PLM Delivery and Adoption in 5 Essential Steps

Product Lifecycle Management implementation involves extensive changes to organizational practices. So, it’s important that you assess your organizational PLM maturity and plan deployment accordingly.

The following five steps are essential to the delivery and lasting, successful adoption of your PLM platform.

Stakeholder Management

Gaining support from key areas within your organization

PLM is capable of benefiting every area of your organization. So, it’s crucial that everyone is backing the delivery from the outset.

Stakeholder mapping helps to identify influencers, supporters and the varying levels of interest and power within the organization. Each of these areas should understand the advantageous changes that PLM will bring to their area.

Planning

A clear strategy and timeline are linchpins to PLM success

Putting the best plan together to implement your PLM platform can become a complex exercise in itself. In-depth stakeholder analysis of current business pain points can be the initial make or break point for most PLM implementations.

The rollout of your PLM platform should be considered as a business process initiative rather than a simple software upgrade. You’ll need to build a well-aligned, strategic plan across multiple disciplines of your business.

So, take time to define your implementation roadmap with delivery phases across each business area. Build on this framework with high-level milestones which define the status of each delivery phase.

From here you’ll begin to see the details in your pain points being addressed. Specify trackable activities for each area of your organizational PLM maturity and use these to define your critical paths.

Communication

Open channels for constructive dialogue keep projects on course

A robust communication strategy is required for any business transformation. This will encourage cultural change during the implementation of new processes and future-proof departmental development.

You’ll need to define and promote a consistent message that links diverse activities and goals in a way that appeals to each specific stakeholder:

• Business impact assessment.
• Any early adoption and subsequent ‘lessons learned’.
• Various media and approaches should be used as part of the communication plan to implement the required strategy.

Learning

Understanding drawbacks and adapting practices to move forward

It’s important to obtain internal and external feedback, to maintain confidence and ensure program alignment. These might be in the form of:

• Regular program health-checks
• Quality standards, checks and balances
• Risk assessment and mitigation / roll-back plans
• Knowledge sharing database and collaboration / learning tools

Issue Management

Remaining flexible is key while developing future strategies

Consistent, systematic and continuous management of risks and issues is critical for the successful delivery of any PLM initiatives, given the many interdependencies, which may involve stakeholders across multi-functional boundaries.

Risk and issues should be managed centrally and follow clear monitoring and escalation processes, with mitigation and resolution plans in place to deliver deployment activities and organizational changes.

In Our Experience…

Organizational and cultural changes are the first potential barriers to your PLM business transformation. As such, your PLM implementation road map should represent an ideal scenario that is flexible enough that all stakeholders are enabled to work through the delivery in an iterative way.