In recent weeks there have been a number of posts suggesting to change the names of both Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) and the Engineering Change (EC) Process. Why? In many companies allegedly both PLM and the EC process are limited to engineering, and a name change will supposedly help to expand them across the entire organization. 

To me this suggestion sounds akin to someone hoping that changing a dog’s name will somehow make the dog stop misbehaving. Most people understand that this would be a futile exercise. 

But before I jump into exploring a more promising approach, let’s look at the actual situation on the ground. Is it really true that neither PLM nor the engineering change process have expanded much beyond the engineering department? To answer this question we need to distinguish between process and technology. 

The engineering change process has been around for more than 60 years. In the 1960s, the aerospace industry started to use formalized and standardized engineering change procedures based on military standards, specifically MIL-STD-480 on configuration control. And in 1978 MIL-STD-973 on Configuration Management introduced engineering change control and an enterprise-wide engineering change process, and the standard was quickly adopted in the aerospace, automotive and other manufacturing industries. A quick tour today through companies in any of these and many other discrete manufacturing industries will show that most companies have an enterprise-wide EC process in place and follow it diligently. So it is clearly not true that the EC process has not been adopted beyond engineering. And clearly the name of the engineering change process had nothing to do with its adoption across the enterprise, because it has been adopted by most companies enterprise-wide despite its name. 

What is true is that PLM – even 25 years after its introduction as an enterprise-wide technology – still has not been widely adopted beyond the engineering department, including to enable and automate the engineering change process. Is that because of the name? Will changing the name from PLM to another TLA (three letter acronym) make it (whatever it may be called) stop misbehave? Unlikely. I mean we tried PDM, EDM, CPC, CIM and a bunch of other TLAs before without more success. So it’s really not the name that is to blame. 

No, the problem lies elsewhere. As I wrote in two earlier PLM Insights articles, PLM Ownership vs Leadership, or How to Foster PLM Adoption Across the Enterprise and Who Should Own PLM? Engineering, IT or Someone Else, the true problem is ownership of PLM, or rather a lack thereof across the organization. In most companies that use a PLM system today it is owned by engineering. And engineering of course is primarily focused on solving its own problems. There’s nothing devious about that, but engineering just doesn’t understand the problems of other business functions, i.e. quality, procurement, manufacturing, etc very well. And because most other business functions outside of engineering don’t understand PLM well (yet), they look for solutions to their problems elsewhere (like Requirements Management, QMS, PPM, ALM, SLM, etc). So PLM technology can’t break out of the engineering cage, neither to enable and automate the EC process enterprise-wide nor to do many of the other things it is perfectly capable of doing, simply because no one knows about PLM technology and its capabilities and promotes it outside of engineering. And that is primarily an ownership problem and maybe secondarily an education problem, but definitely not a name problem.