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Home > Manufacturing ERP/SCM/IT News > Manufacturers can't afford to ignore post-deployment PLM training |
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"When companies simply say they can't afford training, [the project] ends up being self-defeating," said Ken Versprille, PLM research director at CPD Associates, a research firm that helps organizations create roadmaps for manufacturing technology projects. When Fred Garderes, director of supply chain management at Crystal Technology Inc., decided to implement a PLM system, he was more or less starting from scratch. The Palo Alto, Calif., maker of optical components had been using mostly paper-based systems for bills of materials (BOMs) and engineering change orders (ECOs) and other PLM functions before adopting Omnify Software's Empower PLM product in 2007. The Empower PLM software was expected to be a big improvement over the company's paper-based systems. But deploying it ended up being more of a challenge than Garderes had expected. "We were seeking efficiency because we were still carrying ECOs around the building to get signature approvals and then using paper input to update the ERP system," Garderes said. The transition to Empower was expected to be time-consuming because he wanted "information that was 100% clean." That meant carefully reviewing business processes and rules to make sure the new system reflected the way the company operated and wanted to operate. But the bigger challenge was getting the company's users comfortable with the new PLM software. Crystal Technology had several training sessions with Omnify and the [third-party] service provider they hired, with each session targeted at a different group, such as engineering. Super-users help manufacturer adapt to PLM Then, during the actual PLM deployment and for several weeks after, Garderes and others on the implementation team served as super users -- supervisors with the role of helping individual employees solve problems and complete work tasks using Empower. The super-user process "was quite involved," Garderes said. "It ended up being all we did for at least a week." PLM training needs to be hands-on Garderes said that Crystal Technology's experience with PLM made him realize that his company got a lot of the process right -- they did spend quite a bit of time on planning -- but they could have used even more hands-on training. "There is a difference between seeing a trainer or a super-user creating a BOM or an ECO and actually doing it," Garderes said. "That is why we ended up spending so much time directly supporting the users through the transition." According to Chuck Cimalore, chief technology officer for Omnify Software, the most successful approach for PLM training and implementation is when Omnify customers work closely with the vendor's support and training personnel "to create custom training material that combines our standard training with specific information about customer processes and data." He added, "Having key users available along with Omnify trainers during training sessions allows both application and process/company-specific questions and concerns to be addressed." Post-deployment training in PLM software isn't as easy as vendors want their customers to believe, Versprille said. "The actual user interfaces are often pretty intuitive but it can be tricky to move from one kind of process to another. People still do much better when they get some face-to-face and hands-on training." PLM adoption requires changes to corporate culture According to Marc Halpern, the lead analyst for Gartner Inc.'s research group, covering product lifecycle management strategies and vertical software applications, the basic challenges of PLM implementations aren't because of technology -- PLM isn't really that complex, he said. Instead, they involve getting buy-in for change to the corporate culture and appropriately capturing process details. Garderes agrees that users often resist changes to corporate culture. "We got pushback when we first implemented PLM from people who said that using paper was just fine," he said. Recently, when his company upgraded to a newer version of Omnify, "again, people were telling us they liked the system the way it is, and they didn't want to change," he said. Which is why the importance of training is now so important at Crystal Technology. Garderes said his biggest regret concerning the move to PLM was that his company didn't invest in even more training. "More training would definitely have saved us a lot of time." About the author: Alan Earls had his first exposure to computer programming on one of Digital Equipment Corp.'s PDP-8 minicomputers. He went on to serve as editor of the newspaper Mass High Tech and is the author of the book Route 128 and the Birth of the Age of High Tech, a photographic essay on a key part of Massachusetts economic history. He currently is a freelance writer, covering many aspects of IT technology and writing regularly for SearchManufacturingERP.com.
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