PLM Process Automation
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) has become the gamechanger across industries to automate the repetitive human activities of the backend processes using BOTS (Software robots). With evolution of RPA, there were many false assumptions that the BOTS would replace manpower and leave resources jobless. A human resource in any department should be used effectively to draw more productive work resulting in overall growth of the organization, which is not the case in many organizations across industries where the skilled (Technical and non-Technical) resources are forced to work on tedious repetitive tasks from as simple as read and reply multiple emails to as complex as logging in to various internal systems (core database systems to enterprise systems like ERP, PLM, CRM, ECAD, SAP etc.)
Organizations across Banking, Financial Services & Insurance industry has adopted RPA for their backend processes from leaders in Automation. Our experience working with one of the leaders in BFSI India has taught how C-Level personnel thinks in extracting the best out of the investment and how soon to adopt the technology in departments of the organization, not just adopting the technology, but train internal resources to support the users, how to be productive and get higher ROI. Learning the pain areas of the C-Level personnel Plural Technology has built the solution framework solving most of the issues while keeping the implementation costs lower giving high ROI.
Scope of Process Automation in Manufacturing and Engineering Industry
Consider a team working on Product Development in Manufacturing or Engineering industry has the primary responsibility of research on engineering and science to progress on design of the Product. Instead if the resources are forced at collecting data from drawings, legacy systems or migrating data to Enterprise systems like ERP, PLM, CRM etc. Instead if the resources are forced at collecting data from drawings, legacy systems or migrating data to Enterprise systems like ERP, PLM, CRM etc. Freeing up the resources from these repetitive and routine tasks and enabling to focus on value adds would produce remarkable product.
PPA (PLM Process Automation)
Plural Technology has built a simple solution framework – PPA (PLM Process Automation), which mimics the human activities such as collecting / extracting data from drawings / legacy systems, migrating data to Enterprise systems like ERP, PLM, CRM etc. with predefined process rules. During migration of data, it also reads key information and loads into PLM systems and updates PLM or ERP objects data as per the pre-defined rules. If there is legacy scanned documents or drawings data which is available at some physical or shared drive, these BOTS can help read and extract data from such documents. Plural Technology makes the solution easily configurable and deployed at any enterprise level, define custom rules, access control and security & user management process. They can also help manage sub process(es) at activity level where all logs can be recorded, reports error to the responsible to act on. These BOTS can be configured at either department/organization/enterprise levels. Reports can be monitored on the dashboard to carry analysis and further improvise the performance as desired. BOTS can be customized and configured with any of the engineering process where repetitive tasks, calculation, data entry into specific system is prominent with no value add either to the organization or employee. These processes can be scheduled as either by automatic or interactive processing.
Plural Technology with extensive expertise in PLM and being involved in various PLM implementations has developed this solution which can help any engineering organization in various stages to improve productivity during PLM roadmap by bringing together PLM and Digital Engineering.
PLM Process Automation Use Cases
PLM implementation involves various people of the enterprise. Providing right information to individuals for search criteria is key aspect of any organization for reducing time to market Security of intellectual data, cost & compliance management are main objective of PLM implementation for any organization. Individuals across departments, technology partners, vendors, customers play a key role and are involved in carrying out the objective successfully. Plural Technology has significant experience in implementation of various PLM tools like PTC, Aras, Agile from over a decade.
Working closely with individuals across departments allowed us to recognize many repetitive tasks entitled to an end user, few time-consuming and cost involved operations in data migration from various system. We noticed manual tasks where design engineers, managers, change managers are involved and have to login to PLM system to perform design and release process which has workflows and lifecycles.
Part creation process is another activity we noticed to have more manual intervention to search parts in the various systems to locate any existing design in the database. These are very common and tedious manual tasks consuming time. Automating these manuals task can save time and cost. Predefining rules such as search criteria, opening a browser or application, navigate to URL, Login information etc. to assign BOTs to mimic manual tasks can cut down the process run time up to 90% in most of the processes. The rules can be triggered either manually or at any recurring scheduled time.
Comparing Bill of materials (BOM) is one another activity which has lot interaction between manufacturing partners or sometimes confined to a single manufacturing plant. We find more status reports being exchanged to alert product managers and respective authority of the enterprise. Plural Technology is working towards integrating BOT using voice commands.
Prioritizing the tasks is another bottleneck across industries, organizations, departments and individuals leaving important tasks unattended due to various reasons. BOTS can perform the tasks based on priority based on pre-defined custom rules saving lot of time for end users to perform action manually there by sticking to the stipulated deadlines.
While we disclosed very few use cases, based on business need and user scenarios Plural Technology is proficient to train the BOT, integrate with core systems like ERP, CRM, MCAD, ECAD, MES where BOT can perform actions with no or very less manual intervention.
Security
Though digital transformation excites an organization moving to the next level, there’s always a concern on the security as the data is highly sensitive. PPA solution architecture is designed ensuring high data security with fair encryption decryption and network data security. PPA solution can be deployed on either PLM server, dedicated physical server or on cloud based on customer requirement without disrupting any current infrastructure. Plural Technology helps you configures new systems while upgrading your systems available with AMC package at applicable charges
