What Happened To The OCMs?

Being a New Product Innovation fanatic, I spend my time keeping an eye on the whitespace for resource opportunities and quite recently it’s been screaming loud & clear there’s an increasing demand for Organizational Change Management (OCM). There are many new PLM / Smart Manufacturing projects and, of course there has always been, but most have ignored OCM.

Each time I need an OCM, I get very excited, especially when I find nearly 1.7million potentially out there and even more so when i find I’m networked-up with nearly 20,000 of them.

But, and it’s a big BUT, when I dig a little deeper, it’s a blend of individuals who’ve mentioned it was “done” on a project they were involved with, or Application Consultants who done a few workshops, walk-throughs, training etc and called that change management. In the end, each and every time there’s a distinct lack of OCMs with PLM / Smart Manufacturing Application experience.

Why are there so few?

It has to be one of the most rewarding roles around — persuading people to move toward an exciting vision of the future.

Why has Organizational Change Management been ignored so often?

What’s More Important?

I know I’m biased, however what’s more important than making Innovation one of the backbones of your future Enterprise-wide, Digital Culture?

With billions at stake, the ability to maximize the financial impact of innovation has never been more important. Research by Accenture revealed:

• Only 30% of executives are satisfied with their performance in converting ideas into market-ready products, services or business models
• Only 21% of executives feel they have an effective process for capturing ideas from outside their company
• 28% feel lateness to market as one of the top reasons for innovation failures

There’s shiny new PLM4.0 Applications including excellent Product Innovation Platforms. There’s so much exciting Industry4.0 Technologies hitting the manufacturing lines, together with new virtual manufacturing and operations management applications, that many should be racing ahead. However, as we know Technology is one thing and re-engineered best-fit/best-practice Processes another, but what about the People aspect?

Yes, we all know, no one likes change, but still OCM gets ignored?

Where are all the Change Managers to start shouting this from the rooftops?

Culture Eats PLM For Breakfast

Product lifecycle management enables an enterprise to control its products regardless of the lifecycle phase and ownership. PLM addresses and improves the activities of product portfolio management, development, realization and support, to enable a company to reduce product-related costs, engineering changes, product recalls, warranty and recycling costs.

The approach calls for planning of the entire life of the product, by already considering during development how the product will be produced, supported and retired.

Therefore, PLM brings together and aligns the domains of innovation management,

engineering, technical management, manufacturing and logistics. PLM is not only the implementation of a software layer that integrates the product data from various business applications, as it is a business approach and philosophy that affects the core business, from ideation to after-sales support of products:

• Managing a well-structured and valuable product portfolio
• Improving the financial return from the product portfolio
• Providing control and visibility over products throughout the lifecycle
• Managing product development, support and disposal projects effectively
• Managing feedback about products from customers, products, field engineers and the market
• Enabling collaborative work with design and supply chain partners, and with customers
• Managing product-related processes so that they are coherent, joined-up, effective and lean
• Capturing, securely managing, and maintaining the integrity of product definition information. Making it available where and when it’s needed
• Knowing the exact characteristics, both technical and financial, of a product throughout its lifecycle.

Successful PLM implementation and adoption will impact many facets of your business:

• Organizational structure and roles
• Business processes
• Required data
• Data creation and maintenance
• Organizational cross-functional collaboration
• Measurement and metrics

In short, PLM influences “how things are done” in the organization. And these changes aren’t going to happen overnight. As the scope of PLM expands to include cross-functional and collaborative business processes, the need to address cultural change grows. Technology alone won’t be able to help — successful adoption of PLM requires an internal culture shift to build new cross-functional, collaborative teams to work together across the product lifecycle.

PLM Is A Strategy

The statistics for new products today are frightening. 75% of products never make it to market and those that do, 90% fail to deliver a positive return. That’s a total of 2.5% success!!

There are two major areas of product failure:

1. Failure to reach the market at all

2. Failure to deliver ROIC once in the market.

Successful PLM must address BOTH of these.

Getting The Show On The Road

While organizations might choose to flatten the hierarchy and decentralize decision making, everyone in the organization needs to step up and lead — especially in organizational change management.

In today’s businesses which remain volatile and complex, you can’t rely on organizational change managers alone to carry the burden of change. Instead, organizations need to look at change as everyone’s business, but let’s not overly complicate it with hierarchies and “cool” titles, because you just need the following in place:

1. Change Management Experts: setting strategy and determining how to build a resilient workforce. They set the direction and build a network of
2. Coaches: the change agents, the ambassadors, flag wavers — embedded throughout the organization, resilient and acting like motivators and advisors
3. Workforce

The Big Questions

And so we come full circle to my first question:

• Where are you? Where are the Organizational Change Managers, so essential to make a success of PLM & Smart Manufacturing implementations?
• What’s keeping you away?
• Given NPI should be one of the most important subjects on the C-Suite table, isn’t this an area you should be moving into?

Come join the 4IR Party and help organizations lead the way through their people and culture!

Love to hear your thoughts, Andrew

#ocm #plm #4ir #industry40 #changemanagement #smartmanufacturing