product line engineering meets plm

Product Line Engineering Meets Product Lifecycle Management

Feature-based BoM Family Management with the Aras Innovator / BigLever Gears Bridge

Dr. Charles W. Krueger, CEO BigLever Software

Copyright © 2016 BigLever Software, Inc.

Product Line Engineering (PLE) Defined

• Product Line: a family of similar products with variations in features and functions

• Product Line Engineering: the engineering of a product line using a shared set of engineering assets, a managed set of features, and an efficient means of production…

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- taking advantage of the commonality shared across the family

- efficiently and systematically managing the variation among the products


Common Motivation in PLE Success Stories: Competitive Advantage

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BigLever’s Role in PLE

• Industry leader in Product Line Engineering solutions - 15 years of commercial practice with PLE tools, methods & organizational change

• Industry standard PLE framework, ecosystem & methodology - Gears PLE Lifecycle FrameworkTM and PLE Ecosystem of third party integrations

• IBM, Aras, Microsoft, ANSYS, Open Source, MadCap, Sparx, No Magic… - BigLever 3-Tiered PLE MethodologyTM

• Industry’s only service provider with proven success in organizational change management for transition to PLE practice

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Copyright © 2016 BigLever Software, Inc. 5

Live Training Transformation (LT2) training systems for US Army

General Dynamics teamed with BigLever (twice) to create the winning proposal for the US Army Live Training Transformation “Consolidated Product-line Management”.

• US Army audited $800M in cost avoidance over 10 years and 300 training ranges

• 80% reduction in source code maintained


An Efficient Means of Production for Product Lines

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Shared assets are like the factory’s supply chain.

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Features describe capabilities that vary among products.

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• Feature Catalog

- Driven by Marketing, modeled by Feature Engineering

• Bill-of-Features

- Driven by Portfolio, modeled by Product Engineering


Assets are configured according to the feature profiles of the products you want build.

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Features come in.

Assets are configured.

A product comes out.

Just like a factory.


This is a move away from the traditional product-centric development silos.


The communication and coordination that has to occur for a portfolio of N products is proportional to N2.N2


Problem Statement

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• Processes, tools and techniques cannot overcome the exponential complexity

• A new approach is required...

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Engineering Complexity Complexity is making it intractable to engineer Features for a product family in terms of an interacting and variant Bill-of-Materials from mechanical, electrical, and software.

A new approach is required...


Feature-based Production Line Engineering

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Shared PLE AssetSupersets

Product A Asset Subsets

Product N Asset Subsets

Product B Asset Subsets

…


The Evolution and Convergence of Product Line Engineering & Operations

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PLE & PLM – A Shift in Perspective

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Rather than use a Bill-of-Materials to determine Features, use a Bill-of-FeaturesTM to determine Materials*

*Materials == requirements, designs, software, mechanical, electrical, tests, documentation, …

M.C.Escher, “Metamorphosis,” 1937


Transition from PLE EBOM to Downstream xBOM

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Shared PLE AssetSupersets

EBOM Superset

Product N

Product B

…

Product A

EBOM Subsets (As-designed Instances)

Product N

Product B

…

Product A

xBOM Instances • As-deployed • MBOM • As-maintained • …


Demonstration of the Innovator/Gears Bridge

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www.biglever.com

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product line engineering meets plm

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