First Steps

I've come to Product Lifecycle Management through 20 years of working in electronics manufacturing, high tech design and development, software development, purchasing and materials management, production management, MRP/ERP use and implementation and watching inefficient ways to control design documentation. Now I draw on this rich experience to help others improve their practices and processes and hopefully make their lives less chaotic in the office and production floor.

PLM, like ERP before it is a way of working and thinking about information and information management. Where ERP is about finance and day to day operations in support of Production. PLM is about capturing and managing all of the product information so that other divisions in the organization can efficiently and effectively access this information long after production has put the product out the factory door.

One way and another I've been involved in Configuration Management for over a decade and PLM for the last four (4) years. The last two (2) years I have been consulting on PLM implementation using Aras Innovator (www.aras.com).

Innovator is a very flexible tool and I find that even after two years there is an interesting learning curve. You can learn in a few days how to configure Innovator to capture new data types, setup workflows and lifecycles and make general changes to the user interface. However the new and interesting things you can do with Innovator to make it a system that is more appropriate to your business needs have been enough to keep me learning new techniques for all of the last two years.

Like any tool of complexity there are tricks and traps for new users. I plan on using this blog as a way of sharing some of what I have learned about configuring and customizing Innovator and my thoughts on why PLM is worth investing effort in.

Thanks for tuning in and I hope you find some useful nuggets along the journey with me.