BENEFITS OF PDM

Reduced Time-to-Market

This is the major benefit of a PDM system. Three factors serve to place limits on the speed with which you can bring a product to market. One is the time it takes to perform tasks, such as engineering design, and tooling. Another is the time wasted between tasks, as when a released design sits in a production engineer's in-tray waiting its turn to be dealt with. And the third is time lost in rework.
A PDM system can do much to reduce all these time limitations.
• It can speed up tasks by making data instantly available as it is needed.
• It supports concurrent task management.
• It allows authorized team members access to all relevant data, all the time, with the assurance that it is always the latest version.

Improved Design Productivity

Product Data Management systems, when driving the appropriate tools, can significantly increase the productivity of your engineers.

With a PDM system providing them with the correct tools to access this data efficiently, the design process itself can be dramatically shortened.

Another factor is that designers should spend more time actually designing. Historically a design engineer would spend as much as 25-30% of his time simply handling information; looking for it, retrieving it, waiting for copies of drawings, archiving new data. PDM removes this dead time almost entirely. The designer no longer needs to know where to look for released designs or other data; it is all there on demand.

A third major time saver is the elimination of the 'reinvented wheel' syndrome. The amount of time designers spend solving problems that have probably been solved before, is notorious. It is often considered quicker to so it again than to track down design elements that could be re-used. With a PDM system, however, the identification, re-use and modification of existing similar designs should become routine.

Improved Design and Manufacturing Accuracy

An important benefit of PDM systems is that everyone involved in a project is operating on the same set of data which is always up to date. If you are working on a master file you know it is the only one; if you're viewing a reference copy, you know it is a replica of the latest master. So overlapping or inconsistent designs are eliminated - even when people are operating concurrently. Naturally this leads to far fewer instances of design problems that only emerge at manufacturing or QA, fewer ECOs, more right-the-first-time designs and, once again, a faster path to the marketplace.

Better use of Creative Team Skills

Designers are often conservative in their approach to problem solving for no other reason than the time penalties for exploring alternative solutions are so high. The risks of spending excessive time on a radically new design approach which may not work would be unacceptable. PDM opens up the creative process in three important ways.
• First, it keeps track of all the documents and test results relating to a given product change, minimizing design rework and potential design mistakes.
• Second, it reduces the risk of failure by sharing the risk with others and by making the data available to the right people fast.
• Third, it encourages team problem solving by allowing individuals to bounce ideas off each other using the packet-transfer facility, knowing that all of them are looking at the same problem.

Comfortable to Use

Although PDM systems vary widely in their levels of user-friendliness, most set out to operate within the existing organizational structure of a product engineering operation, without major disruption. The system should, in fact, make familiar tasks much more user-oriented than before. When users wish to view information on a PDM system, the application is loaded automatically, and then the document is loaded. In a conventional working environment, users would either have to be much more skilled at accessing the information or be prepared to accept it in a much less flexible form.

Data Integrity Safeguarded

The single central vault concept ensures that, while data is immediately accessible to those who need it, all master documents and records of historical change remain absolutely accurate and secure.

Better Control of Projects

The reason that product development projects are almost invariably late is not that they are badly planned in the first place, but that they routinely go out of control. Why? Because the immense volume of data generated by the project rapidly snowballs beyond the scope of traditional project management techniques. The greater the competitive time pressures, the greater the scope for inconsistency, and likelihood of rework. PDM systems enable you to retain control of the project by ensuring that the data on which it is based is firmly controlled.

Product structure, change management, configuration control and traceability are key benefits. Control can also be enhanced by automatic data release and electronic sign-off procedures. As a result, it is impossible for a scheduled task to be ignored, buried or forgotten.

Better Management of Engineering Change

A PDM system must allow you to create and maintain multiple revisions and versions of any design in the database. This means that iterations on a design can be created without the worry that previous versions will be lost or accidentally erased. Every version and revision has to be 'signed' and 'dated', removing any ambiguity about current designs and providing a complete audit trail of changes.

A Major Step toward Total Quality Management

By introducing a coherent set of audited processes to the product development cycle, a PDM system should go a long way towards establishing an environment for ISO9000 compliance and Total Quality Management (TQM). Many of the fundamental principals of TQM, such as 'empowerment of the individual' to identify and solve problems are inherent in the PDM structure. The formal controls, checks, change management processes and defined responsibilities should also ensure that the PDM system you select contributes to your conformance with international quality standards.