Yet, as businesses begin to take service more seriously, that separate and not equal mindset is starting to change, Kevin Wrenn, general manager for PTC's Arbortext division, told Design News. "Service can help drive profitability and foster a better relationship with customers," he said. In fact, companies can generate more revenue and better margins during the serviceable part of a product's lifecycle, making service a more profitable business engine than traditional product sales for many companies.
While development groups learn a lot about how to evolve a product design during the iterative design stage, there is plenty to glean long after a product is put to work in the field -- especially if the product has a relatively long life span like an airliner or even an appliance. For example, a field service crew working on regular maintenance on an airplane could feed repair records directly into the main PLM repository, giving engineers access to that information as part of their ongoing design work. Taking the scenario a step further, engineers could apply product analytics tools to drill down into the repair data to uncover common points of failure that could subsequently be addressed in upcoming designs. In addition, engineers could garner intelligence on whether a specific part failure was tied to any one particular supplier, affording an opportunity to spec an alternative part or tweak the part design in the next iteration of the product.
"We have to take the lessons learned and feed them back into product design and manufacturing," Barkai said. "We have to fully understand [product] quality, durability, and customer experience." By understanding product failures, especially the ability to tie them back to a specific range of serial numbers, Barkai said engineering organizations can conduct root cause analysis much more effectively, remedy any outstanding issues more expediently, and, as a result, have to contend with fewer product recalls.
This kind of closed-loop feedback isn't always about avoiding the negative, either. According to Barkai, by having insight into what works well in a product design over a period of years of service in the field, engineering organizations gain invaluable insight into what constitutes a proven design, giving them greater opportunity for reuse, and avoiding the high cost and time associated with constantly reinventing the wheel.
It's good to see that service is getting included in the PLM loop. All you have to do to see the importance of this is to read the Design News Made by Monkeys stories. If the service function were included in the design PLM process, a good number of design flaws could be fixed quickly instead of continuing for years.
I agree, Ann, it's been a long time coming. It will be interesting to see of PLM software helps facilitate this communication. I've always thought it was a company's cultural issues that prevented feedback from the field to reach design. Perhaps PLM tools can help change that culture.
Rob, I think it's multiple issues. Certainly corporate culture is one of them. But communications and the ease or lack of it, has got to be another. This should help solve that part, which may, in turn, help change the culture.
I would think that time and value also play a big part. People have very crammed schedules, so the time it takes service to weigh in, and the time it takes design to listen to a new audience are likely large factors. To carve out that time, the value of the communication would have to be clear.
There's a great story about the cultural issues that prevent feedback from the field from reaching design: A few years ago, I talked with a consultant who tried to to tell an automaker that their car's doors were leaking when it rained. Customers also tried to tell the automaker the same thing. The automaker wouldn't listen, though, because all of their measurements told them they were making perfect doors. In their culture, a door was perfect if the measurements said so, not if the someone claimed their doors were leaking. Turned out their doors really were leaking.
Chuck, that story sounds all too familiar. Theory vs practice, abstract vs concrete. It's apparently easy for some people who are not on the user end of things to not believe in actual experience of actual users. What's funny is, we are all end-users, and we are all consumers, so one might think that would be obvious.
In order for PLM to work properly, you must address 3 items: 1) technology issues that prevent access to the right information at the right time; 2) processes that prevent information from being shared properly, and 3) people that buy into the whole process. If any one of these are lacking, PLM will not work as intended.
Many companies think new technology will magiacally fix their broken processes, and that people will somehow adopt it. It jest don't work that-a way. We are seeing more and more capabilities like those from PTC making it easy to connect Service, but the other aspects must be addressed before we see measurable results on the bottom line! IMHO
The 3D printing revolution seems to have a knack for quickly moving technology ahead by way of collaborative effort and even a little friendly competition -- all of course in the name of scientific advancement.
Laura Sapiens' Ego! Smartmouse offers users a unique interactive experience by providing 2D and 3D connectivity, hardware identity authentication, data storage, and more.
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