Product Development using Social Media and PLM · PDF filethan actual product design. ......

Product Development using Social Media and PLM

S e p t e m b e r 2 0 1 1

Product Development using Social Media and PLM | September2011

© 2011, HCL Technologies. Reproduction Prohibited. This document is protected under Copyright by the Author, all rights reserved.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract ............................................................................................. 3

Abbreviations .................................................................................... 4

Market trend/ Challenges .................................................................. 5

Social Media Framework for PLM ..................................................... 6

A Platform for Idea Generation ......................................................... 6

Product Vigilance .............................................................................. 7

Virtual Volunteer ................................................................................ 8

Social CRM to PLM Inputs ................................................................ 8

Data Mining ....................................................................................... 9

Application of Smart Devices integration in Social Media for PLM . 10

Conclusion....................................................................................... 11

Reference ........................................................................................ 12

Author Info ....................................................................................... 12



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Abstract

Crowdsourcing is the contemporary trend in globalization of product development. It involves outsourcing the task to undefined large group of people or community through an open call unlike which were traditionally performed by an employee or contractor. Collective intelligence that emerges from collaboration and competition of individuals helps to achieve effective decision making.

Conventionally Product Lifecycle Management tools are used for collaboration among the individuals of same organization, suppliers, manufacturers, customers, strategic partners. PLM is normally used as single source of truth for patented information hence need to be very secure. The PLM and Social Media collaboration can be done by a secured crowdcasting methodology, where care needs to be taken for protecting the intellectual property of the host organization.



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Abbreviations

Sl. No. Acronyms Full form

1 PLM Product Lifecycle Management

2 SME Subject Matter Expert



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Market trend/ Challenges

Currrent trend in today’s world is towards integrating the social

network with smart devices. With the evolution and the ease of

features in smart devices, there may not much difference between

computer and smart devices in near future. Looking at this trend

many consumer electronic companies are looking for a framework

to integrate social networking with smart devices. “Unified

Communication & Collaboration” (UC&C) by NEC and “Social Media

Listening Command Center” by DELL are a step towards efficient

usage of smart devices. The portability offered by smart devices and

social collaboration can be used in PLM for crowdsourcing the ideas,

product vigilance, proactive product recall, social CRM integration

and a unstructured data repository to gather structured product

feedback/ requirements from a larger audience for a better product

development.



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Social Media Framework for PLM

Social media consists of various platforms. Out of all the platforms following listed platforms can be useful to provide input for a PLM:

Collaborative Authoring/ Content Development – Helps to build a central knowledge repository. Dilution of knowledge concentration due to various factors can be avoided. Subject Matter Expert can review and certify the content, which is a step closer towards developing a mature product related literature for product lifecycle management software.

Question & Answer Portals – Helps to provide wider visibility to questions, issues related to a product to a mass community. The collective group intelligence helps to achieve faster and efficient results and answers. The less experienced audience can experience from the knowledge of the experts.

Communication Platform – Communication platforms like LinkedIn help to connect the professionals and communicate in relevant common product business, product technology specific groups. The constructive discussions can trigger new ideas, report existing issues. The aggregated experience of group can help to solve the problems, suggest new ideas in an efficient manner.

A Platform for Idea Generation

Marketing Collateral/ Artwork Idea Development

There are various online platforms which help for collaborative graphic idea development. These platforms allow hosting a contest for developing graphical content, ideas which can result into marketing collateral or a successfully approved artwork which can be used by the product development company. Due to high number of product lines in consumer industries, there is an ever increasing need to develop extremely creative and innovative artwork and collateral literature development. The online platform like hosting a contest allows an organization to have multiple options to select



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from in less available cost. This also allows manufacturer to reduce the recurring cost to a better demand based service model. e.g. http://www.99designs.com http://www.brainrack.com/

Packaging Design Development

There is a lesser risk to intellectual property of packaging design than actual product design. The packaging CAD work can be divided into various tasks. The mass packaging, container designing ideas can be sprung out from social media collaboration. The common platform also helps to report and gather various packaging related issue like:

Protection against external influences that can alter the properties of product

Protection against biological contamination

Protection against physical damage

Tamper proofing, Child proofing, Anti counterfeiting

Product Vigilance

Pharmacovigilance

Pharmacovigilance (abbreviated PV or PhV) is the pharmacological science relating to the detection, assessment, understanding and prevention of adverse effects, particularly long term and short term side effects of medicines. It is gaining importance due to increase in stories of drug recalls and negative marketing techniques used by competing organization. Even if clinical trial involves several thousand of patients, there are certain less known side effects on other part body, allergic conditions, and negative interaction with another medicine combined. Spontaneous Reporting is core data generating system for Pharmacovigilance. Social Media has powerful web-based and mobile communication technology. Very mature tools for collaborative content development (wiki), multimedia content communities, Review and opinion polls etc. Such useful information is present in social media in unstructured format. The same can be extracted by subject matter expert and converted as structured information. The structured information can be given as input for PLM system. In many parts of the world the spontaneous reporting is submitted voluntarily in electronic format using predetermined format by ICH. Most of the countries it is mandatory for a physician to submit the spontaneous reports of Pharmacovigilance. When such reports have been ported using power of social media, we are able to reach to mass audience, providing them friendly UI. Then same can provided to SME for data mining and which in turn becomes as an input for a PLM system.

http://www.99designs.com/

http://www.brainrack.com/



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Input for Proactive Product Recall

Product recall is a decision to request back batch of entire product due to discovery of safety issues, product defect to limit liability for corporate negligence, avoid costly legal penalties, and avoid damage to publicity, brand name, and reduced trust in manufacturer. This involves fixing the problem and delivering the safe, defect free product back to consumer. Some countries have very strong consumer protection laws which involves heavy penalty on manufacturer due to high risk introduced and failure to recall voluntarily. The social media collaborative platform helps to connect all the end users, sellers, resellers, service providers, distributors. This can help to identify the safety issue or the product defect in early stage. The Manufacturer can invoke voluntary product recall and avoid legal penalties which would have been caused by late detection of the product defect.

Virtual Volunteer

Crowds need a leader to get a direction and achieve a common goal. Online micro-volunteering enables undertaking micro-tasks. People engaged in virtual volunteering undertake a variety of activities from locations remote to the organization or people they are assisting, via a computer or other Internet-connected device, such as:

Researching subject

Designing Graphics

Providing Legal, business and domain expertise

Online tutoring and mentoring

Answering questions

Moderator for Online discussion forum

Manage other online volunteers

Volunteers in field of locomotive industry can help to give better input by opting to go for telematics Data Logger, which can provide large amount of data that can be sampled and analyzed to provide input to PLM.

Social CRM to PLM Inputs

Social CRM allows capturing voice of customer and gathering product features. There are certain problems introduced in certain products due to the after sales service/ replacements. The connection of social CRM with PLM helps to eliminate these issues at design/manufacturing level. This also helps to identify various types of scenarios the product is used. The product usage can be classified into three categories.

Normal Use – The product used in the scenarios it is designed to be operating. All the operating conditions, parameters are in specified threshold limits. The product is normally designed to not fail in “normal use” kind of use.



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e.g. Using a vehicle in city condition, using medicine in proper dosage

Abnormal Use - Abnormal use involves operating the product little above the threshold conditions they are designed for. The product should not normally fail is such “Abnormal Use” kind of use. e.g. Using vehicle for 10% more weight than its threshold, using washing machine for making lassi/ buttermilk.

Abnormal Abuse – Abnormal abuse involves extreme scenario in which product is operated. The product is bound to fail in such scenario.

In case of automotive, aerospace and shipping products it is possible to capture the usage data by application of advanced telematics.

Data Mining

Data mining is required to gather information from the data in social media. Convert that information into a structured format. The processed structured information can be used as input for new product idea, issue, and defects.

Subject Matter Expert

Subject matter expert is a person with domain knowledge of a specific field. The human expertise can be utilized to gather the unstructured information in social media and can be provided to PLM system. SME are required to sign off any kind of content obtained using social media to validate the authenticity of the information. The role of SME is very important in bridging the gap between social media and PLM system.

Software Tools

Ubiquitous Human Computing is the phenomenon of dis-aggregating a task into component pieces and then parcelling them out around the world. The Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is a crowdsourcing Internet marketplace that enables computer programmers (known as Requesters) to co-ordinate the use of human intelligence to perform tasks which computers are unable to do. This even uses micropayments as a reward mechanism for the requestors.



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Application of Smart Devices integration in Social Media for PLM

NEC has introduced UC&C architecture to integrate social media with smart devices.The architecture creates common interface across all smart devices supporting Android, iOS, Windows 7 and blackberry. PLM collaboration not necessariliy always involves heavy CAD interactions. Many of the workflow approvals can be pushed on as a client component on a smar device. This will help the PLM platform to reach through smart devices around the clock reducing dependency on computers. It serves as a important feature for people always on move to approve or review certain workflow activities in PLM. The Social Media Listen Command Center by Dell, allows to monitor relevant topics in social media, to gather voice of customer. It even helps to monitor information in various language. It can be efficiently used for product vigilance and monitoring.



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Conclusion

There are certain microtasks like collaborative authoring, virtual

volunteering and Question & Answer portal, which does not have

any danger of exposing patent data. PLM can be effectively used for

Crowdsourcing these microtasks.Overall PLM and Social Media

conglomerate works very efficiently in consumer driven industries

like automotive, aerospace, pharmaceuticals, consumer product

goods as a platform of idea generation, product vigilance and social

CRM. This also gives PLM an advantage of exploiting very robust

smart device integration with Social Media.



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Reference

Crowdsourcing http://what-is-crowdsourcing.com/

http://www.cimdata.com/newsletter/2011/4/05/04.05.01.htm

Crowdcasting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowdcasting

NEC’s UC&C http://www.nec.com.au/media/docs/nec-ucc-release-d7a6373f-2622-49b9-9bb7-a991cfa2dff6-0.pdf

DELL’s Social Media Listening Command Center

http://en.community.dell.com/dell-blogs/Direct2Dell/b/direct2dell/archive/2010/12/08/dell-s-next-step-the-social-media-listening-command-center.aspx

Author Info

Kapil Jadhav is Technical Manager in PLM

practice for HCL. With post graduation in

Software Engineering, Graduation in Computer

Engineering from National Institute of

Technology, Surat (India), he has around 9

years of experience in delivering IT solutions &

consulting to clients in discrete Manufacturing

Industrial Equipments, Automotive, Aviation,

and Pharmaceuticals. He has wide range of

experience in PLM implementation using Enovia

Matrixone, Oracle Agile PLM and Aras

Innovator with reputed customers like GE

Energy, GE Aviation, Cummins Engine

Business Unit. Currently he is focusing on

Green Design Workbench & other PLM

initiatives.

http://what-is-crowdsourcing.com/

http://www.cimdata.com/newsletter/2011/4/05/04.05.01.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowdcasting

http://www.nec.com.au/media/docs/nec-ucc-release-d7a6373f-2622-49b9-9bb7-a991cfa2dff6-0.pdf

http://www.nec.com.au/media/docs/nec-ucc-release-d7a6373f-2622-49b9-9bb7-a991cfa2dff6-0.pdf




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About HCL Technologies HCL Technologies is a leading global IT services company, working with clients in the areas that impact and redefine the core of their businesses. Since its inception into the global landscape after its IPO in 1999, HCL focuses on 'transformational outsourcing,' underlined by innovation and value creation, and offers integrated portfolio of services including software-led IT solutions, remote infrastructure management, engineering and R&D services and BPO. HCL leverages its extensive global offshore infrastructure and network of offices in 26 countries to provide holistic, multi-service delivery in key industry verticals including Financial Services, Manufacturing, Consumer Services, Public Services and Healthcare. HCL takes pride in its philosophy of 'Employee First, Customer Second' which empowers our 77,046 transformers to create a real value for the customers. HCL Technologies, along with its subsidiaries, had consolidated revenues of US$ 3.5 billion (Rs. 16,034 crores), as on 30 June 2011 (on LTM basis). For more information, please visit www.hcltech.com

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