What are the barriers to getting design and manufacturing and PLM and SCM to work together?
The barriers are mostly cultural. But it takes more than better sociability to get these two perspectives together. There are complicated tradeoffs that have to be thought through by management. For example, quality and cost are sometimes mutually exclusive. Design and manufacturing need to come together to determine where and when to compromise and with what end goal in mind. Likewise, choices about how things are designed and manufactured need to include a look at whether to make or buy and what level of granularity to impose. For instance, is it better to purchase sub assemblies and simplify your manufacturing? About the author: Alan Earls had his first exposure to computer programming on one of Digital Equipment Corp.’s PDP-8 minicomputers. He went on to serve as editor of the newspaper Mass High Tech and is the author of the book Route 128 and the Birth of the Age of High Tech, a photographic essay on a key part of Massachusetts economic history. He currently is a freelance writer
