PLM Perspective
The value of intellectual capital
In today's world, what you know and how you leverage that knowledge is often the key differentiator in business. It's frequently your intellectual capital, and that of your partners and suppliers, that can have the greatest impact on reducing costs, improving quality and increasing revenue.
Intellectual capital is the sum of an enterprise's collective knowledge, experience, skills, competencies, work outcomes, services, relationships, processes, potential and many other intangible components that provide strategic advantage. There is no shortage of information available on the value of intellectual capital, but not as much information on how best to realize that value. PLM is gaining prominence as an initiative that can provide answers, with its ability to transform knowledge to innovation to value.
In a previous issue of this newsletter I wrote about PLM being different from most enterprise IT initiatives in its ability to enhance top line revenue in addition to bottom line revenue. The top line benefits come from PLM's ability to foster time-to-market compression, product innovation and continuous quality improvement - all direct results of well-managed intellectual capital.
Leveraging your internal assets
The knowledge and experience of your employees is a particularly significant asset. The PLM tools we offer capture that cumulative knowledge and embed it in processes throughout a product's lifecycle. Capabilities like knowledge driven automation, packaged industry-specific solutions, a digital collaboration backbone, and the overall ability to capture, manage, distribute and reuse intellectual capital frees your employees to focus on creative and innovative solutions. Technology that enables you to retain and share your product and process information, advancements and best practices digitally are at the core of our PLM architecture.
Leveraging extended assets
Team collaboration is a huge enabler of innovation and increased quality. When considering the overall sources and values of the intellectual assets available to you, you have to examine your entire value chain, from lowest tier supplier all the way to the end customer. To best leverage these resources, you must be able to work in an environment that fosters communication, collaboration and innovation. PLM can create that environment, provided the system is open.
Just as it is important to involve a wide range of internal disciplines and interests in your product development, at every step along the value chain there is important intellectual capital that can help make your product or service better. Your suppliers have unique knowledge of their manufacturing process, your logistics providers know what shipping routes are most in demand and your customers have a great idea for one small improvement that would open up a whole new market to your products.
However, many companies find that they run into a roadblock when they try to access the intellectual capital of their value chain: it is locked up in proprietary systems that can't work together without massive investments of time and money. Tapping into the intellectual capital of your value chain is one of the key reasons that openness should be a key requirement of your PLM system.
Value chains that have implemented open PLM systems have seen a dramatic increase in knowledge sharing, and as a result have gained a competitive advantage in their markets through increased virtual integration. This increased virtualization is changing the process of research and development from a quest for new knowledge to the ability to identify, understand and connect the wealth of available external knowledge. The only way that you can take advantage of this wealth of external knowledge is by ensuring that your PLM system and the PLM systems of your partners are able to work together seamlessly without a massive investment. That's why we focus so much on what we call our PLM Open initiative: because we know it is one of the key enablers of innovation across the value chain, which in turn leads to true competitive advantage for you.
Facilitating a culture change
Finally, many companies find the real challenge to leveraging knowledge and intellectual assets within an organization is the company's culture. PLM can facilitate a culture where all employees are dedicated to creating and sharing information because the tool can free their creativity and thus make their work experience more rewarding. Because PLM is not static, new ideas, insights and practices are continually available to everyone in the enterprise, further stimulating an environment where innovation can thrive.
PLM Perspective - May 2004 Main Page.
