At Mercury Marine (www.mercuryplm.com), for example, churning out commercial and recreational boat engines now requires collaboration among engineering centers in six countries, and manufacturing and supplier facilities in 11.

Since the $1.5 billion manufacturer installed its product lifecycle management (PLM) system, it has been able to glide easily over these waters, releasing a new product every six weeks. “We’ve been able to maintain this pace through the recession with two-thirds of the workforce that we had before the downturn,” reports John Bayless, director of strategy and program management at Mercury Marine headquarters in Fond du Lac, Wis.

Bayless and his colleagues are part of a growing number of managers and engineers who have been exploiting new capabilities in PLM software to build their products as designed. “PLM systems are growing up,” he observes. “They have tremendous capability to connect people.”

This ability has flowed from a change in course that occurred a little more than a decade ago. “The industry got started with design software and then product data management,” explains Bill Boswell, senior director of Teamcenter product marketing at Siemens PLM Software Inc. (www.plm.automation.siemens.com), headquartered in Plano, Texas. When manufacturing companies realized that they should also be managing the entire lifecycles of their products, not just design data, they began collecting and managing process information as well. Software vendors responded by developing PLM software for collaborating around just one source of both product and process knowledge.

Of the plethora of choices available today, Mercury Marine looked at three and decided to install Teamcenter PLM software offered by Siemens. “It had the best cross-functional capabilities for our processes and provided a means to connect design all the way to the shop floor,” explains Bayless. As he and his colleagues discovered, some PLM vendors specialize in a portion of the product lifecycle or in a particular industry. Mercury wanted a solution that would tie design not only to its manufacturing operations and supply chain worldwide, but also eventually to its aftermarket service organization.

Organize around people

Because Mercury was building PLM around its product-development process, the first step in the implementation was to integrate Teamcenter with the Pro/Engineer computer-aided design (CAD) software used by design. (Now known as Creo Elements/Pro, Pro/Engineer was created by Needham, Mass.-based PTC (www.ptc.com) , who changed its name in October 2010.) “In our implementation, part numbers are controlled by the PLM system, not by the ERP [enterprise resource planning] system,” says Bayless. “When a designer pulls a part number to begin working on a new component, the number goes into a bill of material organized in the way that our people are organized.”

Because the PLM software stores all product data in a useful way in a central place, everyone collaborating with the designer can find the most recent information that they need, as well as provide information needed by others. Cost control, procurement, quality control, and manufacturing have access to the data even though they do not use the CAD software. In this way, the PLM system supports not only generating manufacturable designs, but also managing the timeline, controlling costs, and organizing internal and external resources.

Besides serving as the central repository for CAD data and the bill of materials, the PLM software also automates the product-development process and enforces a companywide discipline on it. One result is that everyone concerned knows where everything is in the process and what the next step is. “I don’t have to call a meeting or make a phone call to find out what the latest developments are or when to expect prototypes at the plant,” says Bayless. “As program manager, I get a report on estimated costs every week.”

Faster change orders

Another result of having a common process across the enterprise is a shorter time for processing and disseminating engineering change orders. “It reduced the change process from an average of 56 days down to 22,” reports Bayless. These change requests could come from manufacturing during the design phase or from engineers analyzing warranty data. In both cases, Mercury Marine can implement a quality improvement a month faster, on average, than it would have in the days before PLM.

Management at Mercury Marine expects even more benefits to accrue as it continues to push the PLM system further along the lifecycle. For example, it eventually wants to link quality control to the PLM system, and to make product data available to the service organization. “We’re looking at using the ...