Manufacturing Executive - March/April 2009 - (Page 38) What’s Holding Back PLM? USERS OUTSIDE THE AUTOMOTIVE AND AEROSPACE INDUSTRIES SEEM GENERALLY UNAWARE OF PLM’S BROAD POTENTIAL. PERHAPS VENDORS COULD ADD FEATURES AND TRIM PRICES TO JUMP-START ADOPTION. By Malcolm Wheatley C ontract electronics manufacturer Axiom Manufacturing Services prides itself on stripping them into finished products. “As a matter of course, we apply concepts like design for cost out of customers’ raw designs as it turns procurement, design for test, and design for manufacture,” says Steve Wilks, commercial director at the Newport, Wales-based printed circuit board manufacturer. The savings can be substantial, he adds: improved yield, lower component costs, and reduced rework. But what’s surprising is the low-tech nature of the design documentation with which Axiom works. Unable to afford higher-tech alternatives, it relies on paper sche- matics, Excel spreadsheets, and printed circuit board files structured in the decades-old “Gerber” format. “We can’t invest heavily in all the latest systems,” Wilks says. “We a bill-of-material perspective, Excel works just fine.” need information in a form we can work with — and from Product lifecycle management (PLM) technology wasn’t 38 Manufacturing Executive MAR/APR-09
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