GEIS to Centralize Data for Product Design, Manufacturing

Computerworld - GE Industrial Systems (GEIS), a $5 billion subsidiary of General Electric Co., is implementing a major product life-cycle management (PLM) project that it hopes will reduce product development time, improve supply chain efficiency and cut costs.
The company last week announced that it's using PLM technology from MatrixOne Inc. in Westford, Mass., to develop a collaborative environment for planning, development, sourcing and program management.
When the project is fully implemented in about two years, more than 10,000 GEIS employees worldwide will be able to log onto a central portal site to collaborate on a variety of activities.
"There are several business issues that we are trying to address," said Eric Reed, manager of the My Workplace portal site at Plainville, Conn.-based GEIS. Centralizing the millions of engineering, manufacturing, marketing and project management documents associated with the products GEIS builds, and making the repository accessible from anywhere via the portal, will give the company greater flexibility in where it designs and builds systems, Reed said. Eventually, the environment will also be linked with suppliers, he added.
Return on investment will come through faster product development times and greater efficiency, Reed said, declining to elaborate on the savings. The PLM system will allow for closer collaboration with GEIS suppliers, which can then be more directly involved in the product development process, he added.
The project hasn't been without its hurdles. For instance, migrating nearly 15 million product-related documents from legacy systems into the MatrixOne environment has been a time-consuming task, Reed said. Meeting the specialized document management requirements of the engineering community was especially challenging, as was getting user buy-in during the early stages when there was little immediate benefit to demonstrate, he added.
A growing number of companies are looking into such PLM capabilities, said John Moore, an analyst at ARC Advisory Group Inc. in Dedham, Mass. "But we are not seeing quite as high an adoption as we had expected," Moore said. Part of the problem is the complexity involved in rolling out a PLM capability, he said. Large companies like GEIS with highly structured business processes stand a better chance of implementing PLM compared to those that don't, he added.
The customization involved in integration functions as varied as marketing, design and manufacturing groups can also be a huge challenge, Moore said. "PLM can also be somewhat of a difficult sell at this time" because of the cost associated with such projects, he added.
GEIS declined to disclose the cost of its project.