How to Get Your Team to Embrace PLM Tech (yes, even the sceptics!)

But you already know that. You know that your team needs to streamline product development to strengthen operations for innovative growth. With product development processes becoming increasingly complex, with employees spread out across the globe, the challenge of high productivity is weighing heavily. PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) is the solution to this challenge. Managing the cycle of your product development efficiently will help reduce costs, minimize revisions and accelerate growth just to mention a few of the undeniable benefits. PLM improves collaboration, reduces costs and speeds time to market resulting in streamlined operations, higher profitability and an easier way of working for you and your colleagues. The tricky part is: how do you convince your team that PLM needs to be introduced? Your team are concerned about its merits. They don’t know if it’s worth the investment. In short, they have the fear of a new system. Introducing a new system into any business can create anxiety and doubt, in even the most established and positive of company cultures. The good news is, you can overturn their objections to get your team to embrace PLM and achieve increased productivity across the board. You just need to tool yourself up with information that will convince them of the value of PLM, whatever the obstacle your well-meaning, but doubtful team throw your way.

PRO #1 DECREASE COSTS

The mere mention of ‘decreased costs’ is enough to perk up anyone’s ears. And it’s true – by using the potential of collaborative designing, you’ll open up the opportunity to reduce both material and production costs. There’s a decrease in prototyping and scrap costs, which is largely down to having a single source of authority for everyone in the company. Part re-use is tricky in larger organizations with a significant number of parts, particularly when you have to rely on a designer’s memory. PLM encourages item exploration, avoiding sourcing new parts that are too similar to items that already exist on the system. TOP TIP: When you’re pitching to your team, always lead with cost reduction. If there’s anything that’s going to bring them on board, it’s reducing costs – particularly the powers that be.

PRO #2 SPEED TO MARKET

If you centralize the control over data, the product development will be completed faster and more effectively. Design teams will have the capacity to work faster and increasingly accelerate the transfer of design data straight through to production. There are times when moving fast on a project is critical to its survival. It can mean the make or break of success, so faster product development and a shorter time to market are essential to remaining competitive and in the game. TOP TIP: Invite your team to imagine a time when they needed to move quickly to get a product to market, but it was incredibly stressful or it failed. Although not the most fun trip down memory lane, you can now tell them how a PLM system could have prevented the stress or failure, with an entirely different outcome.

PRO #3 INCREASE PRODUCTIVITY

One of the biggest objections you may come across is ‘we don’t have time to roll out this new system’. On the contrary, implementing a PLM system is going to save time in the long run. A PLM system can completely eradicate all those time saving activities that hold you up. Imagine getting rid of having to replicate data across different systems, double checking for irregularities and having to trawl through systems for missing data. TOP TIP: When trying to persuade your team, make sure you show how time can be saved for each of their job roles. Everyone needs to see how it will benefit them individually, or you might not get the buy in that you need.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Using a PLM system will make it easy to manage and control all the details that will affect the overall product quality, which will be the majority of people’s goal. This is especially important for instances when teams are spread across different locations and a sense of cohesion is lost. PLM also has now come to the point where its ROI potential is offering a real business benefit. There are only two ways to increase earnings- revenue growth and cost reductions, which are both highly important when it comes to profit contribution. As companies exist to make profit, this is a key reason for businesses to implement PLM.