 10 years in the major industrialised countries, and formalise them into a simple framework of standards that everyone can adopt.

Four events were held in during the year, in Gothenburg, Munich, Milan and London. The programme continues in 2012 with a workshop on PLM Standards Implementation which will enable participants to make effective use of the new best practices in their own implementations.

Nordic Region Launch Event

The 2011 programme was launched with a workshop for the Nordic Region held at the Novotel Gothenburg on 24-25 May.

The Gothenburg Workshop was very productive, and one of its main results was to generate a standardised framework for PLM Governance. The framework gives visibility to the CEO and the board of PLM progress and enables the PLM Team to highlight business issues in a simple and unobtrusive way.

The results from Gothenburg formed part of the working material for participants in Munich.
Munich Workshop

The second event was held at the Universit�t der Bundeswehr M�nchen on Tuesday 07 June and Wednesday 08 June.

The Munich Workshop built on the results from Gothenburg, and extended the standardisation concepts into skills, provisioning, and through-life support. Focal points included PLM in the military and defence industries, and the development of a PLM Best Practice Library.

The first results from the Gothenburg and Munich workshops have been published the Q1 2011 issue of the PLM Journal.

Milan Workshop

The third event in the series was a Workshop in Italy, held in partnership with Holonix and hosted on 27-28 September by the industrial user company Nearchimica.

The two main features of the Milan Workshop were the process industry background of the main participants, and the natural concentration of delegates from Italian piccole e medie imprese (SMEs). The group leveraged the ongoing results of the series to develop new techniques for PDM in the process industries, and a completely new methodology for SMEs to adopt PLM.

The Milan results have been published as the PLM Handbook for SMEs in the Q3 2011 issue of the PLM Journal.

London Workshop

The fourth event was hosted by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers at their headquarters at 1 Birdcage Walk on Thursday 01 December and Friday 02 December.

The London Workshop continued the developments made in Gothenburg, Munich and Milan, and focused on PLM Governance and improving the adoption of PLM. The partnership with the IMechE as a learned society enables PLM Standardisation to move to a new and more influential phase.

The London results were published in December in the Q4 2011 issue of the PLM Journal.

PLM Innovation Congress

In February 2012 the PLMIG ran a Standards Implementation Workshop to show how to apply PLM Standards and PLM Best Practices in real commercial environments.

This was held in synergy with the PLM Innovation Congress in Munich on
22-23 February, giving delegates the opportunity to "cross-fertilise" between the two events.

The primary focus of this Workshop was to enable PLM Teams from user organisations to understand, adopt, and use the new standardised and best-practice material that was generated by the 2011 programme. Detailed information and explanations about the new material were presented, followed by working sessions to develop the parameters of a real standardised PLM environment.

More information is available via the Standards Implementation Workshop main page or by contacting workshopinfo@plmig.com.

PLM Body of Knowledge

PLM Best Practice Library

The PLM Best Practice Library brings together in one place, for the first time, some of the most important knowledge learned about PLM over the past decade. A 31-page Catalogue indexes over 300 pages of formalised concepts and methods covering PLM, PDM and some of the most important specialised disciplines.

In concept, the PLM manager reaches a decision point, and looks in the Library for a simple document that indicates the best-practice way forward.

Metrics, commercial value, PLM skills and concepts, roadmapping, planning, culture change, and through-life support all belong in the Library, together with detailed best practices for PLM-ERP, PLM-ALM, PLM for SMBs, and advanced PDM techniques.

The first revision of the PLM Best Practice Library is published in the Q1 2011 PLM Journal.

It is available via PLMIG Membership.

Path to PLM

The Path to PLM is a comprehensive framework of tools and information that leads from the first decision to try to understand PLM to a fully-working implementation. It provides you with a central structure to build the optimal PLM environment within your organisation, and a core set of standard principles against which you can compare the external information sources and proprietary advice.

The methodology enables any organisation from any industry to become fully aware of PLM, and to achieve a practical and effective first implementation within 2 years.

The Path to PLM can also be used by companies that have already started out with PLM, but feel that progress has not been as good as expected. The methodology includes a "brownfield" process that will steer the implementation onto a best-practice track within a similar timescale.

The Path to PLM is published in the Q2 2011 PLM Journal

It is available via PLMIG Membership.

PLM Handbook for SMEs

Small and medium-sized businesses generate at least 25%-30% of private sector output in most industrial countries. In Italy, almost 95% of industrial companies have less than 150 employees. This made the Milan Workshop in September the ideal platform to review how the PLM industry serves this sector.

The Workshop showed that a completely new approach is needed. It has always been assumed that PLM implementation for SMEs is somehow a "stripped down" version of what larger companies apply, and that that it is simply a matter of buying cheaper software and making it work. This completely overlooks factors such as management style, commercial drivers, ability to adapt and reliance on staff performance that are the particular strengths and vulnerabilities of smaller companies.

The group in Milan focused on the real world of SMEs, and applied PLM from this viewpoint. The result is the PLM Handbook for SMEs, which sets out a practical PLM methodology that is designed from the SME point of view.

The Handbook has now been published in the Q3 2011 PLM Journal, and is available via PLMIG Membership.

PLM Governance Standard

The PLMIG programme of workshops in 2011 has produced the first ever international Standard for PLM Governance that can be applied by companies of all sizes as a methodology for integrating board-level and operational PLM.

The Standard gives CEOs and VPs clear visibility of PLM throughout the enterprise, without requiring them to deal with technical detail - and it provides the PLM Team with a natural mechanism for presenting PLM problems and issues to the Board in a clear and non-contentious way.

The Standard does not rely on restrictive rules, and does not require extensive documentation of procedures. Care has been taken to keep it simple, lightweight and accurate.

It focuses purely on governance, not implementation performance, and is simply a distillation of best practice management and oversight at all levels of a company.

This is a landmark for the PLM industry, because it is the first standard that applies purely to PLM. Also, this is a standard, and not simply a collection of best practices. It is intended to be followed in the same way as other international standards.

The first revision of the PLM Governance Standard has now been published in the
Q4 2011 issue of the PLM Journal. It is available via PLMIG Membership.

Tools & Techniques

CEO Briefing Document

Everyone has faced the problem of trying to explain PLM issues to senior management or the CEO. If an issue arises that the board needs to act on, you have the challenge of trying to explain all of its detail, and the PLM context, in a very short period of time.

It is easy to be concise about the issues. The issues are important for the business, and urgent enough to need their attention. The difficulty is that you also have to give them the PLM background, and this tends to expand into a long and diffuse explanation.

The Q4 2010 PLM Journal has been written as a self-contained CEO Briefing Document that shows the PLM side. You talk about the issues, and give them the Briefing Document which explains about the PLM.

The Q3 and Q4 2010 PLM Journals are provided with PLMIG 2012 Membership or are available from the Store.

PLM Dashboarding

It is now possible to create an on-line 'management dashboard' that tells everyone in the extended enterprise everything they need to know about PLM.

A comprehensive PLM Dashboard will show the CEO, product development, operations, field support, finance, and also the external customer and supply chains, exactly what is the current PLM status - and enable them to drill down and run "what if?" queries so that they can decide what should happen next.

The mechanism and material to create this PLM Dashboard already exists. It is simply a matter of utilising current PLMIG methods and tools. The full methodology for creating the Current and Future Dashboards is contained in the Q2 2010 issue of the PLM Journal.

Implementing PLM

The PLMIG provides extensive working material for those who are about to implement, or are in the process of implementing, PLM. The knowledge embodied in the PLM Journal and the PLMIG toolkits and handbooks is neutral, accurate and effective, and is based on the collaborative work of PLMIG members since 2004.

PLM managers can use PLMIG tools and handbooks to carry out some of their most important tasks, including:-

as well as specifics such as:-

These are all provided with PLMIG Membership, or are available from the Store.

PLMIG Membership

You can receive all of the PLMIG working material, plus the quarterly PLM Journal in 2012, plus the 2011, 2010 and 2009 issues and the back catalogue, through PLMIG membership via membership@plmig.com.

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