When speaking to customers about 3DEXPERIENCE, I often include a discussion about project management. Quite often customers - especially smaller ones with fewer staff – will say we are too small to justify project management: “We don’t do Project Management”.
In my experience this is rarely the case, but perhaps it would be best to first define what I mean by Project Management.
If you think I am about to start talking about Prince 2 or Six Sigma, then I am sorry (not sorry) to disappoint you.
I am referring to something much more basic.
A customer places a pricing enquiry with your company, this enquiry needs to be accepted by someone in the business and then fed through to the right person who has the skills to quote. Then a quote is generated and fed back - possibly after being ratified by a salesperson (who decides this)
Now let us assume that the customer places the order.
The order is accepted by someone in the business and this is then passed to the order processing team who perhaps perform some level of credit control (who decides this) before confirming the order and passing this over to the design team, the design team then have to organise their workload to ensure that work is prioritised correctly and delivery times are met – how is this done/tracked
Once the design is complete this will need to be passed to manufacturing – starting with material procurement – then must be scheduled into an appropriate slot in the manufacturing cycle. The product is then made and shipped to the customer, after a set payment date the customer must pay for product and someone must ensure the payment is received.
In most cases the majority of these tasks may be done by email or excel being updated manually – lots of information stored in different locations and possibly uncontrolled copies floating around each department.
In effect you are managing a mini project every time you receive a quote/order - it’s just invisible.
Let me paint a different picture for you – step in Project Management in 3DEXPERIENCE.
A project is generated from an existing template (we could have a different template for existing customers vs new customers) within 3DEXPERIENCE.
This template contains all the common tasks associated with moving an enquiry from pricing through to delivery.
It also has documents populated and stored directly within the project space (these could be anything from requirements templates, process documents through to quality control templates).
The tasks that are already predefined from the templates are assigned to users with a single click.
We repeat this for all tasks.
In addition, each project will automatically update metrics that reflect the status of the project allowing managers to understand the status of this customers quote/order at a glance.
Now just imagine that this project management was all done on the cloud, where all you need is an internet connection to gain access so you can access information and update customers from (almost) anywhere. In addition (if you wanted to) you could attach the actual CAD geometry generated by the Design department into the same ‘Project Space’ as all the supporting documents. This CAD data would be revision/version controlled automatically meaning no more accidentally saving over current revisions/versions, again all in the cloud.
This, and much more is available on cloud when you start your 3DEXPERIENCE journey.
So, do you still believe you 'Don’t Do Project Management’ or have I convinced you that you probably do, but perhaps never realised? If you feel that you could benefit from some of the concepts shown in brief here or would just like a conversation – get in touch.
Want to know more about the 3DEXPERIENCE Platform? >>