As I write this, Christmas is approaching fast and children all over the world are writing their wish lists to Santa Claus. What will they get this year? With Issue Management, we got a tool to gather all wishes and suggestions for improvements that can provide valuable input for improving our products – and it even works after Christmas.
Make your own wishlist this year
Did you know that there is an app that is really similar to a wishlist, but on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform?
Much like the wishlist is a request for something you want to get, Issue Management, as the app is called, enables us to make suggestions to how a product can be improved – for the benefit of the company.
You can enter your justifications for the suggestion, so that the product development team has something to work with. A person will either qualify the issue to be included in the next product change, or dismiss it with a justification. Like all wish lists, some wishes might come true, and some will not. In either case, the submitter of the Issue will be alerted of the outcome – so that everyone is informed and every historical request is tracked in the database.
a simple way to manage challenges
Issue management is an app within the role Collaborative Business Innovator, which is the basic role for product data management and product lifecycle management on the cloud.
Issue Management enables everyone with access to the company’s platform, to make suggestions that may lead to changes, without necessarily needing to specify the technicalities of what change that will resolve the issue. That part will be up to the Product Manager to judge, so that they can decide whether a change needs to be done and when, as well as what specific change that will be carried out, by whom, on what CAD file.
This is really useful for the whole company; employees who may sit on information that is valuable to the product development team, can report in issues on a product without regard to how the issue is supposed to be solved – and report this directly connected to the data the issue concerns.
Examples of how to use Issue Management
Let’s imagine that a supplier of fasteners, suddenly has a problem to deliver the fastener your product is using. This particular information can be reported as an issue by the person responsible for providing supplier parts, so that is brought to the attention of the product development team. The right individual in the product development team can then judge what the best way to solve the issue will be; use a different fastener type? Can we easily change some parts so that no fasteners are needed? Or is the reported issue simply not critical enough to delay manufacturing of our product?
Another example could be a manufacturer of automotive components that may discover that there might be a clash between components in certain situations. They track all reported issues, so that the product development team can look closer on if and how changes are going to be carried out.
Figure 1 – All individual issues can be tracked in a simple interface. Some of the issues in this list is even connected to a specific 3D model, making it even easier to manage all issues.
The product development team will have a single place to gather and track all incoming suggestions, and can assess the incoming information and the nature of the issue, and with their direct knowledge of the product and its structure, can decide if and when a design change will occur – and initiate a controlled change process which in turn will feed information back to the originator of the issue, once the new release is official.
Figure 2 – Markups can be attached to an issue, showing what exact location on a model the issue concerns.
Keep everything in one place
But why stop on gathering incoming issues only from within the company? With 3DEXPERIENCE, you can allow your customers, external consultants, focus groups and any other stakeholder, access your data in a controlled manner and supply the information you need to improve your products.
The Issue Management app is a perfect example on how also non-technical persons in a company can help with the improvement of your products – and how working on the same data set can benefit the whole company so that everyone pulls in the same direction.
The Issue Management app is a PLM app which is included in Collaborative Industry Innovator.
