BPM per il PLM

Ecco come sono state utilizzate tecnolgie BPM per risolvere problematiche PLM.

BPM wasn’t even on the radar at Nacco Materials Holding Group Inc. when the company began to consider buying a major product lifecycle management (PLM) platform to streamline its product development efforts.
Nacco, a $2.8 billion global company based in Portland, Ore., designsand builds heavy construction equipment. Its main competitor is Toyota Material Handling. But in the wake of a recently completed, troubleplagued, multimillion-dollar SAP AG ERP implementation, the company was gun shy about launching another major IT project. The company’s CEO originally advocated for Agilent Technologies Inc.’s PLM suite because Nacco was already using an Agilent product for data management in some areas of the company. Bob Shallow, director of global product development, was a relative newcomer—20 months—to Nacco, but he had successfully used Lombardi’s Teamworks product at his previous employer, FordMotor Co.
He persuaded Nacco to go with Teamworks, spending about $350,000 on the BPM tool set instead of $3 million or so for a PLM platform. The decision has paid off: Shallow has completed many projects successfully and quickly. The first one—aprocess redesign to automate a small cost authorization system—took just15 days.
Despite this success and others, Shallow has had to face down reluctance and distrust of BPM tools from IT. “They viewed Teamworks as just a workflow modeler. The attitude was, ‘We own the systems. If you want to model it, that’s fine, but we’ll build it and implement it.’ They didn’t realize how powerful it is,” he says. That attitude changed fairly quickly when IT resources started to get a bit stretched, he adds. “They started to say, ‘You guys take it as far as you can and then call us when you need us,’” he says.
The relationship with IT has gotten much better, Shallow notes. “They see that the tool set is very strategic and very powerful. The IT director was originally not a fan,” he says.