7 reasons the wheels are going to come off your nice new PLM strategy

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Whether you’ve just decided to corral all your PLM initiatives under one organization, or you’re already down the road and have created your governance model, completed your strategy and gotten everyone excited (and have the money approved) to move forward, what are the biggest risks to success in a large enterprise with PLM?

Integware has worked with dozens of companies, most of them larger than $1B in revenue, on enterprise-wide PLM solutions.  While it’s essential to select a PLM systems integrator that has experience delivering PLM solutions in your specific industry, what are the biggest organizational risks we’ve seen that keep companies from realizing the business benefits of their investment in PLM?

1. Lack alignment on the business operating model.  This is an enterprise architecture question that will be the subject of an upcoming blog.  Unless IT delivers a PLM architecture based on how the business measures itself, you have a square peg in a round hole problem.  The solution just doesn’t fit.  An example is corporate IT driving for a centralized solution so that they can reduce cost while the business operates in a diversified manner with each division operating almost independently responsible only to its own P&L.
2. Overcoming organization resistance to leveraging processes & tools.  Everyone is in love with their own process and even more so, with their own tool.  If the executives don’t have the mandate, or they can’t explain the business benefit of leveraging tools and process and ones that integrate the data between related processes, then an enterprise-wide solution just isn’t going to work.
3. Fortitude to ensure requisite level of investment over entire roadmap.  Many first PLM implementations are a foundation for defining information models and implementing basic PLM processes.  The big benefits come with second, third, and later releases.  Without a long-term commitment to a PLM program, you can spend a lot of money to create a robust foundation but only build the first room of the house.   
4. Relying on “out of the box” solutions that don’t map to business process.  Since PLM can be used in a wide variety of industries, and PLM vendors build applications that can be used by as many customers as possible, chances are high that their solutions don’t actually meet your needs.  All customers want to be as OOTB as possible.  How do you do this and still meet your business process requirements?    
5. Not having the subject matter experts at every level of governance.  These people are your most knowledgeable and therefore, most valuable.  We’ve seen too many projects fail because they didn’t have enough input from the experts to drive the process changes required to produce world-class results.
6. Not paying enough attention to usability and training.  Out-of-the-box, PLM solutions can be clunky, clicky and cluttered.  Users find it hard to do simple tasks, like “find a document” or more elaborate yet critical things like “show me all the quality issues in China last year”.    
7. Underestimating the complexity involved in data migration.  This item is last for a reason.  It gets everyone.  When we talk about data migration with customers at the beginning of projects we tell them, “you’re already behind, you should have already started.”  Most companies refuse to believe that their data is really in that bad of shape.  Bad data = worthless PLM investment.