SOFTWARE UPDATE NEWS ABOUT DIGITAL MANUFACTURING TOOLS AND SOFTWARE
PLE Software Helps Engineering Teams Reduce Product Development Complexity
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Manufacturing Engineering: Your company just re- leased onePLE, a new version of its product line engineering [PLE] software. What’s new in this version? Charles Krueger: With onePLE, BigLever is bringing to market a holistic g [PLE] solution. It combines our services offering with the Gears technological framework and inte- grates with other partner solutions, which includes lots of engineering tools across the full lifecycle. The key piece that we are elevating with onePLE is our services offering enabling large enterprises to adopt PLE. As we started helping organizations just work on a single prod- uct line, we could keep a very technical focus. Now, as or- ganizations are adopting PLE as an enterprise-wide strategy, it requires more organizational and cultural change—rather than just focusing technologically and on a single product line. What we’re doing now is focusing on supporting the true business-level value of PLE. That encompasses supporting executives and addressing what is truly required across the broad enterprise for the successful adoption of PLE.
ME: Describe what PLE is, and what it offers manufactur-
ing product developers. Krueger: PLE helps organizations that create families of similar products. The challenge that we address is the diversity and variation that must be supported across the entire product family. Engineering teams may spend as much as two-thirds of their time and energy just managing the diversity that exists within the engineering artifacts needed to
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AdvancedManufacturing.org | February 2017
support a set of products, which come with a spectrum of variations within their features and functions. When managing these product variations, and their many artifacts, at the detailed asset level—at a parts level, a bill of materials level, a software source code and components level, and an individual requirements level—you could have thousands, even up to a million points of variation across these engineering assets. Dealing with this level of complex- ity, and the fact that these assets interact with each other, is very time-consuming. As we get into more sophisticated, intelligent products with more advanced software-based capabilities, it becomes diffi cult for organizations to deal with this complexity using traditional engineering approaches. What we offer in our feature-based PLE solution is the ability to abstract—to use a simpler way of describing, managing, and automating the management of this low- level variation. This simplifi cation, through abstraction and automation, can triple productivity, and reduce engineer- ing overhead and product defects by a factor of 10. These
“As products become more sophisticated and intelligent, and as the product line grows, the complexity and overhead of what engineers do each day with conventional approaches is really overwhelming engineering teams.”
engineering improvements provide such a signifi cant leap forward in capability that it impacts an organization’s busi- ness far beyond the engineering level. ME: One of the new developments in onePLE is creation of a new PLE Factory; please tell us about that feature. Krueger: The ‘PLE Factory’ is a metaphor we use to help organizations understand what PLE is all about. Imagine the idea of creating a family of similar products. With conventional
Charles Krueger CEO
Big Lever Software (Austin, TX)
www.bigleversoftware.com
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