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
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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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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
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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
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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.
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This is a move away from the traditional product-centric development silos.
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The communication and coordination that has to occur for a portfolio of N products is proportional to N2.N2
Copyright © 2016 BigLever Software, Inc.
Problem Statement
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• Processes, tools and techniques cannot overcome the exponential complexity
• A new approach is required...
Time
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...
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Feature-based Production Line Engineering
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Shared PLE AssetSupersets
Product A Asset Subsets
Product N Asset Subsets
Product B Asset Subsets
…
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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
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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 • …
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Demonstration of the Innovator/Gears Bridge
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