Thank you 2019

A new year always sparks conversations about what we’ve done, who we are, and who we’d like to become. In the day-to-day messiness, it’s often easy to forget all the things you’ve accomplished, so Christmas seems like a natural time to step back and reflect.

In this blog post, we’ve rounded up the top 9 things we achieved during our incredible 2019, and some of what we’re planning to help us start the new decade off right.

  1. TRIPLED OUR CUSTOMERS

When Bea and I started Share PLM 2 years ago, we both wanted to “feel” the results of our work.

In 2019, we were lucky to work with a bunch of new and amazing customers! We’ve had so much fun working with companies like Aqseptance, Eurostep, Konecranes, Methode Electronics, Technia and Quick Release.

This year, we finally felt we were taking off. And we’re looking forward to what’s ahead – and excited to continue growing and learning with new customers.

 

  1. DOUBLED OUR TEAM

Our team includes more than 8 people right now, which means we’ve more than doubled our team in size this year.

Myriam and Nathalie have joined us as PLM Consultants, and we’ve lately welcomed Heather as our copywriter. This year, we also welcomed the very first man at Share PLM: Mario, our web and media designer. He’s done a great job to become a part of our “woman-centric” company.

Doubling our team has been super exciting, but it’s also been challenging. In a knowledge-intensive business like ours, it takes time, care, and money to build the capabilities your people need. Especially when you don’t have good enough processes.

 

  1. DEFINED AND DOCUMENTED OUR PROCESSES

This year, we set out on a mission to define and document who we are and how we do things with processes and a clarified company structure. Processes are all-important as your team grows. They are the groundwork that allow the team to grow, and they bring in transparency.

To visualize our way of working, we put together an intranet that lays out our core processes: Product, Sales, Delivery, Operations and Human Resources.

We’ve gone the extra mile to keep our processes lean and document key tasks in a simple way. We (still) don’t have swim lanes and complex process management software, as our customers do. But it feels like we’ve become more organized, disciplined, and focused.

 

  1. STREAMLINED OUR WAY OF WORKING WITH NEW TOOLS

When it comes to running a small business, having the right toolset can make a huge difference. This year we’ve been shaping our toolset to communicate better, organize ourselves, and increase transparency.

We’ve expanded the use of Asana, the powerful project management software we use to keep our projects on track. It helps us visualize what tasks are on our plate, what we’re currently working on, and what’s been completed.

We’ve gone the extra mile to keep our processes lean and document key tasks in a simple way. We (still) don’t have swim lanes and complex process management software, as our customers do. But it feels like we’ve become more organized, disciplined, and focused.

  1. STREAMLINED OUR WAY OF WORKING WITH NEW TOOLS

When it comes to running a small business, having the right toolset can make a huge difference. This year we’ve been shaping our toolset to communicate better, organize ourselves, and increase transparency.

We’ve expanded the use of Asana, the powerful project management software we use to keep our projects on track. It helps us visualize what tasks are on our plate, what we’re currently working on, and what’s been completed.

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  1. MET IN PERSON IN OUR TEAM EVENTS

Technology has made it easier to interact with people across great distances and time zones, and there are a lot of benefits that accrue to us as a distributed team.

At the same time, it means that if we don’t arrange live face-to-face workshops, we might never meet each other in person. For example, Myriam and the team worked together for several months without meeting in person.

There’s no substitute for meeting someone face-to-face. Working remotely actually makes in-person interactions even more valuable.

This year, we hosted 3 team retreats in Frankfurt, Hamburg and Madrid.

We try to organize workshops frequently to improve our way of working, share ideas, and discuss feedback. Over dinner, we learn what makes each other tick, or share our true passions with a good red wine.

  1. ATTENDED AND SPONSORED PLM CONFERENCES

Industry conferences are great for learning and sharpening your skills, networking with peers and potential customers, and taking a break from the day-to-day work routine.

I always return from conferences with a lot of new ideas, contacts, and inspiration.

This year, we sponsored PI PLMx London and PDT Europe, and attended several smaller PLM events and user groups.

While people can read about our products on our website, I love to chat in person with potential customers, ask questions specific to their business, and show hands-on examples of our eLearning courses at our sponsor stands.

 

  1. STRENGTHENED OUR ONLINE PRESENCE

In 2019, we continued to build a consistent digital presence through our blog and social media.

Creating interesting and valuable content is an effective way to attract potential customers. It allows you to share your expertise, knowledge, identity and experience with your followers.

Content marketing works for us at #SharePLM, and some of our best customers have reached out to us after reading our articles or following us on social media.

However, creating content regularly is hard. It’s easy to get side-tracked by the client work, and we often don’t find time in our days to write. There’s always so much else you could be doing when it comes to content!

 

  1. LEARN ONLINE MARKETING AND SEO

When I started Share PLM a little more than 2 years ago, I knew nothing about online marketing and SEO. While we’ve seen results from our online presence, SEO is still an important missing piece of the puzzle. SEO is powerful because you can get heaps of free, good-quality organic traffic.

In 2019, we learned a lot more about online marketing and SEO. We’ve enrolled a program at #latransformateka, a Spanish online business accelerator, to better understand SEO and content marketing. We’re excited to start implementing some of these learnings and key SEO principles in 2020!

 

  1. STARTED TO DEFINE A SALES SYSTEM

This year we’ve been experimenting with several sales methods to define our sales system. A sales system is a predictable, repeatable, reliable, and sustainable way to generate and manage sales. We’ve tried both online and offline methods. We’ve tried paid advertising. We’ve even stepped outside of our comfort zone and tried cold-calling and cold emailing. We still don’t have a perfectly crafted sales system, but we’re on our way. In 2020 we want to focus on what works for us and document our selling process in a CRM system.

SAY HELLO TO 2020

This year, instead of listing a vague mishmash of broad ambitions and aspirational targets, we’d like to choose one word for 2020. One word that we can focus on this year, one word that embodies all our intentions and goals for 2020. One word that steers us and keeps us focused, like the North Star.

For 2020, our One Word is…

FOCUS.

In 2020, we want to do less, but do it better.

The Pareto Law holds true for us at Share PLM in many areas. For example, if we look at our projects, 80% of our income comes from 20% of our clients. And if we take sales, 80% of our new leads came from 20% of our sales initiatives.

We want to free up time and energy for the few things that matter most to us, instead of spreading ourselves too thin by taking on too many projects.

We want to focus on the 20% of the work that leads to 80% of the results.

FOCUS ON OUR CORE BUSINESS

More specifically, we’re looking forward to focusing on online PLM education and training. In 2020, we want to be more intentional about the projects we accept and prioritize eLearning and training.

FOCUS ON CONTENT

Besides that, we want to further strengthen our online presence with a focus on content. We want to create great content on a regular basis. Content that our customers not only use every day to manage their work, but also love.

We’re planning to tidy up our website, improve its design, and simplify our product portfolio.

FOCUS ON SPAIN AND LATIN AMERICA

One of our targets for 2020 is to land our first client in Spain or Latin America. Although we’re based in Spain, we still haven’t worked with any customers in our territory. To achieve that, we’re planning to launch a Spanish-language version of our website and blog, and organize a series of small events in our country.

FOCUS ON INTERNAL TRAINING

Finally, in 2020 we want to invest more in internal training. We’ve realized how difficult it is for someone who hasn’t had previous experience with PLM to understand exactly what PLM is.

That’s why we plan to prepare a toolbox for “To-Be” PLM Consultants, so it will be easier to onboard new talent and show them the steps to success. Going from being a “doer” to a “teacher” and coming out of the zone won’t be easy. We’ll need to reverse-engineer our flow, turn it into step-by-step instructions, and make it understandable.

Part of the toolbox will be an online PLM course. We want to keep the course practical and let people play with cloud CAD and PLM tools and work on real case studies, so they can get a taste of what it’s like to be a PLM Consultant!

We’d also like to sell this course and experiment with our first business-to-consumer course.

GRATEFUL FOR YOUR SUPPORT

As 2019 comes to a close, we want to express how grateful we are for the support you’ve shown us. We’re just starting our journey, and most of you have helped us a lot to improve and continue growing by sharing our content and referring people to us.

Here’s to an amazing 2019, and an even better 2020!

Make lifecycle the polar star that guides your PLM Vision

Last week, I went to observe a start-up pitch competition. During the event, start-ups get to pitch to multiple investors in order to attract potential investment, partnerships, or exposure. – What’s your one word? –

That’s the first question the jury asked each participant. The challenge was simple: lose your product’s long list of features and benefits, and instead pick ONE WORD.

Most participants couldn’t come up with their one-word quickly. Their single words didn’t capture the essence of their products.

The few start-ups that could pitch their one-word confidently were the ones that won.

Creating a one-word PLM vision helps you drill down to what’s most important. It helps people learn and remember your core message.

So let me ask you the same question:  If you had to boil down your PLM vision into one word, what would it be?

If you’re like most companies, your answer will contain a list full of business jargon.

Unfortunately, most business jargon is vague in meaning, not everyone understands what you’re talking about, and it tends not to work as effective communication.

ONE WORD for your PLM VISION

Look at the vision board of winning PLM programs, and chances are you’ll see the same ONE WORD: “LIFECYCLE”.

The commitment to focus on lifecycle value runs deep throughout the most successful PLM implementations I’ve seen.

Lifecycle-centric PLM has huge advantages. PLM isn’t only for Engineering anymore— the onus is on every team in the entire company to capture the product’s lifecycle value. From Product to Sales, Engineering, Purchasing and Service, everyone needs to think about how to design, make, ship, install, operate and maintain the product. There’s a long lifecycle, with lots of monetization possibilities to exploit including spare parts, upgrades, maintenance and smart connected services, among others.

By paying attention to and valuing LIFECYCLE, you can create a digital thread that keeps you continuously informed about business opportunities, and you can improve our products using the feedback from the site.

Let’s take a look at five essential steps to shift your PLM vision toward lifecycle.

1. Let people build on the Lifecycle Vision.

Spoon-feeding people with facts about the benefits of a lifecycle mindset won’t get people to care about it. Rather than force-feeding facts, elicit interest by inviting them to pose questions:

“What questions would you be able to answer if you had access to your product’s digital thread?”

For example, for an industrial equipment company, the main teams could come up with these questions:

  • Product Management: What is our standard product? How is our product structured and designed? What components are available to build the product? What are the customer requirements for the product?
  • Sales: What variants and options are available? What is our offered variant for this customer? What are the customer-specific requirements? What services can we offer?
  • Delivery: What products will we deliver to the customer? What variants should we use? What do we need to manufacture, and what do we need to buy? What components can we use for this customer?
  • Services: What spare and wear parts should we offer? What services do we need to deliver to the customer? What is the Installed Base at this customer? What feedback are we getting on the product?

You need ways to help people test the vision for themselves. Thinking about the end result is an invaluable resource for building a lifecycle-centric PLM vision. Without realising it, people will be pointing out things they could know, but don’t know currently with the current information they have at hand.

2. Clarify the end-to-end process

 

How do you make your end-to-end process clear? You must explain it in terms of human actions. This is where so many process documentation initiatives go awry. Boring process charts and endless swim lanes are certainly useful, but they are often too abstract to the point of being meaningless.

We are wired to feel things about people, not for abstractions. With that in mind, gather every team working with one of your products in a single room and organize a PLM process walkthrough. The idea of a process walkthrough is to break down the process to give every team a basic idea of how it all works together.

From keeping people in the loop on what’s happening, to building relationships with various stakeholders, to negotiating the terms of collaboration— product teams can benefit greatly from a process walkthrough.

After the walkthrough, people in your company will understand what, exactly, their colleagues’ jobs are and why they matter. Not only do process walkthroughs clarify the overall process, they also create an understanding of what works, what’s missing, and what should change.

I’ve always found process walkthroughs incredibly valuable to opening the door for collaboration between and among teams. It turns out that when people see the work that’s being done by other teams, they start valuing it more.

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3. Reduce clumsy handoffs between teams

The actions taken by each team at your company affects each of the other teams. Your product definition affects how quickly prospects move through your sales process. Your sales teams affect how easy it will be for engineering to deliver your products on time. And of course, your support and services activities impact whether your customers become promoters – people who recommend you to their peers – or warn their networks to stay away.

Listening to other teams’ needs in real words is an important reminder that there are people on the other side of the wall. Understanding what other teams need is the first step toward providing the information you need to answer these questions — not because “it’s your job,” but because their efforts will end up creating more lifecycle value in the end.

To put lifecycle at the heart of your business, you need to invest in transparent, easy-to-understand and actionable handovers.

Start by mapping the deliverables each team expects from the others. Ensure that every team understands what they need from their colleagues, who they’ll be handing things off to, and how they can provide further assistance even after the handoff has occurred.

Removing friction from your internal handovers means you can free up your product lifecycle – and create value – faster.

4. Focus on Information Flow

There are various reasons why wrong information can creep into your product lifecycle: unclear instruction flows, cranky integrations, unreliable data, lack of collaboration among team members … and the list goes on.

Product data is spread across multiple systems and teams throughout the lifecycle. It’s often difficult to know where it comes from, where it’ll be sent to, or who owns it. It’s often complex to visualize how things are connected and understand the big picture.

To make matters worse, each team’s work probably happens within more than one system that names things differently – that is, the same information is stored in more than one system, but with different attributes.

Click on the different icons to see how it works:

“What does this attribute mean?”, “Why is it named differently in the CAD system?”, “What system is the owner of the information?”, “Why can’t I modify this information?”, “Where do these values come from?”, “Why is this numbering code different?”…

What can you do about this?

Start by giving people an actual window into the company’s information flows. A visual representation of your company’s key product information flows can help people gain both high-level and granular visibility of how information flows between your core systems. It can help teams understand exactly what information is important for the downstream processes.

An information flow map serves as a guide that helps people visualize how relevant data flows through core systems and how the attributes that carry that information are named in each system.

Documenting information flows is only the first step towards making information flow more fluent. It’s a laborious task, and you’ll probably spot several places where information just “doesn’t flow” and others where lots of manual work is needed.

5. Lifecycle ownership and accountability

The commitment to focus on lifecycle value must run deep throughout the entire fabric of your organization. When all of your teams are aligned around the product lifecycle, you can provide a more holistic and delightful experience to anyone who interacts with your company’s products.

Transparency in the workflow will enable people to be aware of each other’s roles and responsibilities and how they complement their own.

Instill a sense of accountability all around, and people will carry it with them during their day-to-day work.

There are no shortcuts to a lifecycle mindset

There are no shortcuts to attaining a lifecycle-centric culture. Working out a bold lifecycle-centric vision and getting every team to talk to each other is the first step. Integrated workflows and a free flow of information give everyone a better appreciation of how other teams and departments are affected by their actions. The better your teams can communicate with one another, the easier it will be for them to share ownership of the lifecycle value.

The goal should be for all members of your organization to consider themselves “guardians of lifecycle value” in one way or another. That is, all teams should be laser-focused on doing their part to ensure that your company’s products have a well-defined digital thread.

A lifecycle mindset isn’t a box to be checked off. It’s a core value that requires a company-wide commitment to lifecycle value in order to get right. If you want to win at PLM, make lifecycle the polar star that guides your company culture.

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How to define your very own PLM Bible.

In my previous blog post, I shared with you why I believe that successful PLM implementations start with a PLM Bible: a blueprint that explains what PLM means to them and how they work with their products and data.

If you’re in the same boat, let’s get down to brass tacks and talk about how to define your PLM Bible.

1. Define your learning customers.

Getting a grip on who your learners or customers are is the first thing you need to do when you start working on your company’s PLM Bible.

Learning for a techy PLM system administrator isn’t quite the same as it is for an IT executive. Everybody processes information differently. An insightful presentation that captivates the executive’s attention might be confusing or utterly boring for the system administrator, even if the information is equally relevant to both of them.

Having a comprehensive understanding of your customers allows you to:

  • Keep focused on your customer’s learning needs;
  • Connect with their motivations and behaviours;
  • Enrich the impact of your content;
  • Personalize and tailor your training content; and
  • Look at (and solve) problems from your customer’s perspective.

To identify your customers, think about the people who need to learn PLM in your organization. Now go one step further and try to classify them in groups.

To show you what I mean, let’s pretend you’re a Cloud PLM software provider. Some of your potential customers – your leads – have never tried your application. They need to understand what they’d get if they purchased it. Your paying customers have already subscribed to your product. They need to help their users get up and running with the new system. And they also need to train their system administrators, the ones configuring and managing the application behind the scenes.

In this case, you can break your learning customers down into three groups:

By considering your learning customers, you’ll then be able to determine how to structure your PLM Bible and what content you need to create to keep your learners interested.

2. Detail your PLM Learning categories.

We’ll use learning categories to create our learning structure and to organize, sort and filter the learning content. If we tag every piece of content with categories such as roles, process, system, etc, we’ll later be able to locate all the relevant content easily.

To detail your learning categories, get your team together and brainstorm. Think about at least four categories to tag your content. For example, we could look at the information from a role perspective: R&D Engineers, Product Managers, Sales Managers etc. We could also define processes as categories. How about using PLM capabilities as a way to categorize our content? Another idea would be to tag our content according to the corporate systems involved.

If you want to come up with rich learning categories, make sure you get a diverse group of people involved in the discussion. If your team works on all of the same projects together, goes to team meetings together, and sits next to each other in the office … well, needless to say, the categories will likely start to get pretty homogenous.

3. Build your Learning structure.

Now that you’ve pinned down your categories, it’s time to start thinking about the learning structure.

A typical learning structure starts with a learning path. A learning path is a group of courses that allows us to master a topic in small steps. Courses are made of several lessons, and the content often can be reused in several learning paths.

Learning paths work well for PLM, because they help people absorb a lot of information while providing flow and structure.

If you want to get inspired, head over to Dropbox, Lynda, or Asana. It’s helpful to see a few examples of learning structures in action, and these companies all do a great job of it.

Using the learning categories you’ve previously identified, you’ll define the learning paths. The first step is to select a main category. We’ll focus on one main category first, because we want to keep things simple.

For example, we could select Roles as the main category to come up with our learning paths. In this case, we’ll have paths such as “Becoming a Product Manager”, “A day in a life of a Sales Manager” or “Customer Support Foundations”.

Alternatively, we could select Process as the main category. In this case, we’ll have learning paths such as “Product Development Fundamentals”, “Understanding the delivery process” or “A day in the life at Support”.

When working on your PLM learning structure, simplicity is a design principle worth following. While you want to deliver a highly personalized learning experience to your customers, having too many learning paths or courses leads to indecision, confusion, and lower satisfaction. That’s why I recommend that you keep your learning paths lean and focused.

4. Analyse and map Learning content.

Now that you’ve got your learning paths in place, it’s time to go one step further and define your courses. At this stage, you’ll take the learning paths and think of the courses needed to achieve the customer learning goals.

First of all, make an inventory of the existing documentation. Take each of the learning paths you’ve come up with and think about the courses you’ll need to achieve the learning goals you’ve set.

Content mapping can be tricky, because you have to work backwards.

Start by determining the logical pathway a learning customer would take when navigating through the path. What process do they follow? Which functionality will they use? In what order? Do they need any previous knowledge?

To give you an idea of how this works, let’s look at Outotec’s Equipment PLM Learning path:

In the picture, you can see a series of use cases following the process (on the left) that walk the user from product development to product delivery and services.

Behind each of the use cases, you’ll find the learning content required to complete each step.

At this point, your task is to define those use cases and think about the type of learning content you need for them. The content can be in video format, eLearning, PowerPoint presentations, manuals or even teacher-led trainings. And you don’t need to use the same content type for each path. I encourage you to mix up different content types to match your learners’ needs.

Great learning content must:

  • Combine theory and practice;
  • Be interdisciplinary;
  • Provide business context; and
  • Be practical.

For inspiration, check out some examples from the engaging eLearning courses we’ve created for our customers Konecranes, Aqseptance or Upchain. Nowadays the possibilities for eLearning are immense, and you can break down and present complex concepts (like the ones involved in PLM) in a very interactive and engaging way.

5. Getting a grip on what’s important.

Now that you’ve analysed the content you need to create, it’s time to prioritize what’s most important.

Start by determining which learning customer makes up the largest portion of your learners. If most of your learners are newbies, for example, you might decide not to work on the intermediate and expert learning paths just yet.

However, if you have roughly an equal number of learners from each group, you should consider what content is most relevant to them. Maybe some courses will be common for all your customers, or perhaps there’s a deployment coming up for an specific role that should take priority.

Sometimes it helps to survey a random sample of customers and ask them some questions to shape your plan. For example, if you’re working on a PLM course for newbies, you might want to ask your experienced users:

  • What are the 5 things a new PLM user absolutely needs to know to realize value?
  • What are the top 5 things you wanted to do when you first logged into the new PLM system?

You could then use the results to decide which content to prioritize.

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6. Create a plan.

Once you’re clear on what content matters most, go ahead and create an action plan.

Think of your plan as your PLM Bible’s North Star. It will keep your sights set in the right direction and guide you as you move things forward.

Using a template or spreadsheet, determine which content you’ll work on a weekly/monthly basis. Rather than working on an overly long-term plan, break those long-term goals down and focus on multiple short-term “waves” to reach the goal.

The plan for these shorter-term waves lays out a clear course of action to review, create and test the learning content you need. This way, you’ll gain greater clarity on how long the work will actually take versus how long you thought it would take.

And what’s more, you’ll be able celebrate small successes, learn from the experience, and get buy-in.

7. Listen to your customers.

Finally, for your PLM Bible to really stay relevant, you need to talk to your customers. Whether it’s in person, online, or through surveys, take the time to check in with your customers and stay on top of what matters most to them. Customer feedback is one of the most powerful tools you can use to make your PLM Bible meaningful and relevant – and ultimately help your customers stick around to become PLM evangelists.

Over to You.

I know this is a lot of information, but the work has just begun! It takes time, organization, and creativity to create a successful PLM Bible.

But, as the book of Proverbs says, “The beginning of wisdom is this: Get wisdom, and whatever you get, get insight.“ If you value education, PLM will bring a lot of value to you!

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Why You Need a PLM Bible.

plm definition

Last week, we lost one client. The company’s management got tired of user complaints and slow progress and decided to halt their PLM Program.

The company had invested a lot of money in a customized PDM system and integrated all its CAD applications in an attempt to boost reuse and accelerate their product deliveries.

However, users found themselves unable to work with the new system. They found the PDM system slow and very complex. They didn’t understand why they had to rebuild their CAD models to fit in a design library. They were annoyed that it now took 10 minutes longer to save a model in CAD than it used to. They didn’t understand the big picture.

Eventually, the PLM program was in dire straits, and management took the decision to “press pause”. The company lost tons of euros along the way, not to mention the goodwill of both employees and management.

Why do PLM implementations often fail?

Sadly, this case isn’t uncommon.

PLM implementations often fail.

Where is the problem? Why do so many companies struggle to extract value from their PLM programs?

Is it because not all PDM systems are implemented flawlessly? Or is because PLM is too complex?

Last week, after digesting the bad news, I asked my customer: “If you were given another chance, what would you do differently?”

After a moment’s silence, he said: “I would start with a PLM Bible.”

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What’s a PLM Bible?

A PLM Bible. That made a lot of sense to me.

In my experience, savvy PLM implementations have one thing in common: They ALL have consistent ways of doing things. They have a blueprint that shows users how they work with their products and data.

It’s their PLM Bible.

Here’s an example of one of our client’s PLM Bibles: the company Outotec. In their PLM Bible, they define what PLM means to them and explain how to get support and who is involved in the PLM process. They publish release information in their bible, have a glossary of terms, and an information flow that represents how systems are connected to each other.

Then, diving deep into each of their product categories, they define a detailed process that ties together theory and practice and makes PLM a bit easier to navigate. Outotec’s PLM Learning cloud is flexible and immediately accessible, and it enables their employees to pick up skills in the context in which they must work. And they can learn at their own pace, and in ways that match the problems they face on the job.

This framework helps users achieve flow and make sense of the multiple clicks in different, apparently unconnected systems.

Once you have a PLM Bible, everything becomes clear.

Every support request becomes easier to handle. Every decision is easier to make. Every user has a clear overview of how to work with their product data. Every training is easier to plan and execute.

I agree with the client we just lost. You can’t be successful at PLM without your very own PLM Bible.

8 Key Benefits of Defining a PLM Bible.

1.Understand what PLM means to you.

A good PLM Bible starts with defining what PLM means for your organization. When you start talking about PLM in detail, you need to be specific in your terminology.

For example, several years ago, I attended a management meeting where one executive announced that his company would be focusing on streamlining PLM in the coming year. During the meeting, everyone around nodded in agreement. Afterward, though, my colleagues discussed what PLM actually meant. Some thought we should focus on streamlining the product process, some thought we should improve the PDM system, and some were convinced we should productize our products more.

PLM. Though we often use these three letters, its meaning is usually unclear.

Don’t let PLM become a placeholder word that people use to gloss over concepts your people don’t fully understand. PLM is too good to become a dummy buzzword.

2. Connect the “Why”, “How” and “What”.

Most people believe that PLM problems are all about technology.

But PLM systems are only the tip of the iceberg.

The truth is, most PLM implementations fail because employees don’t have a true understanding of the “why” and the “how” of the transformation.

PLM is NOT something you just buy and plug into your organization.

Most companies tweak their PDM systems to mirror their business processes, so they don’t simply resemble the application they purchased. The problem is, after many years of unchecked customization, PLM systems become too nebulous.

A PLM learning structure can help you explain how your company does PLM and can become your PLM Bible. With your bible, you can tie together theory and practice and make PLM a bit easier to navigate.

3. Know What You Don’t Know.

When you define your PLM Bible, you’re likely to discover unexpected gaps in your PLM concept.

Maybe you still don’t have a good solution to keep Service Bill of Materials up to date, or perhaps your concept to keep track of different MBOMs for the same EBOM is not yet crystal clear.

Recognizing your PLM gaps is essential to coming up with a successful PLM environment.

Working towards a PLM Bible can help you discover the things that don’t work well today and craft a roadmap to make them work tomorrow.

4. Know What Your Users Don’t Know – and explain it!

Identifying your user’s knowledge gaps is key to winning at PLM. Ask them to explain difficult concepts, even if you think everyone understands them. This will not only help you build your PLM Bible from a real-life perspective – it will also reveal explanations of concepts that your colleagues don’t fully understand.

Your PLM Bible’s critical task is to create a clear path to value, no matter how complex your PLM environment is. Make sure your users receive clear, timely guidance every time they encounter a difficult concept or need to follow a complex process. Define a seamless system “flow” and explain the benefits of each part of the system’s integration in clear, concise terms.

5. Understand the Big Picture.

It’s easy, as a PLM user, to get overwhelmed by complexity. One of the biggest hurdles to winning at PLM is that product data is spread across multiple systems (PDM, ERP, CRM, MRO…).

Documentation is spread across several teams and sources. Each guide focuses on one specific system or process, this makes it hard to users to understand the “big picture”. As a result, they can’t easily achieve flow, and they get side-tracked by multiple clicks in different, apparently unconnected systems.

Your users have better things to do than spend all day browsing through unconnected documents and manuals. That’s why a PLM Bible is one of the most important and useful resources in a successful PLM implementation.

6. Prepare your PLM Team for Outsourcing.

Troubleshooting, system configuration, end-user support or training are tasks you might consider outsourcing as your PLM implementation becomes more mature. Maybe you’ll decide to externalize certain tasks and will need to make sure the methodology you’ve designed can scale. A PLM Bible helps ensure that everyone on your team follows the right processes, even when you’re not looking. It will make your process repeatable for new hires, trainers and consultants.

7. Build a Scalable Training Framework.

It’s time to stop viewing product lifecycle management training as a nice-to-have, and start treating it as the foundation of a healthy, successful PLM environment.

Instead of cobbling together a rough-and-ready user manual, you need to fixate on creating standout digital training.

Instead of viewing training as a one-time problem, you need to provide a learning experience throughout the entire user lifecycle—one that helps new users and seasoned users alike get more out of PLM.

With a digital PLM Bible, you can present technical content in a practical and user-friendly way with the help of eLearning. eLearning can help you cut costs and scale: you can train employees efficiently and fast, all at a much lower cost than traditional classroom training.

And it’s not just about cost. It’s about quality, too. Content in eLearning is well organized and standardised, which increases training quality and democratizes knowledge.

8. Streamline the Product Lifecycle Management Processes

When you work on a new implementation, you tend to see many broken processes and many workarounds. That’s because the old ways of working suddenly don’t make sense anymore. Re-evaluating your business processes and confirming that they’re still valid is part of the implementation.

You have to challenge yourself and ask: “Do we need to be taking this extra step? Do we need this in the PDM system?”

As your PLM implementation becomes mature, a PLM Bible can help you continually collect feedback and create a systematic framework for improving PLM adoption.

Challenge the status quo and simplify complexity.

Stop complaining about PLM technology. Stop your finger-pointing and look in the mirror.

It’s the way your system’s been set up. It’s the way it’s been implemented. It’s the way it’s managed.

Wake up! If you want your PLM program to succeed, start with a PLM Bible!

How can we make PLM simpler?

plm cloud

Two weeks ago, my blogging peer Jos Voskuil published a blog entitled “Why PLM will never be simple”.

If users want quick, easy, and painless – that is, if users want “simple” – why shouldn’t PLM also be simple?

We’d all love to make PLM simpler, but how? Jos’ post inspired me to share how I think we all can make PLM simpler.

1) It all starts with a simple vision.

Much like a company’s vision, a PLM initiative should have a consistent, clear vision that is easy for everyone to understand and rally around. And it all starts by formulating this vision in a statement that clearly expresses what your PLM initiative aims to achieve.

Think of the PLM vision statement as a 30-second pitch that sums up the initiative’s purpose and critical targets. Drop the corporate-speak, and choose a down-to-earth message.

Here are some good examples of guiding visions statements for sound PLM initiatives:

“To enable full lifecycle traceability for the factory of the future, making sure we know the origin of parts and ensuring they remain traceable.“ – Renault

“To provide business & people with 3DEXPERIENCE universes to imagine sustainable innovations capable of harmonizing products, nature and life” – Dassault Systems

“To make End to End data accessible for realistic car visualization, ensuring that the complete visualization data with geometry, material definition, equipment, appearance and variation is centrally available for all downstream processes” – Mercedes Benz Cars

With a clear vision, it is much easier to brand your initiative, communicate what needs to be done across your organization, and find the right technology solutions to support the vision.

But letting a vision guide your team requires a lot of communication. Painting a clear picture of what you want to achieve, explaining why it’s important, and building a movement around it spurs people to action.

2) A bit of marketing.

Yes, a bit of marketing can help PLM as well. And building a brand that connects with people on an emotional level for your PLM initiative is actually an excellent idea. People who feel emotionally connected to your initiative’s brand will have a better experience using your PDM system, because they’ll be more willing to forgive small usability hiccups.

It’s important to encourage people to change by making the outlook for the results of that change tangible and realistic. Sharing case studies from other departments, companies or clients that have achieved something similar is a great way to make it real. Sometimes an actual, real-world inside story about the aspired-for state of the business can also lead people to visualize the change.

Whether you’d like people to actually use the PDM system, follow the product development process or get excited about the renewed document-management functionality, a PLM internal marketing strategy can help you build awareness and thrive. When done well, a marketing strategy can spell the difference between resistance and success.

Join our FREE-10 day 
PLM internal marketing email course.

Discover how internal marketing can boost your PLM initiatives and the exact steps to create an internal marketing campaign.


3) A less-complex PLM system architecture.

The rise of cloud computing and open APIs is changing the game for traditional PLM architectures. Even if traditional PLM vendors have historically shied away from flexible open architectures, we’re seeing a positive change towards more flexible applications that can cope with the connected world we live in.

Monolithic PLM systems are incapable of managing today’s product collaboration. These locked-in legacy systems don’t integrate well with each other, and they often become a barrier to the fast and smooth information flow that modern businesses demand.

A platform approach – using open standards, APIs and microservices to streamline integrations between the systems that manage product data – is the way to go.

And often complexity is a side effect of not making decisions. Too often, companies engaging in mergers and acquisitions end up having bunch of systems doing the same thing. They are unable to “kill” any of them and, over the years, things get complex. I’m working with several SMEs that have six different mCADs, and multiple environments for the same mCAD. Imagine how many distinct integrations they need to consolidate their product data!

A slow or poorly handled system integration between merging companies can greatly complicate your PLM system landscape. To keep your PLM architecture simple, you need to be brave and make the tough decisions.

4) A well-designed User Experience.

Boring light-blue screens from the ’80s, thousands of new windows opening with every click, cryptic error messages, slow performance and sudden application crashes are day-to-day realities in the PLM world.

UX stands for User Experience. User Experience design focuses on the optimization of an application to make it easy to use, effective and enjoyable. User Interface (UI) design refers to the look and feel of an application. Both elements are crucial to an application and work closely together.

User experience design isn’t just about how the application looks, but rather about how it works. It’s not just about picking colours and designing beautiful graphics, but rather about making it easy for the user to do their job.

A well-designed User Interface is a very powerful way to make a PDM system simple, clear, bright and user-centered, and thus improve the user experience.

Most PLM vendors try to keep their solutions generic, and don’t provide specific out-of-the-box solutions for different industries. Vendors try to take into account so many use cases that simplifying the main structure of the PDM application itself seems impossible.

The result is an overwhelming number of choices and options. Specialization sidesteps complexity by providing industry-specific workflows, terminology and data models.

Some companies start to patch the UX holes with their own development on top of the out-of-the-box systems, and often end up making it worse by trying to make it better.

However, I believe things are changing for better. Several PLM vendors are working on developing modern user interfaces, and cloud providers are taking steps towards toward nimbler and industry-specific PLM.

If your company is still stuck in legacy PDM systems and wants to improve the UX, you might consider working on a modern web portal that consolidates product data, provides visibility into your product’s lifecycle and facilitates information searches. Web portals are a great way to improve the user experience, generate engagement, and deliver on the PLM value promise.

5) Better training and support.

Regardless of how well defined your PLM methodology is, someone is always going to need help.

There’s no way around this. People get lost even when the concepts are clear and the applications to manage data are well designed. Not having a way for your users to reach out and get help creates frustration and helplessness. Having a support team working together to help users can actually make the difference and create an amazing user experience.

Being close to your people will also help you realize where the issues are. When you see users get stuck, think of it as an opportunity to improve your concepts, processes and applications.

It’s easy to blame technology – but in the end, the key to success is people.

Most PLM initiatives fail because people don’t understand the project’s “why” and the “how”. That’s why one of the first things you should do when planning your PLM initiative is to define a learning strategy. Every PLM implementation is different, so the concepts and processes always need to be defined and structured in a way that’s easy to grasp.

The lack of a common vocabulary is often a key obstacle to empowering that understanding. MBSE, MBE, Digital twin… we get confused about those terms, too! If you’ve been in the PLM world for a while, you already know this issue affects us all. Make sure you compile a glossary and work on educating the people involved in your initiative to use only the words you’ve defined in your glossary.

Making PLM feel more simple.

George Bernard Shaw once said, “I’m sorry this letter is so long. I didn’t have time to make it shorter.”

Simple is good. But simple isn’t easy!

Still, there are some great examples of businesses that managed to make it “feel simple”.

Think Google. If I want to find out why PLM isn’t easy, I go to Google, type in my question, click search and boom! I get lots of ideas.

Think Amazon. After choosing which credit card and address you want to use, you can click a single button, then sit back and wait for your stuff to show up at your door.

Amazon and Google cut through the clutter with a simple and enjoyable user experience. That doesn’t mean those businesses aren’t complex under the hood, but they’ve managed to make it feel simple for the customer.

But making things seem simple involves being brave, making decisions and having difficult conversations.

And simplicity involves transparency. This, in my opinion, is the main reason why PLM can feel so complex.

How many of your companies have well-defined products with prices on the website? To my consultant peers: how many of you are open about what you offer and how much it costs? To the vendors: where can I find a single PLM solution provider who’s open about their pricing?

This is a mentality shift, but we all should strive for transparency. This is where the world is going. Everything feels much simpler when we’re transparent.

By being transparent and simplifying the user experience side of PLM, we can make it feel simple. Even when things under the hood are complex. When concepts and processes are clear and applications are well designed, sharing and supporting one another gets much easier and the barriers to collaboration start to crumble.

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Design Sprint: where creativity meets capability.

plm design

Let’s face it, working remotely is great. Especially because of everything it usually allows: flexibility of schedule and work method, total freedom to decide where you want to live, a better family and home life… However, those of us who have been transforming our home into our office for some time, know that as with everything in life, nothing is perfect.

One of the things we miss most about our daily routine is probably the direct contact with our workmates. Though it’s true that every day there are more tools that bring us closer to our team (video conferences, chat, email…), there’s nothing that beats daily physical contact. Therefore, in Share PLM we do our best to get together at least once every three months. We choose a city (usually where someone from the team lives) and spend a few days taking part in co-working, team building activities and having a beer or two. These days are always a success and we go back home with our batteries recharged and our heads full of new ideas.

On this occasion, our Team Meeting took place at the end of January in the city of Frankfurt, with Helena hosting. We dedicated the first day of co-working completely to the team. First, we spent some time taking part in a few ice breaking activities, which always help us to let go and make the environment more relaxed. Then we had the opportunity to talk about our most important daily tasks and their future evolution. And finally, we shared anecdotes of our routine that helped us understand each other’s daily realities. The result? It was a very useful and productive day!

Helena and Bea had warned us that the second day of the Team Meeting would be a surprise, so we had no idea what we would be doing. We made bets of all kinds with each other and were truly eager to find out what they had prepared for us. The truth is that as a team we are forward planners and like to know the details of what we are going to do together in advance. However, this time it was different. What would they have prepared for us?

The Design Sprint experience.

When we arrived at the co-working session they told us that we would be dedicating the day to a Design Sprint, I have to admit that I had no idea what they were talking about. It was the first time in my life I had heard those words and of course I didn’t know what the methodology consisted of. There was no time to waste so we immediately got down to work to discover exactly what a Design Sprint was and what we could get out of it.

It’s true that we didn’t have the 3 days minimum that they recommend to carry out the process (ideally 5 days), and we had to condense everything into one veeery intense day. However, this time was enough to give us a tangible idea of the power of this tool. Want to know what a Design Sprint is? Let’s get to it!

What are we talking about when we talk about Design Sprint.

Firstly we should make one thing clear. The Design Sprint is a methodology developed by Google Ventures and made popular by Jake Knapp, author of the book ‘Sprint’. In it he explains the method for resolving problems and testing new ideas in just 5 days.

What does it consist of?

Basically in 5 days (or less) we need to be able to come up with an idea, design it and implement it. In order to do this, we help ourselves out by following a strict time schedule as well as methods based on Design Thinking.

The final objective of the Design Sprint is to generate innovative solutions that add real value to existing problems or needs. To be more specific, I will give the practical case that we faced as an example.

The sector of e-Learning training in which our activity is framed is continuously evolving. The rapid advance of new technologies makes it essential to maintain an open-minded attitude to all the demands of the market. And not only that, it is our obligation to study and understand those demands and then transform them into extraordinary services that solve real problems.

With this in mind, we have recently detected what could be a future need for our customers: the adaptation of Virtual Reality to our packages or PLM training courses. The sense of interacting in a real way with a system will probably accelerate the learning processes, making them more easily memorable. That’s why in our Design Sprint we experimented with a fundamental initial component: VR glasses.

In our case, the whole process was developed based on the idea of using Virtual Reality to train PLM and therefore, our goal was the launch of a product that would integrate this technology and be easily sellable.

Phases of the Design Sprint.

1. Map Day.

The first stage encompasses the first day of the process. In it, the main objective is to gain context and define the real problem. For this it is very important to identify the consumer and ensure that all stakeholders are aligned to the same objective and have the same information. In short, it is about generating the map to follow during the rest of the days.

In our particular case, the first stage helped us identify our target audience and what their experience with virtual reality was. To reach our conclusion we used techniques in which through empathy, we put ourselves in our client’s shoes. Specifically, we realised the importance of good listening when we have a conversation. In the following exercise, each person had to adapt a role (client or salesperson) and carry out the following instructions:

What conclusions did we arrive at?

Many times, we lose focus of what our client is telling us because we only have one thing in mind: the sale. We do not realise that our business potential is precisely in the words of our client.

In the second part of the exercise we could see how in many cases there was a big loss of information between what the client said, and what the salesperson took in.

Another exercise that gave us great perspective to generate the map was the use of fictitious interviews. In this case we repeated the roles of client-salesperson, but this time it was the salesperson who had to carry out a very thorough questionnaire on the client to analyse their needs. The rest of the team would act as listeners to later give feedback to their peers.

2. Sketch Day.

Once the problem is identified and our target audience recognised, it is time to discover how to solve it. The sketch phase is the most creative of all, and basically consists of exploring the multiple ways of solving the problem. In this stage, there is total freedom to be creative and no idea is discounted as bad, everything goes.

To make our Sketch phase more fun, we took a large sheet of paper and each member of our team had to draw 8 ideas that occurred to them to find a solution to our problem (all in record time!). The result was a lot of creative ideas and in some cases some crazy ones, but none were received with indifference. Thanks to this exercise we were able to later develop the idea that seemed most appropriate in phase 3.

In the following video you can see our colleague Jeni explaining her ideas to the rest of the team:

3. Decide Day.

In this phase the objective is very clear: to decide which of the ideas discussed on the sketch day is the best and which ones we ought to abandon. For this, it is necessary to follow a process in which we can assess the viability of our ideas one by one and why we should continue, or not continue, with them.

4. Prototype Day.

Probably the hardest day of the whole process. Day 4 is when action needs to be taken. It is time to get down to work with the creation of a prototype that can be tested by the target we have defined in phase 1. We must remember that the main objective of this phase is not another one to be tested, therefore it is essential that we build something based on this condition.

Something that is very useful for generating the prototype quickly is to divide the team and assign specific tasks. In addition to having this ready, on this day the interview that we are going to do on the users the next day has to be worked on.

5. Test Day.

During the fifth and final stage we have to validate our idea and discover any errors in the concept design. To carry this out we need to do tests with real users that are framed in our target. Subsequently, we must interview them to learn from their experience of use and expectations.

At the end of the day, the team will meet again to reflect among themselves what has been the main learning process and thus determine the next steps to follow. In our case, in having to concentrate 5 intense days into just 8 hours, the stages of the prototype and the test were merely theoretical. Even so, this introduction to Design Spring opened the doors to a very powerful tool that we gained great knowledge from. We hope to expand this knowledge even more during the next team meeting.

And you? Have you already tried this methodology? Tell us your opinions in the comments.

See you!

Create your next PLM online course in 12 Steps

elearning course design

Here’s a stat for you:  85% of every euro spent on your PLM classroom training is spent delivering it. 

This means that when you invest in classroom training, you’ll probably spend more on the PLM trainer time and travel costs than you will on actual training materials.

Creating a PLM online course is a flexible, cost-effective way to deliver your PLM training. An online course is easy to access from anywhere and allows your learners to pace themselves according to their needs.  The best part is that you standardize your procedures, provide better training and reduce costs!

Creating an online course involves a whole lot of moving pieces, some more exciting than others. Brainstorming course ideas? Fun! Uploading your course to your corporate LMS? Not so fun. The trick to successfully getting your online course off the ground is to meticulously plan and organize your materials, prioritize properly, and stay on top of the progress of each and every one of these moving parts.

Although every PLM environment is a bit different, a systematic process will help you plan and structure your course and reach your desired goals. This article will walk you through all the steps you need to take to build your first PLM online course.

1. Pick the Perfect PLM online Course Topic

The key to creating a successful online course is identifying exactly what your organization is looking for. Does sales need to better understand your organization’s products? Do you want to train your PLM support team to troubleshoot common issues? Have you recently launched a new product development process and need to explain the changes to your organization researchers? Does service need a blueprint to maintain your company’s products?

People are drawn to the topics that matter to them. Before selecting a course topic, ask yourself: How much effort will it take to create the content and what will the immediate impact be? The magic behind success is prioritization. Focus on the high impact, low effort topics first that can drive quick success.

2. Assemble the right team

You’ve finally come up with a course topic and got buy-in from your boss to start working on it. Great! Next up? Assemble the right team to help you build the course!

Assign clear roles and responsibilities for each team member and define areas of joint responsibility. Below are the typical roles needed to develop your course. You may not need all these people. Just make sure these responsibilities are covered within your team!

  • Project Manager: Oversees the full project, interfaces between subject matter experts and the eLearning team, sets deadlines and makes sure the job gets done.
  • Concept Developer: This is the person who works with the content and presents it in a way that facilitates learning. Often, the concept developer handles the course project management as well. Working on a PLM online course is demanding work – it’s not something every instructional designer can do. Understanding the technical content is not enough. You need the right blend of technical and communication skills to understand complex concepts and present them so that people actually “get” what you’re trying to teach them.
  • Graphic Designer: Creates graphics and animations, and produces video and audio. The graphic designer’s work is key to achieving an appealing look and feel for the course.
  • eLearning developer: Assembles all the elements into an engaging course, adds interactivity and works on the course didactic. Sometimes the eLearning developer takes care of the graphic design as well.

Beyond your core team, you’ll also be interacting with other people across your organization who will be part of your extended team:

  • Subject Matter Experts are experts in his or her field. Imagine you’re working on a product training for your sales team. The product managers would be the subject experts in that case. Or think of a very technical course documenting the PLM architecture. In this case, the information architect would be the subject matter expert.In practice, the concept developer works with subject matter experts to develop the content.
  • Reviewers / Tester: Testers and reviewers execute the course review process – both from the  technical and conceptual perspective. It’s key to appoint the course reviewers well ahead of time and clarify who will make the final decisions. The review process is one of the most demanding parts of the course development process, so I recommend that you tie up loose ends with your reviewers before you get started.

If some roles are only needed part-time, consider working with freelancers. For example, your team might need graphic design and project management work on a part-time basis, so these roles could be outsourced. At Share PLM, we specialize in training and eLearning and can help you create your PLM online trainings!

3. Get clear on your learning outcomes

Learning outcomes are the compass that guides your course development. They explain in simple terms what the student will learn by the end of your course.

Think carefully about what your key learners’ takeaways will be. What is the course all about? Who are the students? Why should they take the course? How will it help them?

Getting clear on these big questions is the best way to take a step back, look at your course holistically, and define the targets before you start getting into the weeds.

Here’s an example of the learning outcomes for our PLM Basics eCourse:

4. Organize a kick-off meeting

One of the best ways to avoid getting stuck during the project is to organize a project kick-off meeting where all the roles and responsibilities are clearly defined. Who will collect the feedback? Who is responsible for reconciling conflicting feedback? Who gets to make the final decision? Are you going to collaborate with freelancers to design or develop the course yourself?

Get your team together and identify expectations, including:

  • High-level objectives
  • Budget
  • Suppliers
  • Tools
  • Deadlines
  • Style Guidelines
  • Review process
  • Escalation path for decision-making.

By taking some time up front to set the ground rules, you’ll be in a much better position to create a successful course, on time and on budget!

5. Prepare an Online Syllabus

A syllabus ensures that only the right students will enrol in your course. The syllabus is like the course’s cover letter – an introduction to the course’s content and goals. It’s a guide for students to the kind of teaching and learning they can expect in your course.

A good online syllabus should at least include:

  • Course description: What is the basic content of the course and what makes it important or interesting?  How does the course fit into the context of the discipline?
  • Learning objectives: What will students be able to do by the end of the course? Formulate objectives in simple terms and keep it easy for your learners to understand what they will get from your course.
  • Prerequisites: Do your students need any previous skills to take the course? Do they need to understand any previous concepts before they start? Do they need to install something, or grab a new license? Make sure to list everything they need to take the course!
  • Course duration: How long does it take to complete the course? Don’t forget to include the exercises and thinking time when calculating the course duration.
  • Support: Explain to your learners how they can solve questions through the course. Do they need to write an email to someone? Do they have a support forum available? Are you organizing Q&A online meetings?

Later, you might also want to incorporate the course outline into the syllabus. This ties into our next task: “Preparing a course outline”.

6. Prepare a course outline to structure the content

Before you jump into the content, it’s worth spending time on structuring your course. It’s best to start with the end in mind and work backwards: think about the key takeaways you want for your students and brainstorm to come up with the content you need.

Now look at your ideas and start classifying them. Break down your content into a hierarchy of chapters and lessons. Group similar themes, tips, and ideas into small lessons that are easy for learners to digest. Then work on the sequence: structure the chapters and lessons in the order that makes the most sense. This is sort of like a puzzle. Just move your lessons around until the story flows!

Sign up now and get started with your PLM training.

Sign up now and learn in detail how to define your very own PLM Learning strategy.

7. Select and Gather your PLM Course Content

It’s time to prepare a detailed inventory of what you have: past training materials, PowerPoint presentations, user manuals, workbooks, audio and video files, and worksheets. Only include content that directly relates to your learning outcomes.

Once you have all the “raw materials,” your next step is to review them and check if the information is accurate. Flag those parts that require an update or flag the content you need to create from scratch.

At this stage, many PLM teams start procrastinating. They realize that some parts of the process aren’t well documented, some information is missing, and some concepts aren’t yet in place.

My advice is to focus on the content you have ready first. Put the missing parts in the “to-do list”, and work on them later!

8. Create engaging lessons

Now that you have a thorough course plan and know the content you need to create, it’s time to get to the meat of your course. This is where all the learning happens. Your goal is to fit your content and ideas into a storyboard and figure out how you’ll present the content to learners.

Creating content for your course is a really creative process in which you’ll organize information, brainstorm the interactions and decide on the best way to deliver the content.

What type of visuals will you use? Will you have videos, reading content, interactive activities, audio content? Mix up different formats to bring your content into action and keep your learners engaged!

The good news is that the tools to put all the pieces together, including ones that record your original content, have become easier to use and a whole lot less expensive.

If this is the first time you’ve worked on an online course, it’s hard to imagine all the potential ways to present your content! To help, we’ve put together a blueprint that guides you through the course-building process, step by step. Click here to get inspired!

9. Prepare exercises

It’s time to prepare some exercises related to the course content. Exercises are great for helping learners follow along and strengthen their skills and knowledge. Keep your exercises relevant and try to use real-world situations as often as you can! This is a cool exercise example from John Stark’s PLM Paradigm course.

10. Review your course

At this stage, you should collect feedback from all the stakeholders. Ask your reviewers to formulate their feedback in a way that’s specific and actionable. What do I mean by specific feedback? Let’s look at one example:

  • Unspecific Feedback: “I can’t read the text. Please change.”
  • Specific Feedback: “The header text is too bright. Could you please change the colour to black?”

The review process is one of the most challenging parts of the online course creation process. The more people involved, the more complex it gets!

When Share PLM develops PLM courses for our clients, we sometimes find ourselves stuck in the middle. We have to make sense of confusing and contradictory feedback from reviewers who confuse and contradict, and those who are too busy to work on the content until the very last minute. Managing the feedback process can be a big challenge!

The review process can often feel like it’s never-ending. To avoid these challenges, set a due date for the feedback and agree on the ground rules at the start of the project. And if things get stuck, avoid the back and forth and bring everyone together for a face-to-face online review.

11. Host your PLM online course

After all that hard work, you’re ready to share your awesome PLM online training with your learners! There are two major ways to deliver your online courses:

  • Option 1: Self-hosting

As the name suggests, with this option you host your online course on your own server or website. If you use WordPress, you can install plugins such as “LearnDash” or “Scorm Cloud” and upload the courses to your website. Things start to get trickier if you need to track results or deliver certificates. At the end of the day, setting it up requires technical knowledge. It’s also time-consuming.

  • Option 2: Learning Management Systems (LMS)

An LMS is a platform used to deliver, track, and report eLearning courses. They give you full control over everything and are very easy to set up. LMSs come in all shapes, sizes, and price levels. At Share PLM, we use a free open-source LMS called Moodle to host our own online courses. If you work for a big company, the odds are that they already have an LMS.

12. Measure Your Success

Measuring the success of your course is an important final step. Ask for feedback from your students and analyse the statistics from your LMS. How many students took the course? How many finished it? What did they like most about it? What would they improve?

Gathering feedback is great for iterating and improving future versions of your course, creating better courses in the future, and shaping your PLM training program so that it brings the people in your organization closer to your products!

And that’s it! Ready to dive in? We’ve compiled a quick guide to walk you through the building blocks of modern PLM online courses. Check it out and share it with the world!

Plugging into the power of the connected plant

plant engineering

Digitalization and end-to-end plant lifecycle management are spoken of as top priorities by companies across the chemical, oil and gas, process and power industries.

The goal? A complete digital footprint of the plant to help optimize operations, plant maintenance, build better products and provide better services.

But how can traditional Engineer to Order (ETO) businesses, who often lag behind other sectors in terms of information technology, product and data management, even dream of a plant digital twin?

Complex one-off products and low volumes

Products are complex and produced in low volumes and in high variety.

Plants and Facilities are almost always the result of a project. Engineering, Procurement and Construction companies (EPCs) design and build these plants to meet single Owner-Operator (OO) requirements, which often lead to Engineer-To-Order solutions. The order specification process is often lengthy and complex, a labour-intensive process that requires deep technical knowledge.

It typically takes several years from initial customer inquiry to the closing of the deal – and yet the deal is still not done. The detailed design of the plant or facility is not carried out until an order has been signed. Each new order often involves new product development to match customer specifications. Products usually end up being highly customized.

This is entirely different than traditional “PLM-ish” industries, where the product is designed before it’s sold.

The main challenges: Departmental silos and Interoperability

The final plant is the result of an intense collaboration between and among functions and disciplines. The civil department, mechanical equipment, structural building, piping… everyone has their own set of discipline-specific tools. Applications and core systems are usually not well integrated with each other. And information ends up imprisoned in documents and discipline- specific authoring applications.

The result? A “messy” application landscape, departmental silos, lack of transparency and a lot of duplicated data. Each discipline gets locked into their own engineering tools and standards. Information handovers are sluggish and hinder the sorely needed cross-discipline collaboration.

Plugging into the power of the connected plant

Connectivity within plant businesses is not new. Yet today’s advanced technologies and cheap computing, storage, and bandwidth costs make it possible to move beyond single plant and equipment automation toward more complex, connected product and process networks. Integrating of data from several installed products – the so-called product instances – enables a holistic view of product performance and generates actionable insights to improve next-generation designs.

All this improves equipment performance throughout, leverages data-driven insights, increases the quality of the end product and prevents breakdowns before they occur. Identifying and responding to small problems before they become big, improves plant performance and lowers maintenance costs.

For example, using cloud-based technologies and connected data, a plant digital twin enables an expert sitting in a central control room to monitor a product installed in several plants located around the world, troubleshoot problems and extract performance insights to help product development teams design the product’s next generation. It enables a field service engineer to scan an equipment, load its digital twin, follow maintenance instructions, check out historical reports and use advisory tools to improve equipment performance. And it equips analysts with a wealth of connected data to answer the questions “How often?”, “What?”, “When?”, “Where?”, “Who?”, and “Why is this a problem?”

The possibilities are many, and realizing them begins with setting the foundation for a connected model that allows for digitalization at the plant level. Product Lifecycle Management, enabled by the latest technological capabilities, provides this foundation and allows plant businesses to capitalize on the convergence of the digital and physical worlds and plug into the power of the connected plant.

Setting meaningful goals for your plant digital twin strategy

The decision to embark on a plant digital twin initiative should align with the organization’s specific needs. Understanding how the company intends to compete and aligning this strategic “true north” with the digital investments is crucial to success.

For example, some EPCs could decide to focus on their service portfolio and to invest in fast, reliable information to offer better services. Others may choose to invest in product configuration to speed up quotations and close more deals. Operators might want to monitor plant performance and invest in maintenance to extend asset lifecycles.

It’s important to prioritize strategic initiatives for investment based on the company’s specific objectives. What follows is a summary of the six overarching trends that seem to be accelerating the drive toward plant digital twins.

Leveraging the service side of business

Plants are products with long lifecycles. And EPCs are undergoing a fundamental business transformation to monetize these long lifecycles. It’s a shift from project to lifecycle business.

Rather than the “one and done” project approach of the past, the business model for most Plant and Facility solution providers is evolving from delivering projects to providing services for the entire plant’s lifecycle.

A portfolio of services ranging from spare parts delivery to plant maintenance or process monitoring can greatly boost the revenue from after-sales while building longer, closer relationships with customers. Better service means higher revenues, greater profitability and, over time, a powerful competitive advantage.

Leveraging the service side of business requires easy access to equipment-relevant information and smooth data transfer between project and service organizations. Service-relevant master data such as spare parts, spare-part kits or maintenance-relevant information must be defined and available to streamline service quotations and delivery.

Retaining knowledge

Deep technical knowledge is needed to sell and deliver the final plant. And this knowledge often resides in the heads of a handful of experienced employees. Typically, procedures and rules aren’t written down and shared with others. A technically educated sales team is needed to fit the product to the customer’s needs.

Standardizing their methods and creating reusable knowledge allows plant businesses to take on more projects, scale and grow. Documenting processes and “decoding” product configuration and sizing rules from the experts’ heads is crucial to retaining knowledge and democratizing the selling process.

Gaining efficiency through reuse

Reuse (and the re-users) is the crux of the matter when it comes to efficiency. Reuse is a major cost-saver. Not only does it reduce time spent in delivering the final product, but it also allows development costs to be amortized over many projects.

Modularity is a design strategy for building and organizing complex products effectively. A product is modular if it has standardized interfaces and the components perform one or very few functions.

Providing less variety along products and adding commonality among components simplifies complexity and paves the way towards more advanced product configuration tools. You can still allow a certain degree of product customization by combining standard and custom components wisely and involving the customer in the product specification process.

Exploiting reuse requires a good dose of change management. By making designs reusable and storing them wisely so they can be found, your company prepares the ground to get reusers on board and fight the “not invented here” attitude.

Looking for an in-depth Plant Information Management overview?

Access our FREE Plant PLM eCourse  ​from PLM Partner!

Speeding up quotations to boost sales

Quotation speed and delivery time are order-winners. A clear and concise product description, using modular designs that limit the options available to customers, is key to speeding up sales quotations and closing more deals.

Salespeople can build a reliable, high-quality proposal faster and at a better price than others by using product configurators, templates and standard documents that have been fine-tuned and proven to be successful.

That’s not to say that the sales process operates on autopilot. Think of product configuration as a toolkit that salespeople have at hand to put together a compelling proposal while applying their skills to close the deal.

Traceability and compliance

Manufacturing and the supply of a large proportion of the plant’s equipment is outsourced to third parties. Orchestrating these equipment deliveries with suppliers around the world is a complex process that requires close attention to quality, scheduling and cost.

Adding to the complexity, orders and specifications might change during the project. This often leads to product design and documentation adjustments that need to be tracked and controlled. End-to-end traceability along the project and supply chain are critical to ensure compliance and quality.

A well-defined Plant Digital Thread is a keystone to demonstrating to regulatory authorities the integrity of plant-maintained information.

New digital revenue streams

The plant digital twin generates reams of data that can be monetized through the development of new products and services. Advisory tools to provide corrective advice to optimize process performance augmented reality to help field services maintain and repair equipment, remote process monitoring services analytics to reveal asset performance issues … the options are many, and by listening to customer challenges it’s easy to be inspired, develop new solutions and dive into new revenue streams that capitalize on access to fast, connected information.

Getting started: taking small steps towards the plant digital twin

The journey towards the plant digital twin requires navigating complexity and a keen focus on acquiring needed capabilities. While an overly simplistic plant model may not yield the value a digital twin promises, taking an overly fast and broad approach can almost guarantee that you’ll get lost in the complexity. The good news is that by thinking big and defining an ambitious true north, starting small with agile bimodal projects, and scaling fast based on the learnings, it’s possible to see the shoreline beyond the rough waters of the plant digital twin.

1. Start with a plant structure

Start by describing the plant’s structure. As my peer Bjorn Fidjeland explains in his Plant PLM eCourse , several plant information structures are required to describe a plant.

To get going, start with a functional structure. A plant’s functional structure is discipline-independent, hierarchical and breaks down the plant from the functional perspective. A plant structure includes plant processes, systems and equipment.

plant engineering

Once you’ve agreed on the plant functional structure “on paper”, it’s time to move it to a system. And where does the functional structure belong? If you’re already using a PLM system, that’s probably the place. If you still don’t have a system, you could experiment with Aras PLM, or look into Siemens, Dassault or Aveva comprehensive plant solutions.

2. Identify and share relevant information

Plants require intense collaboration between and among different disciplines, using a variety of different tools. The information-sharing across disciplines and functions is a major challenge and affects the traceability of information throughout the plant’s lifecycle. All stakeholders struggle to access information effectively due to its lack of visibility, a problem that is compounded when information is split among several discipline-specific applications.

Now that we have a common plant structure, the key is to get disciplines to start sharing their data. They need to understand why others need the information they produce and how easier work will be downstream if they spend a little more time on sharing it.

plant engineering

It’s OK to start sharing only documents. The goal at this point is for people in the organization to become familiar with the structure. Afterwards, we’ll start sharing models and metadata.

3. Define a product family modular library

A product family library comprises a predefined set of modules that can be combined in different ways to form a product. Modular designs offer not only an opportunity to speed up product deliveries; they also have an enormous potential to unlock service opportunities and increase customer loyalty.

It’s time to audit your product portfolio, seek commonalities and analyze how to reduce complexity and foster reuse. Defining a product family library to illustrate what modules are available and how they can be combined is a major breakthrough but also a huge task for ETO companies.

The variety and complexity of the product portfolio is high, and while companies usually don’t start from zero, it’s a big effort to come up with a comprehensive modular product library.

My advice? To win early support, begin with products that have the potential to maximize the return on investment. Find the most profitable product families and focus first on the common and profitable products and modules. If a product is seldom sold, the cost of defining a library may exceed the benefit.

4. Connect plant specification to product realization

The next step is to connect the plant’s functional structure, where we specify equipment, to product realization, the asset itself. At this step, it’s very useful to integrate the plant structure to the most common authoring applications. Plant disciplines operate in different CAD environments, and information often gets locked up in department-specific applications. Purchasers can’t access MCAD – they don’t even know how to use it or have a license. And the service colleagues spend more than half of their working time hunting for technical information locked in hidden drawings to order spare parts.

Integrating discipline specific authoring tools to the plant structure enhances visibility and provides easy access to plant’s technical data and product bills of materials. A reliable information flow between CAD and PLM speeds the development process, enables efficient information handovers between disciplines and upholds consistency in product quality.

In the example, we are connecting a centrifugal pump specification to the asset that’s fulfilling the specification. The difference between specification and realization is very important within the plant model. Imaging that this pump gets broken, and we need to change it. We’ll then bring in a new asset, but the specification stays the same.

5. Modeling the plant lifecycle

Most plants and facilities move through a lifecycle with approximately eight distinct phases, starting with the specification of the plant objectives and ending with decommissioning. The plant structure and the connected products will evolve through the lifecycle. At this point, we can start defining a model to maintain the plant’s “digital thread” all the way through the process.

6. Define a plant catalogue

Equipment in the plant is specified using attributes. Some of these attributes are measured by field instruments, creating a digital feedback loop or, in some cases, a remotely accessible live view of the plant. Classifying processes and equipment in the plant and defining reference data are needed to automatically create a plant tag and effectively connect all data – including the data from sensors in the field.

A major challenge when dealing with field data consists in the systematic and efficient information tagging of sensor data so that we don’t end up comparing apples with oranges. If you want to know more about reference data and catalogues, head to my peer Bjorn Fidjeland’s blog. He has several excellent articles where he discusses these topics.

7. Integrate suppliers

Different interactions with suppliers are required during each stage of the plant lifecycle to share and store information. Efficiently collaborating with suppliers is key for plant businesses, where a big portion of the equipment deliveries come from third parties. Integrating suppliers into Plant PLM facilitates document exchange, product model collaboration and change-tracking, among other things.

8. Harness information for action using end-user apps!

Now that we have the data, we can harness it for action using end-user apps! End-user applications are easy to configure and drive meaningful value, whether it be through powering better decision-making or enhancing consumer-facing applications.

Imagine an application for salespeople who need to constantly monitor after-sales opportunities for their products. Through an easy-to-use application, they could track installed equipment, gain performance insights and tap into new service and modernization opportunities.

I’m a big fan of end-user applications because they facilitate daily work and generate additional insights for specific use cases.

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step

Jos Voskuil concludes in his “PLM for Owner / Operators” blog that digital continuity requires a “new way of thinking” for plant owners/operators, who are “struggling to grasp a modern digital enterprise concept as their current environment is not model-based but document-driven.”

All in all, true success in achieving early milestones on a digital twin journey will likely rely on an ability to grow and sustain the digital twin initiative in a fashion that can demonstrate increasing value over time.

It can be an overwhelming task to get there, but as a wise person once said: “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”

How to Craft a Killer PLM User Onboarding Journey

it onboarding

What is user onboarding?

User onboarding is the process of actively guiding and helping users to find value and success within your product, process or service.

Onboarding gets users past the awkward uncertainty of trying out something new. Good onboarding experiences combine the right elements of education, inspiration, and actionable insights.

User onboarding is one of the most critical phases in a PLM user’s journey. The better you can engage your users on day one, the more likely they are to see value right away, pull others in, and stay around.

When done properly, onboarding should feel like magic—an invisible hand that guides users through every step of their new way of working.

The value of user onboarding for PLM

Connect people, processes and data across the entire lifecycle of a product. A short and sweet elevator pitch that got your management team excited, and your company embarking on a PLM journey.

Yet five years afterwards, you’re still fighting with clunky systems, bad data and employees who complain about how much slower they’ve become since you renewed the company’s operating model.

Product data is stored and spread across multiple core systems and applications. These systems are often bumbling and complex, and not well integrated with each other.

Dropping new users into this system’s jungle with only a knife between their teeth leads to few finding their way out safe and well.

If you want to put your PLM transformation program on track, you need to “sherpa” your users and your business through your PLM journey.

While onboarding can’t control the complexity of your PLM landscape, it can certainly help your users go from being completely unfamiliar with PLM to being intrigued, committed, and, ultimately, advocating for your initiative.

And how can you do that?

By setting up the easiest trails, removing as many roadblocks as possible, and always encouraging them to continue the journey.

By nailing down your user onboarding.

The building blocks of PLM user onboarding

Your onboarding process should be a combination of education, inspiration, and actionable insights. But before we get into the process of designing an onboarding flow, let’s explore the building blocks of a PLM user onboarding experience!

1. Educational Emails:

Start by saying hello to your users with a welcome email as soon as they enrol into your PLM program. What can you do to engage them and excite them about what’s coming?

Plan out an email sequence to hold your user’s hand through the first stages of their onboarding.

Introduce yourself and the program and provide them with a short list of useful resources to get started the first time you show up in their inbox. You might also encourage your users to ask questions and let them know where they can find you.

When you show up in their inbox again, ask yourself, what does a new user need to know in order to get going? Focus your email efforts on those first steps, and share content that delivers value and education.

After the first few critical days, you can continue sending educational emails to help your users advance into the deeper stages of their journey.

You might also try out event-based emails: as users start to see success and hit milestones, communicate with them, let them know what comes next, and encourage them to continue the journey.

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2. System Trainings:

Are you looking for a way to quickly teach your users how to use your system? If so, interactive system trainings will be just right for you. You can guide your learners through a workflow by having them click through various core systems to complete a task with system trainings.  System training prepares your learners in a safe environment and helps them to master the new workflows.

Here’s one example:

3. System Walkthroughs:

System walkthroughs are a powerful way to give support and guidance in context. The idea is to get users right into the system, drawing their attention to key features with visual cues, and encouraging them to interact. Once they click the visual cue, a popup with explanations and tips appears. The advantage of this is that it’s contextual—part of the natural workflow.

Slack does a great job of walking users through their product:

If you’re using a cloud PLM application, there are specific user onboarding tools available, such as walkme or appcues to ease the process of creating your product walkthroughs. If not, you’ll probably need custom development.

You might also want to consider preparing a short “Getting started” eCourse to cover what happens when your users first log in. What do they need to do in order to log in? What do they see? How do they navigate the user interface? Our Autodesk Fusion system first login demo does a nice job of this. Check it out here!

4. eLearning:

Users don’t care about your processes and systems as much as you do. They care about how those new processes and systems are going to make their life better. You can prepare an eLearning course to help them learn about your products, processes, system landscape, and any special skills or workflows they’ll need.

You can break down complexity and let them slowly get into greater detail through interactive learning. Elearning can help you explain concepts in a practical and user-friendly way.

Looking for ideas and inspiration? Check out our FREE eCourses at Share PLM.

5. Documentation and Training Materials:

Your documentation and training materials are the basis of an onboarding experience that thrives. When your users need help, can they find it? Is it clear what they need to do? Try to keep it practical, and prepare learning materials that help your people understand the theory and get the job done.

6. Personal Support:

It’s easy to make PLM onboarding exclusively about systems. But onboarding is really all about people. So when you’re laying out your PLM initiative, make sure you take the right steps to prepare your people as much as you prepare your systems.

In my experience, PLM users are usually worried that you won’t be there to help them out in the future. Therefore, it’s crucial to introduce and highlight the team of people dedicated to helping users with their support issues.

Schedule a first coaching meeting, and sit down with the users to help them get started. You can show how to log in to the system, set up their preferences and search for a part, as well as view their product BOMs and models. Share your contact details and let them know how they can reach out.

Schedule a couple of follow-up sessions more to cover the key features and answer their questions, while also making them aware of the broader support network dedicated to helping them master PLM.

Asking your users for feedback is a delicate dance. Use these meetings to get feedback straight from the user’s mouth. Observe how your users interact with the systems, and find out improvement ideas for your future releases.

You might also schedule a follow-up call to learn how it’s going a month after your users have started.

Emphasising human support throughout onboarding will reassure users that it’s a safe bet to jump into PLM for the long-haul.

6 steps to craft a PLM onboarding experience that works

Now that we’ve covered the basics, and the building blocks of user onboarding are at your disposal, let’s look at how to put this all together into an onboarding process that feels tailored to each one of your users.

Below are six steps to guide you when you’re setting up your user onboarding process.

1. Know your users well:

You can’t plan a great onboarding experience if you don’t know who your users are, the products they work with, and why they need that data to do their job better.

Define user segments by categorising their needs. You could segment using business functions, roles or disciplines. Or you could devise a broader categorisation, and group your users into viewers, editors and admins.

By knowing how your users think, and what they value, you can craft an onboarding experience that helps them see value right away.

2. Craft a strong value proposition:

What does ‘success’ look like for each of your user segments?

The focus of the onboarding process should be to guide the user towards the core value proposition of your PLM program. Every step along the onboarding process should help boost users towards that value proposition.

Take the time to make it very clear why each of your defined user segments should join your company’s PLM journey. This information will give you a solid understanding of your users’ motivations, and help to design the actual onboarding flow.

3. Outline your user’s lifecycle:

Much like the seasons of the year, your users go through a series of stages as they engage with your PLM program. User lifecycle maps represent the journey a user takes to move from first learning about your PLM program, to becoming the one telling others about it.

Your user lifecycle maps will probably look different for each of the segments you’ve defined.

This is an example of a user lifecycle map for a “designer” role:

4. Walk in your user’s shoes:

Now that you’ve identified and broken down your user’s lifecycle for each of your segments you can begin to map your onboarding activities to each stage.

Start by breaking down tasks into the smallest possible pieces. Examples of these tasks could be “search for a part”, “send a notification”, or “save a design”. Small tasks like these are simple and easy to complete.

For each lifecycle stage, try to really put yourself in your user’s shoes: What’s important to them? Where do they need to head next? What other insights might be useful?

Try to anticipate the next question your user will ask, and provide it only when they need it. Keep going through the entire process, documenting every step that’s relevant.

5. Design your user onboarding flow:

At this stage, you’ve framed your onboarding process, and you’re ready to start mixing up the user onboarding ingredients to “cook” an appetising onboarding flow.

Storytelling is the first essential component of a great onboarding flow. Remember who you’re talking to, and combine several onboarding elements wisely, with the “why” always in mind. People learn in differing ways, so make sure to give them options that fit each one’s learning style while keeping them engaged.

6. Iterate and experiment:

Gathering feedback and tracking user interaction is vital to improving your PLM initiative and its onboarding. Measure your users’ onboarding experience by getting their feedback and assessing their activity during the onboarding flow. This will give you insights on adjustments required to create an onboarding experience that means the most to them.

Striving for long-term user engagement

User onboarding isn’t just for first-time users. Once you get your “newbies” onboard, your job is to make sure that your old users are still there, and continue to engage with your PLM initiative.

Regular online and in-person meetings are great to keep users motivated, as they deepen their engagement with your PLM initiative. Use webinars, discussion tables and information rounds to demo new features and answer questions, as well as keep your users up to date and share experiences.

PLM user onboarding is not an exact science. Keep trying new things, and then leverage metrics to find out when your efforts are paying off.

Your onboarding program must keep up with system updates, new features, process improvements and perhaps even more importantly, people. As your users change and become familiar with your PLM journey, your user onboarding will evolve as well.

What is Blockchain, and why does it matter to PLM?

PLM Blockchain

With the words “blockchain” and “Bitcoin” on everyone’s lips these days, it seems you risk seeming outdated if you can’t discuss about it in your after-work weekly catch-ups or at home during dinner.

Whether you’ve heard about it at your most recent conference, at the office, or even in your local newspaper, you probably found yourself in the same situation we did – confused about what’s behind this “dark and secret” highly hyped technology.

In simple terms, blockchain is a shared public ledger on which cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin rely. But if blockchain is basically just the technology underlying Bitcoin, why are people so excited about it?

Because blockchain is much more than just Bitcoin, and the PLM sphere is beginning to recognize how it can reshape the way companies manage their products and information flows.

Blockchain puts the product at the heart of the data structure. It enables different organizations, with completely distinct data models, to collaborate across the product’s lifecycle.

And blockchain does this by maintaining a clean audit trail and an immutable data thread.

Untangling the blockchain wires

At its core, blockchain is a new way of storing and managing data. Think of a blockchain as a database that can be used to store and share records of value. However, it’s not like a traditional database, where information is stored in a central location.

Blockchain databases aren’t stored in any single location, like a bank or a cloud datacenter. Information in a blockchain is held on the individual computers of the people who use the database. That’s why blockchain is often described as a decentralized, distributed ledger.

This “distributed ledger” is used to keep track of transactions. In a blockchain, transactions are packaged into blocks. A “block” is a collection of transactions that are validated at the same time. Each block is then “chained” to the next block, in linear, chronological order, using cryptography. Cryptography is the underlying foundation of blockchain. It’s used to sign transactions, authorize exchanges of value and much more.

Blockchain allows consumers and suppliers to trade without intermediaries, to connect directly and remove the need for a third party.

Anatomy of blockchain

Each blockchain is made up of a series of blocks containing validated transactions.

Let’s do a deeper dive on each of the core components of a blockchain.

1. The transactions

A business transaction is a transfer of value, such as goods, money or services between two parties. Every transaction involves:
  • A digital asset: Information stored in a blockchain can be anything – from money, stocks or even identities to digital goods such as art, music or even code!
  • Sender: The person who wants to send a digital asset. To initiate the transaction, the sender only needs to know the address of the person she wants to send transfer the digital asset to
  • Receiver: The person who receives the digital asset.  She needs to share the blockchain address with the sender each time a transaction is to be made.

Authenticating a transaction

Each transaction must be verified before it’s allowed to enter the blockchain.

The verification process is often done using two keys, a public key and a private key. Everyone can see the public key, but the private key is secret.

Public and Private key pair

Blockchain uses PKI to authenticate transactions. Every blockchain user has a private and public key pair: a public and a private key to encrypt and / or sign data. Private keys are mathematically related to public keys. However, it’s impossible to extract a private key from a public key thanks to a strong encryption code base.

To better understand how public private key pairs work, let’s imagine that you have a mailbox. The public key is the address of the mailbox. A person can insert letters into your mailbox, but cannot retrieve them; you need to use your private key to open the mailbox and retrieve the letters.

Encrypting and decrypting is like locking and unlocking your mailbox. If anyone encrypts (“locks”) a transaction using your public key, only you can decrypt it (“unlock”) it with your private key. If you encrypt (“lock”) a transaction with your private key, anyone can decrypt (“unlock”) it. This action serves as a “digital signature”.

In the digital world, keys are just text strings with many digits. You can generate your own public and private keys using this online tool.

A cryptographic digital signature

Transactions are authenticated with digital signatures. A digital signature is created with a sign function that depends both on the transaction itself and on the private key.

Since the digital signature is created with your private key, no one can produce it but you. Additionally, by also using transaction data to create the signature, the sign function ensures that no one can copy the signature multiple times.

2. The Blocks

Transactions in a blockchain are stored in fixed structures called “blocks”. The important parts of a block are:

  • Block content: A validated list of transactions.
  • Block header: It contains key metadata about a block. There are four main sets of metadata in a block header:
–A block identifier: To identify a block, we use digital signatures that are generated using cryptographic hashes. And what are cryptographic hashes? A cryptographic hash is a kind of ‘signature’ for a text or data file. A hash is a function that converts data of any size into a fixed-size string.
Whether the input is a single number, a long text or a digital file, the resulting hash is always the same size. Converting a string to a signature is called hashing. Hashing only goes in one direction; you can’t take the fixed-length data output and recreate the string. Blockchains often use a SHA-256 hashing function, which generates an almost-unique 256-bit (32-byte) signature for a text. This hashing online tool allows you to generate the SHA256 hash for any string: -The previous block hash: Every block includes a link back to the previous block. This way we can access all previous blocks in a blockchain – they are linked together, and the database retains the complete history of transactions. –A Merkle tree root: It’s a data structure that condenses the transactions in the block. A Merkle tree is built by hashing pairs of transactions until we come up with only one hash. The node at the top of the Merkle tree is called the root. To come up with a Merkle root, we start from the bottom. We take the transactions and hash them. Then we pair those hashes, concatenate them and hash them again. And so on, until we come up with only one hash.
–Proof of work: Valid blocks contain the answer to a complex mathematical problem created using an irreversible cryptographic hash function. The only way to solve this mathematical problem is to guess random numbers. We’ll explore the proof of work more in detail a bit later. If you want to explore the block’s content by yourself, have a look at one of the blocks in the blockchain.info public records.

3. The Blockchain

All confirmed transactions and blocks are included in the blockchain. To confirm pending blocks, blockchains uses a process called mining. Mining prevents previous blocks from being modified, protects the neutrality of the network, and ensures consensus. Now let’s explore the main actors in the mining process.
  • The miners: Transaction requests are sent to every computer on the network so the transactions can be validated. These computers are also called miners. Miners validate new transactions and record them on the blockchain.
To validate the transactions, they must solve a difficult mathematical problem based on a cryptographic hash algorithm. This problem can only be solved by guessing the numbers. Every miner on the network competes to guess the solution to the problem.
  • The Proof of Work: The solution to this mathematical problem is called the Proof Of Work. When a block is ‘solved’, the transactions contained in the block are considered confirmed.
The first miner to solve this mathematical problem gets a reward, as the mining process uses a lot of computer power and electricity.

Exchanging value with blockchain

Imagine you have created a PLM API that gathers and presents data from CRM, ERP and PDM systems. You want to license and sell this application using a blockchain-based “PLM marketplace”.

You can use a token to identify your PLM API digitally. This token is stored on the blockchain and contains a link to the PLM API, stored somewhere on the cloud. Everyone on the PLM Marketplace blockchain agrees that the API belongs to you and that your API is officially licensed. If I want to buy your API, I sign the transaction with the API’s token, your public key and my private key. Once the network validates the transaction, it’s added to a block stored in the blockchain, and the PLM API’s license is mine. I can now use it freely; if someone wants to check the authenticity of the license, they can go back to the blockchain and audit track the transaction.

PLM and blockchain: what does the future hold?

It’s still early days, but blockchain may well play a significant role in the PLM world. It has the potential to ease integrations, simplify migrations and enable end-to-end collaboration, and provide an accurate record of the “who, what, where and when” across the product’s lifecycle.

It promises to connect businesses whose applications, data models, part numbering and coding systems are different. Blockchain puts the product at the heart of the systems and allows them to focus on the data they need to collaborate on.

Other opportunities – in copyright protection, additive manufacturing, supply management, IoT data management, and sustainability – are on the horizon.

Although PLM vendors don’t offer anything off the shelf right now, many businesses, like Maersk, Toyota or Walmart are exploring ways to juice up blockchain for their products.

Nevertheless, it will likely take some time before the technology is in productive use. The technology is still in its infancy: lack of standards, scalability, incompatibility between different blockchains and the unfathomable amount of computing resources and energy used through the mining process are only a few of the challenges that blockchain needs to meet before it becomes commonplace.