The Digital Battle — Customize Your PLM or Adapt to It?

Is customization really worth the cost? The answer might be found in round two of The Digital Battle. On this episode, Thom Singer and Craig Brown are joined by Digital Enterprise Society Trustee, Mark Pendergast to hash out the facts and frustrations behind customization. In this insightful and sometimes heated debate, Craig and Mark debate all things customization, including its shortcomings, benefits, and why (or whether) customization is really an issue at all.    On today’s podcast, you will learn:   Why is customization an issue?    The commitment of money over time and people's satisfaction with systems makes this a hot topic.  Higher quality and delivery standards are not met by today’s PLM tools.  Organizations rarely know how to embrace something that they don’t create.  Too often companies avoid investing the resources needed for customizing.  Best practices from other industries are often underestimated.      Why customize at all?   World-class lean manufacturers achieve excellence and pursue low-cost labor, which can be a recipe for disaster.  The current tools on the marketplace don’t offer the help that companies need in today’s highly competitive world.  Adopting and adapting may be secondary issues to the greater need for training on new tools.  The counterargument to customizing is maintenance. Over time, the lifecycle cost does not justify the expense of customizing.  Is bad management to blame for ineffective customizing?  When you can’t measure what you’re getting in exchange for customization, it’s easy to discount the value of the customization.      How to achieve effective customization    The ideal balance comes when defects are caught without committing overly high cost.  Utilizing specialized workers is not the answer- an overall, non-evasive, least impact approach will get the results needed.  Easily maintained customizations can be achieved by limiting invasions.  Vendor architecture and providers seem to struggle with much-needed change.  Moving beyond CAD data is the critical step to effective customization.  Demanding customers are only adding to the problem, not the solution.  Management needs to optimize for the constraint and then focus on the only customization needed.    Continue the conversation with us within the Digital Enterprise Society Community at www.DigitalEnterpriseSociety.org.   Digital Guideposts Blog