New Article by HA in Tech Clarity: PRODUCT COST MANAGEMENT AS A LINK BETWEEN ENTERPRISE SYSTEMS

Nov 052012

Last week, Hiller Associates published an article in Tech-Clarity with the title:

PRODUCT COST MANAGEMENT AS A LINK BETWEEN ENTERPRISE SYSTEMS

Here’s an outline of the article:

Siemens PLM recently bought Perfect Costing Solutions from Tsetinis & Partner. What does this mean?
To answer this, let’s first ask, what IS Product Cost Management and what does PCM software really “do”?
Now that we know what PCM software really does, who would value this in the Enterprise Software world?
There are look’s of possible categories of enterprise software that could value PCM software, but the most likely are PLM and ERP.
Product Cost Management software is really a bridge linking the engineering language of physical things to the rest of the organization (purchasing, supply chain, finance, manufacturing, etc.) who primary speak the financial language of dollars.
If independent PCM software companies are not bought by a large PLM or ERP player, what are the other possible options for their future?

Here’s a teaser diagram from the article, just because who doesn’t like maps?

Product Cost Management Bridge from PLM to ERP Hiller Associates

Click to Enlarge! The position of PCM Software in the Enterprise World

My thanks to Jim Brown and Tech-Clarity for the publishing platform to discuss this subject – Eric Arno Hiller

Siemens buys Perfect Costing Solutions (Tsetinis)

Product Cost Management, Software Tools (for PCM, ERP, PLM, etc.) 6 Responses »

Sep 112012

Today is a day of solemn remembrance for Americans and many around the world who remember the 9-11 attack on the the United States of America. However, there is at least one person who likely quite happy today for a very different reason: Andreas Tsetinis. Andreas is the Founder and CEO of Perfect Costing Solutions who makes Tsetinis Perfect Pro-Calc and Perfect Calcard. In the biggest Product Cost Management (PCM) news of the day, Siemens PLM (specifically the Industry Automation Division) has announced the acquisition of Perfect Costing Solutions.

What is Tsetinis and What are Its Products?

For those of you who are not familiar with Tsetinis & Partner (parent of Perfect Costing Solutions), it is an integrated product cost company of software tools and consulting services. Many people consider the software tool side of the Tsetinis business, Perfect Costing Solutions, the recognized market leader in Europe for the PCM. In the last couple of years, the product Perfect Pro-Calc has also been making inroads in the US. Perfect Costing Solutions makes two software products:

Perfect Pro-Calc – This is a cost estimation tool used primarily by costing experts. It is fed by manual input that allows predictions of cost for mechanical and some electrical parts. Perfect Pro-Calc also includes that ability to roll up costs in a hierarchical BOM structure that the user defines.
Perfect CalCard – This is a software focused on capital tooling (injection molding, casting, and stamping) cost estimation by tooling experts. It has the capability of accepting 3d solid CAD models as input to the costing process, although, I am personally not aware how advanced this ability is.

Per the Perfect Costing Solutions website, “today over 240 companies in the automotive sector and other industries successfully use our products.” Perfect Costing Solutions has 50 employees according to the Siemens press release.

What does this mean for Product Cost Management?

The last year, starting from September of 2011, has been a very eventful year in Product Cost Management. First, Solidworks unveiled its first foray into the PCM world: Solidworks Cost — the first tool, besides aPriori, that can cost parts directly from geometry. Then PTC announced Windchill Cost. Windchill is not a cost generation tool, but is a cost management / roll-up tool that builds off of Windchill. It allows customers roll-up costs generated by other softwares or methods and track and analyze these costs. Now we have the very first Product Cost Management acquisition (Perfect Costing Systems, Gmbh) by a major Product Lifecycle Management player (Siemens). This begs many questions, among them:

Will the PLM companies begin to dominate the PCM space and crowd out the pure plays?
Will Siemens attempt to build CAD Feature Based Costing abilities into Perfect Pro-Calc?
What does this mean to PCM software companies; will other players acquire specialized PCM software companies?

I am going to see if I can get an answer to these questions. In an eerie coincidence, just this week, Jim Brown of Tech Clarity and I were just discussing me writing an article about where Product Cost Management might settle out in the enterprise software landscape. It sounds like it’s time for me to write that article…

What does the rest of the PCM world think about the Siemens acquisition of Perfect Costing Systems. Please let us all know by commenting!

PLM, ERP, and the Effect on Product Cost Management

Product Cost Culture, Software Tools (for PCM, ERP, PLM, etc.) 3 Responses »

Apr 302012

Michelle Boucher from Aberdeen Research just put out another nice piece of research on Product Cost Management. (Actually, it’s not about PCM specifically.) It’s called Product Development Single Source of Truth: Integrating PLM and ERP. The report delves into perennial topic of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and (or versus) Product Lifecycle Management (PLM).

I have worked closely around these enterprise categories for the last 10 years, but I admit I may not be an expert of Michelle’s level. However, from my seat in the ballpark, it feels like the open warfare between PLM and ERP has now morphed into a cold war or maybe cautious Glasnost and the realization of each other’s right to exist. Michelle’s report doesn’t focus on the war between the software categories but on the end customers. The end customers know that both ERP and PLM must exist in a corporation, but they have the problem of figuring out how ERP and PLM should best work together.

The general interoperability of ERP and PLM is beyond my interest in this post. What is interesting is that there is research in the report on Product Cost Management, even if the report does not call it out specifically. Here’s a few pieces of data that I have surgically excised from much larger tables from a much larger report.

How important is Product Cost Versus Other Pressures?

Top Pressures Driving Improvements to How Products Are Developed Hiller Associates

CLICK to Enlarge: Top Pressures Driving Improvements to How Products Are Developed

Readers of Jim Brown’s blog on PLM may remember that I did a post on this very topic a few months ago. You can read it here. Take a look at the figure to the right. It appears that my intuition was right, at least with the preeminence of time-to-market as the number one priority to product development. However, I was surprised to see that Product Cost Management came in number two in importance, albeit 25% less important than time-to-market (using time-to-market as a base). Regardless, that is encouraging. So, one wonders again why more companies don’t have stronger PCM efforts?

Does PLM and/or ERP Help with Product Cost Management?

One of the tables in Michelle’s report shows the effect of a company having PLM and the effect of PLM’s level of integration with ERP on many different performance metrics. One of those metrics is whether a company meets its product cost targets or not. Take a look at the chart to the right. This is very interesting for two reasons.

CLICK to Enlarge: Performance Benefits of Integrating PLM and ERP

First, we see a range of meeting product cost targets of 65%-72%. Really? In my own research on about 40 operational companies in many different industries, the mean percent of time that companies meet product cost targets at launch is 20-30% — HALF of what Aberdeen is seeing. I wonder what the disconnect is in my data versus theirs?

Second, the report shows mean (average) of the respondents that fell in each category on the chart (having ERP but no PLM system, having PLM and ERP but unintegrated, and having both in some level of integration). As expected, the companies with some level of integration do better, but is this statistically relevant? What is the standard deviation on this data? I ask this because the range of answers I get when I ask companies how often they meet product cost targets is from 0-100% of the time.

Is PLM or ERP is Storing Product Cost Data?

CLICK to Enlarge: Data sent from ERP to PLM

Looking at the graph to the right, notice that none of the couple hundred Aberdeen respondents were pushing any cost data from PLM to ERP. They were pushing some data from ERP to PLM. I have shown the pieces that they are storing in ERP and pushing to PLM. One could argue that the “Sourcing Data” that they pushing to PLM may be quite relevant in Product Cost

Management. However, I wonder how relevant the “Costs / Actual Costs” are to PCM, given that ‘actual’ costs imply old carryover costs, which are fairly irrelevant to new designs or re-designs.

According to Aberdeen, 77% of companies do store “Item Costs” in ERP. This left me wondering, where are the other 23% of companies storing cost information? An excel spreadsheet? (have mercy!)

There’s a lot more in Michelle’s report than this narrow slice of data on PCM. So, if you don’t subscribe to Aberdeen’s research, you can sign up or just buy the report. Great data, though, Michelle. Thanks.