PLM encompasses a complete journey of the product from managing requirements to supporting product services.
Electric Vehicles (EVs) are not new to the industry but their rapid growth in the recent past is redefining the transportation industry of the future. EV focuses on delivering user experience and not just addressing the core needs of transportation.
Hence the complexity to manage the requirements of EVs is completely different from how conventional automotive vehicles were managed and delivered. This rapid growth is fueled by the adoption of various digital technologies by organizations that build them so that they can connect the bridge between what end users want, to what technology can do.
Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) is one of the primary systems that manages product data and authors it for further consumption across the enterprise. While PLM is a tool that manages product data across its lifecycle, it is the business processes that are implemented in them that determine how the cost, quality, and time to market the product is well managed. Inefficient business process slows down product realization. Early adopters of PLM used this as a system to manage and release the Computed Aided Design (CAD) data through a structured design Bill of Materials (BOM) authored by the engineering team. In today’s world, PLM encompasses a complete journey of the product from managing requirements to supporting product services.
The first challenge that the EV industry faces is more around the need to collaborate between Mechanical, Electrical, Electronics, and Software components which need to coexist and must be engineered simultaneously. The second challenge that they face is the ability to bring new EVs into the market at an accelerated pace to reduce New Product Introduction (NPI) timelines which require the engineering and manufacturing teams to work concurrently. The third challenge is more in terms of establishing end-to-end traceability between different systems and enhancing the reusability of systems, sub-systems, and components. To solve the above problems, EV OEMs implement a digital backbone that addresses the concerns with short-term and long-term objectives. While Product Lifecycle Management creates a foundation to solve these problems, what is really needed is a digital transformation with PLM at the core.
Digital transformations focus on four major pillars namely People, Processes, Data, and Technology. Business processes at its core is what differentiates an organization from another in terms of the adoption of tools and technology. To shift gears, an organization needs to review its business processes and make changes as required to address the needs of an electric vehicle. As part of the digital strategy, a well-defined blueprint is created to understand their current IT landscape, current processes, gaps in the processes, areas of improvement, target state architecture, and more importantly a roadmap that leads them to their final goal.
