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PLM
In a lab at BD's headquarters, a quality control tester puts an aluminum carabiner into a pull test machine. Slowly, the machine tugs at the carabiner, which stretches like a wet noodle before snapping in half, the amount of force being in excess of what the protective device is rated to withstand. The company cranks out 160,000 carabiners a month.
"We spend an inordinate amount of money breaking our own gear," Dees says.
BD excels at making rigorously engineered hardware but until recently IT hadn't had much influence on the company's manufacturing processes. The company has state-of-the-art computer-aided design systems, but they don't talk to each other. There's a lot of duplication and replication, with data living in different systems, including three PLM modules from the same vendor.
Now that's changing as BD is rolling out a new PLM system, Teamcenter from UGS, which was acquired by Siemens AG.
"We were interested in software that could handle everything from napkin sketches to manufacturing to sell-through and archiving, looking at things from concept to death," Dees says. "We're trying to normalize our product lifecycle. That's big, and it'll be an ongoing project. It touches so much of what we do that you just can't snap it into place."
When the PLM rollout finishes in 2008, the system will become the heart of BD's transactional systems, which will enable the deployment of other tools such as new forecasting software. Currently BD uses Demand Works Co.'s forecasting system. The company also must decide what its next ERP move will be: upgrade or deploy something else.
"Are we going to go to a big enterprise system?" Dees asks. "Do we like this platform? There are a lot of decisions to make."
Embracing SOA as a means to unify these systems, he says, makes sense.
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