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FROM THE PLE FRONTLINE
Product Line Engineering for the Enterprise: Part 1
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Greetings from Dr. Paul Clements:
In a previous newsletter issue entitled Product Line Engineering Meets Product Line Operations, BigLever CEO Dr. Charles Krueger wrote that the complexity of managing the variability in a family of similar products or systems — that is, a product line — is not limited to engineering groups.
Organizations, he observed, expend enormous amounts of time and effort dealing with product feature diversity to manage manufacturing and supply chains, certification and compliance documentation, product marketing and product portfolio planning, sales automation, training, support, service, maintenance, disposal, and more — all activities beyond engineering.
In this newsletter series, we’ll explore the natural culmination of that trend: Product Line Engineering (PLE) for the entire enterprise.
In this first issue of the series, we'll explore how Feature-based PLE, pioneered by BigLever, is already equipped to meet that brand new challenge.
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In the beginning...
Let’s wind the clock back about two decades to remind ourselves how PLE came into its current form. Even from this early beginning, PLE was recognized as an approach yielding extraordinary and unprecedented improvements in time, cost, and quality.
However, back then, there were no formulaic, repeatable approaches. In the literature, authors waved their hands about “domain engineering” (figuring out all the common, general, reusable content) and “application engineering” (taking all that and doing whatever it took to turn that content into material suitable for use in a single member of the product line), but anything remotely resembling a codified methodology was nowhere to be found.
Application engineering, under early approaches, included clone-and-own — find a piece of useful content in a repository somewhere, check it out, and change it however you need to in order to use it for your application.
Feel free to shudder; I do.
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Let there be… PLE automation
Around the turn of the millennium, PLE automation — such the automation enabled by BigLever’s Gears solution — appeared on the scene and that changed everything.
First, with Gears, “application engineering” essentially disappears. Gears performs that task in seconds, not weeks, by automatically configuring shared assets to support a product that is described by a Bill-of-Features, which specifies the features chosen for that particular product from the Feature Catalog (the “single source of feature truth” for the entire organization).
Second, Gears provides and imposes a well-defined common language for the capture and expression of features. This means that everyone in the organization is working to the same supported set of variation. That has enormous implications for the organization — for its communication and collaboration, planning and roadmapping, evolution and growth, and more. Features don’t just have meaning to engineers. They have meaning to business leadership as well.
This elevates PLE — giving it much greater visibility in the enterprise, something that previous approaches could never hope to achieve.
Finally, Gears provides a specific set of well-defined variation mechanisms for configuring a shared asset to support each member of the product line, no matter what kind of shared asset is involved. That observation foreshadows what is to come.
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PLE evolves — but its fundamental concepts endure
In those early days, “shared asset” was understood to be software. That’s where Feature-based PLE got its start: Engineers would use a configurator to exercise variation points in software, in order to produce the source code to support each member of a product line.
It only took a small leap to understand that this approach works for different kinds of content other than software: requirements, for example, or test cases, or design models, or user manuals. Voila! Feature-based PLE soon spread across the entire Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) realm.
Then came the marriage between PLE and Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) to cover the full systems engineering lifecycle, bringing shared assets such as bills-of-materials and mechanical drawings into the mix. And now we are seeing Feature-based PLE about to enter the electrical realm.
PLE and engineering? Check.
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PLE on the “wings of the V”
In that previous newsletter issue we mentioned at the outset, Dr. Krueger wrote that it is “immensely clear that the disciplines of PLE and Product Line Operations are overdue for a PLE&O convergence.” Well, that’s easy to say, but how would PLE extend that far — beyond engineering — out on the “wings” of engineering V?
In fact, because of the robust concepts underlying Feature-based PLE — as well as the off-the-shelf tooling, ecosystem of integrations, and well-codified, repeatable methods — it’s pretty easy to do as well. Here’s how.
Each time PLE enters a new arena (software, ALM, PLM, Operations, etc.), the story has the same prelude.
A forward thinker asks, “Can PLE help us manage our product line in this discipline?”
We already know the answer, but to play along we ask, “Do you have digital assets in your discipline?”
“Yes, of course we do.”
“Can you build a superset of each of them? Can you identify variation points in them that could be configured by feature selections?”
“Yes,” is always the answer.
“Well, then,” we say. “PLE applies. What tools do your practitioners use to create and evolve those assets? Let’s start building Gears integrations for them.”
This is how we take each next generational step in the evolution of PLE. At every step the same approach applies: Gears configures variation points in shared assets according to feature selections to produce instances that support products.
PLE and Operations? Check.
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Now, portfolio management, product conceptualization, sales and marketing, manufacturing, supply chain management, product field service, and more are all within PLE’s ever-growing scope.
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PLE for the enterprise
Suppose you’re a CxO in a forward-thinking company that has embraced PLE, rolling it out across the engineering arm of your organization. And, following industry trends, you’re spreading its footprint across your company’s operations arm. Ultimately, everyone in your organization who touches any of the products in your product line(s) will be working from the same playbook — a uniform, shared understanding of the feature diversity in play.
Due to the fully scalable PLE Feature Ontology that Gears supports, each person can focus on the diversity most applicable to his or her role, from the finest-grained diversity that configures individual data items (such as the color of a wire in a wiring harness) to the coarsest-grained options that your corporation’s portfolio managers control (such as new ways for your self-driving cars to network with each other to optimize your driving experience).
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Pushing the edge of the PLE envelope
For our part, BigLever has consistently pushed the edge of this envelope through each stage of the evolution. We constantly collaborate with customers to understand their evolving needs, and work diligently with tool providers to grow the Gears Framework, and the PLE Ecosystem, with the integrations needed to extend PLE across the full engineering and operations lifecycle.
Gears supports mega-scale product lines, and offers the ability for hundreds or thousands of individuals to simultaneously work on defining product content. It offers Server APIs to allow organizations to write their own apps to present PLE content to users as needed, when needed, in the form needed.
Feature-based PLE for the enterprise allows your organization to work as efficiently, and as strategically, as possible. Duplicate product content is eliminated, which in turn eliminates repetitive, replicated work and results in huge amounts of effort avoidance and cost savings.
Now, with Enterprise PLE, your enterprise can focus squarely on high-value work — the innovations needed to take your product line portfolio into the future, creating your competitive advantage.
PLE for the enterprise is an industry game-changer. The next installment in this newsletter series will explore how the venerable concept of feature, as supported by Gears, applies across the enterprise, from engineering cubicles to the boardroom.
Best regards,
Dr. Paul Clements
BigLever Software Vice President of Customer Success
pclements@biglever.com
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