Frequently Asked Questions

What are the major benefits of PLM ?

The benefits of implementing Product Lifecycle Management are many, and vary from customer to customer. Essentially, the ability to take a holistic view of your corporate data, in a coherent manner adds considerable benefit. Depending on what type of business sector (automotive, manufacturing, process etc), you will employ different aspects of PLM, each with its own benefits. Also, certain functions may be more important to you than others. It is therefore recommended that an analysis be commissioned before any implementation takes place. Such an analysis may entail a Business Process Optimisation phase, but will certainly employ an analysis of your current functions and disciplines. In SAP terminology, this would be termed a Blueprint, where the exact nature of your business and the potential benefits would be determined and discussed. From here, you can commission the PLM implementation, deploying the functions of PLM that will most benefit your company.

Why is CAD integration with SAP so important ?

As many companies use drawings as a means of visualising the designs, these drawings actually display all necessary information on the equipment and materials to be implemented. They are used by estimators to (usually) manually count items in order to estimate the cost of the work. These manual exercises waste time and are error prone. If the information required to build the design is incorporated in a drawing, it must be more efficient to connect the drawings to the SAP system (where all the material costs, manpower costs and so forth) are stored. In a paper-based environment, this is obviously not possible. Yet, as most designs are now created using CAD (Computer Aided Design) systems, and are thus in electronic format, it is preferable to link the CAD system - or the elements within the CAD model - to the applicable materials in SAP. This is called Bill of Materials extraction (from the CAD model), and eliminates errors encountered in the manual estimating process. Added to this, the integration of other AP PS (Project System) and others means that manual input is confined to decision making rather than manual interpretation. This vastly increases accuracy and speeds up the entire process. If we ad engineering change management and workflow to the equation, we end up with greatly improved efficiency, which adds directly to the quality of the product and contributes directly to increases in the company's bottom line profits.

I use SAP DMS,PM,PS and Workflow. Why do I need PLM ?

Many companies use the Logistic functions of SAP, together with cross-applications such as DMS and Workflow/WebFlow. However, that does not mean that they have a PLM strategy in place. PLM is far more than its individual components, and offers a total holistic view of the product or asset lifecycle. Without a PLM strategy in place, it is difficult to see the whole picture, and thus establish overall efficiencies and profitability.

I use other products for document management, maintenance management and so forth. What does mySAP PLM offer above the benefits I'm already seeing?

It is undoubtedly the case that the most expensive part of any system implementation is the maintenance of interfaces. The initial software and implementation costs fade into insignificance when faced with the bill for maintaining those interfaces. Maintenance includes the upgrade of the interface when systems are upgraded, remedial maintenance to correct errors and the costs associated with adding functionality. With SAP PLM, most of the interfaces are built-in to SAP. And those that are not (for example, the CAD - or GIS or SCADA - interface is fully supported and maintained by either SAP itself or its accredited partner. This gets us back to the concept of a single source of truth, and the benefits enjoyed when interfaces costs are covered in your support contract(s). Many companies have stated that, if a functionality is required and SAP provides 70% or more of that functionality, then SAP will be used. This policy is to ensure that such customers realise the maximum return on their SAP investment. Thus, the general rule, if SAP provides the functional it is almost certain that maximum benefits will only be realised if that SAP functionality is used.

Isn't PLM just document management with another name ?

Definitely not. Whilst most PLM implementations either begin with or incorporate SAP DMS (Document Management System), the DMS is just a small part of the PLM solution. In the old days (remember that 5 years is considered a lifetime in this environment) we spoke of PDM or Product Data Management. PLM is actually PDM with a lifecycle focus. It is considered as one of the 5 supporting pillars of SAP's future direction: enterprise portals, private and public exchanges, supply chain management (mySAP SCM), product lifecycle management (mySAP PLM) and customer relationship management (mySAP CRM). Some of the more important differentiators between PDM and mySAP PLM are product and asset visualisation, collaboration (with partners - including non-SAP partners - over the Internet) and the leverage SAP provides with other areas of the business where it is deployed (for example, re-use of FI/CO data, integration with operation support functions, exploitation of HR data etc).