Process and IS Alignment in Support of Your PLM Environment

By Shelley Gaddie

Introduction
Your company has just gone through a major merger with another large firm and you've been asked by Senior Management to direct a program that will align the processes and information systems supporting Engineering and Manufacturing. You were also given a schedule and budget to accomplish the task. This concerned you because the program work statement was not sufficiently defined for which a budget and schedule could be established!

Being the good worker that you are minor details such as budget and schedule can't hold you back from such a challenging assignment. You agree to forge ahead and begin the task of understanding the strategic direction of each company. You review the status of all projects currently underway, and what project management methods and tools are being used. During the first few weeks of fact finding you discover the reason you were selected to direct the project; no other person in his or her right mind would take on such an impossible task! You've identified disjointed initiatives driving a multitude of projects, many of which are not on schedule and over budget. You also see that some of these projects are not integrated or aligned with corporate strategies and objectives. You discover most of the projects have a single functional focus and should be cross-functional enabling information to be used by multiple organizations. In addition, the projects need to flow down stream to customers and suppliers. You realize that the siloed functional focus is due to alignment of funding sources with functional groups. It's also clear that most of the project leaders are using different methods and tools for project management and are lacking in project sponsorship.

Wow, you see the problems and now it's your job to pull it all together under a single program and align the projects and resources to one strategic plan! Oh, by the way, you need to consider the schedule and budget constraints established by your senior management. How will you bring the various project's tasks, dependencies, schedules, resources, and management plans together into a cohesive corporate plan that supports a newly merged company? These challenges are not much different from the ones that keep executives up at night: delivering value on critical business goals, having accurate information for making informed decisions, being able to nimbly adapt to the economy.

Redefining How You Lead and Guide Your Organization's Work
It all comes down to leading and guiding our work in a different way as our organizations become more complex. The traditional thinking of managing projects, siloed in a functional view, must shift to a broader enterprise perspective that aligns complete systems with business strategy. That shift to a broader enterprise perspective is Enterprise Program Management, or EPM.

EPM provides a means for an organization to translate its vision, mission, and objectives into an executable set of programs and projects. When effectively defined, planned, integrated, and communicated, you are provided with a 360-degree view of your organization's ability to define and achieve its objectives. The shift to EPM changes the traditional definitions of project management. In traditional project management, project objectives, requirements, and constraints are defined optimally for the success of that project. In EPM, project objectives, requirements, and constraints are defined optimally and strategically for the success of the organization.

The Project Corps EPM Vision
Executives and senior managers must be assured that resources are effectively allocated to the projects that will best achieve the organization's objectives. Similarly, people allocated to projects must have assurances that their efforts are in full alignment with the organization's objectives.

An EPM framework has four primary levels: Executive Owners, Sponsors, the Program or Project Organization, and project teams. Executive Owners are responsible for establishing the vision, mission, and goals of the organization. Sponsors are responsible for translating the vision, mission, and goals into tangible objectives to be pursued as programs and projects. The Program or Project Organization is the steward of program and project success. As the steward, the Program or Project Organization works with project teams to align multiple plans and schedules into an integrated, comprehensive view for Sponsors and Executive Owners. Project teams represent the functional and technical resources that plan and execute activities to deliver in accordance with organizational objectives. Together, the four levels work in complete alignment to define objectives and deliver upon those objectives.

Implementing EPM in Your Organization: A Seven-Step Approach
Shifting your organization to EPM is a major project in itself. How do you shift your organization to this new way of leading and guiding your work, while continuing to meet the objectives and responsibilities of your existing projects? This is not much different than trying to rebuild a last place football team into a Super Bowl contender. The ownership and coaching staff must continually work to improve the team's approach and capabilities, all the while playing its games during the regular season and making changes during the off season.

As a coach rebuilds their football team, they must address the challenges of transforming their players' attitudes and cooperation, in conjunction with defining the plays and strategies to win. The creation of a winning team, and the shift to EPM, are both art and science--both cultural and technical. We will provide you with the three critical elements that can make or break the implementation, and an effective seven step process for your organizational shift to EPM.

Design Automation & KBE Using CATIA - V5 & CAA Tools.

Introduction
The aim of this paper is to increase the awareness between the Design Community about the Knowledge Based Engineering (KBE) and Design Automation techniques to increase the productivity. Many organizations, over a period of time have gained a strong knowledge in their domain areas. The knowledge could be either design or process related. They understand their centered on few people and of course they would have learnt it in a hard way. But, in the competitive environment, Industries can sustain in their markets only by transforming these intelligence into a knowledge system. Industry leaders are now focusing on creating these Knowledge Based Engineering systems to hold and manage their organization knowledge.

Also, if you closely monitor in a product development life cycle, there are many repeated tasks performed by the designers. Eventually, these tasks increase design cycle time and reflect in increased product cost. Design Automation KBE techniques can reduce these mundane tasks to a great extent.

Following are the major advantages of KBE and Design Automation.

• Reinvention of wheel can be avoided
• Mundane tasks can be automated (Design Automation)
• Design cycle time will be reduced
• More number of Design Iterations is possible

CATIA - V5 Capabilities in KBE & Design Automation
CATIA V5 has a suite of knowledge ware products and design automation tools, which helps the user to perform the following.

1. Rules / Checks / Reaction: A rule is a set of instructions whereby you can control certain parameters and events according to a context. For example, in a bending operation the value of the bend radius is limited to a particular value. A rule can be defined, which will alert the designer when he / she tries to modify the bend radius beyond the limits, and also performs certain actions like modifying other parameters to accommodate this change in bend radius. A check is used to verify the design conditions are met or not. The reaction feature helps to cope with the rules and the behavior limitations and to create more associative and reactive design. Knowledge ware products help in optimizing and verifying the designs also. Knowledge ware products also work seamlessly with other CATIA products such as analysis tools also.
2. CATScripting: CATScripting (Standard CAA) is a powerful design automation tool, which can be used to automate most of the interactive and repetitive tasks in CATIA. CATScript can be used along with KBE applications to achieve maximum benefits. Standard CAA is part of any basic installation of CATIA V5. CATScripting is very simple and user friendly. CATScripting can be used along with Knowledge Advisor to achieve most of the facilities available in other products such as Knowledge Expert.

Example - Automation of Reflection Check in a Display Panel of an Automobile

• Requirement

This is a very laborious and time-consuming activity. This leads to limited number of design alternatives. To overcome this problem, an application was required to automate this reflection check process.

Traditional Approach
The solution approach to this problem is to reverse the direction of light ray. In other words, Occupant eyes will be considered as the source of the light. Light rays will originate from the occupant eye and will get reflected by the display panel. The behavior of the reflected light rays will be studied and Display zones are classified. This method reduces the number of light rays to be studied compared to ambient light source. When ambient light source is used, billions of light rays are to be considered for reflection check, of which only a few get reflected to eye point.

• Drawbacks

• Infosys Solution

• Benefits