Chapter 7: Evaluation and Deployment

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Overview

Don’t wait for something big to occur. Start where you are, with what you have, and that will always lead you into something greater. —Mary Manin Morrisse

Traditionally, many companies have developed their own PDM and SCM tools. The commercial tools available on the market have been too expensive, difficult to use, inflexible, and of inadequate functionality. This situation changed during the 1990s as new PDM and particularly SCM tools appeared on the market with more acceptable prices and improved functions. Today, most companies using SCM tools have not developed these tools themselves, and many companies are replacing or are considering replacing internally built PDM tools with commercial ones. However, this does not mean that they have started to use these tools directly. PDM and SCM systems support many different activities during the entire PLC, and they are seldom implemented in one single tool with a precisely recognized purpose. Often additional support, adjusted to the particular processes of the company, must be provided. This can be done by using tools in a particular way and by tailoring them. The PDM and SCM support is provided in the form of a collection of different tools (this is especially true for PDM) that are rather different. The tools in such a collection are used by different categories of users, are different in size, and manage different types of data. The heterogeneous characteristics of these systems and the involvement of many different roles in their use make them complex. In spite of significant improvements in recent years, they remain difficult to introduce into the development process, difficult to maintain and upgrade, difficult to understand, and especially difficult to replace. Finally, they are expensive. As the result of all of this, PDM and SCM tools belong in a category of tools that are very seldom replaced. For this reason, the process of integrating such a system into an organization is extremely important. If not managed in a systematic way with clear goals, and if the tool is not well understood, the process may result in a financial disaster with decreased development and production efficiency, frustrated employees, and delayed and low quality products.

The integration process can be divided in two phases:

  1. Tool evaluation—to find and select the most appropriate tool;

  2. Tool deployment—to introduce the tool in the everyday process.

Both phases include many activities and may require much effort. This chapter describes these in detail. Most of the procedures described apply generally to all complex tools. In addition to these general descriptions, the chapter includes descriptions of particular activities specific to PDM and SCM evaluation and deployment.



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Implementing and Integraing Product Data Management and Software Configuration[... ]ement
Implementing and Integrating Product Data Management and Software Configuration Management (Artech House Computing Library)
ISBN: 1580534988
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 122

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