Design for Manufacturing » Hiller Associates Product Cost Management

SEER Composites Brings Cost Estimating to CATIA

Mar 202014

Hiller Associates posted the following article at ENGINEERING.COM yesterday. You can read it there at this link, or just keep reading below!

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Another solid piton in the cliff of making product cost mainstream in CAD / PLM Products?

CATIA users can now get a faster and more effective way to design and source composites products with the highest profit by bringing the estimation ability closer to the designer’s native environment. Galorath Incorporated debuted its newest integration of SEER® for Manufacturing with the Dassault Systems 3DEXPERIENCE® Platform in CATIA at the JEC Composites conference in Paris. The new product is called the SEER Ply Cost Estimator.

Who is involved?

Galorath Incorporated grew out of a consulting practice focused on product cost estimation, control, and reduction that began in the late 1970

s. Over the last 30 years, Galorath built their costing knowledge into the SEER suite of software products. SEER is one of the independent product cost estimating software companies.

Dassualt Systems is one of the “big 3” Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) companies in the world.

Hiller Associates spoke with Galorath CEO Dan Galorath, Vice President of Sales & Marketing Brian Glauser, and SEER for Manufacturing product lead Dr. Chris Rush and got a full product demo.

What does this integration do?

The integration allows users of CATIA to use SEER’s costing software for composite materials within the CATIA environment. In CATIA, the engineer designs a lay-up for a composite part, generating a Ply Table (a critical design artifact for composite parts that specifies material, geometry, and some manufacturing info). That activates the integrated SEER Ply Cost Estimator so that the designer (or the cost engineer or purchasing person aiding him) can set up more part-specific costing choices and preferences within the CATIA environment.

When ready, the user pushes the cost analysis button. The information is processed by SEER Ply Cost Estimator which sends the ply table data and other information to the interfacing SEER-MFG software to compute cost. The cost data is returned and presented to the user, once again within a native CATIA screen.

How broad is the capability?

Click to ENLARGE!

Currently, the integration of SEER is applicable for parts made of composite materials. It’s a strong starting point for the integration partnership because SEER has a long experience in the field of costing composites, working with companies in the defense and aerospace verticals. Composites are also becoming more mainstream in other industries, such as automotive and consumer products. Galorath has been a major player in the US Government’s Composites Affordability Initiative (CAI), a 50/50 government/industry funded consortium including Boeing, Lockheed and Northrop Grumman that was formed to drive down the costs of composites. Galorath has also worked with Airbus in the area of composites parts costing.

Galorath’s Brian Glauser says that the SEER Ply Cost Estimator has hundreds of man-years invested, much from previous work with CAI and with aerospace companies that resulted in several of the modules already in the SEER-MFG standalone product.

The first version of the SEER Ply Cost Estimator handles many composites manufacturing processes, materials, concepts of complexity, and both variable and tooling costs. However, it does not yet directly cost the assembly of one part to another.

The initial integration will be to CATIA v5, but SEER and CATIA have signed a v6 agreement as well. That integration will follow later.

Galorath (and likely Dassault) are hoping that the SEER Ply Cost Estimator will be well received by customers and help drive many product cost benefits. If this happens, there may be demand from Dassualt’s end customers not only to improve the SEER Ply Cost Estimator, but to expand the SEER/CATIA integration to other manufacturing processes covered in SEER’s stand-alone software products such as machining, plastics, sheet metal and assembly processes.

What does it mean for Functional Level Groups?

Philippe Laufer, the CEO of CATIA was quoted saying :

“Using Galorath’s SEER for Manufacturing in CATIA…will help companies perform early trade-off analysis on the use of various materials and composites processes before manufacturing even takes place.”

Well, that has been one of the goals in Product Cost Management for a long time. If your company uses composites, the tool has the following possibilities:

Engineering – identify which design choices are driving cost and by how much
Purchasing/Manufacturing – get an early warning of what to expect from suppliers before asking for quotes or estimates (should-cost)
Cost Engineering –focal point for the cross-functional discussion about cost to drive participation, especially from engineering

It’s important to realize that this integration will have its limitations, as with any costing product. First, the current integration applies only to composites. While expensive, composites are only one type of part on the Bill of Material (BOM). You will have to go beyond the current integration of SEER/CATIA to cost the full BOM, perhaps to SEER’s standalone costing product or to those of its competitors.

Second, remember that cost is far harder to “accurately” estimate than many physical performance characteristics. While meeting an absolute cost target is important, even more important are the following:

Continuous Design Cost Improvement – If your company consistently designs lower cost products because you have superior cost estimation information, you WILL beat your competitors.
Correct Cost and Margin Negotiation – If your company is better at negotiating quotes because it can give suppliers a better understanding of what it will cost them to make your part and you can negotiate a margin that is not too high, but adequate to keep your suppliers healthy, you WILL beat your competitors¹.

What does it mean for the C-Level?

Philippe Laufer of CATIA also says:

“This [the SEER Composites integration] leads to finding out the most efficient way of manufacturing a product while meeting cost, performance, functionality, and appearance requirements.”

The C-suite doesn’t really care about composites or ply tables in and of themselves, but it does care about revenue and profit. Of course every well-marketed product will claim to improve these metrics. Regarding product cost, the good news is that Galorath and Dassault are aiming at a big target. Companies that use a lot of composites can have very high costs. For example, Boeing and Airbus have Cost of Goods Sold of 84.6% and 85.5% and Earnings before Tax of 7.2 and 3.6%, respectively². Those COGS figures are big targets on top of a highly leveraged COGS/Profit ratio.

What does it mean for Product Cost Management becoming mainstream in the enterprise software stack?

We asked Dan Galorath how long it would be before Product Cost Management was as much of the PLM ecosystem as finite element, manufacturing simulation, or environmental compliance. He replied:

“Cost estimation software will never be on every designer’s workstation, but I don’t believe that is what it means for Product Cost Management to be considered ‘mainstream.’ It’s not fully mainstream yet, but a greater need is being driven by outsourcing and the tight business environment. The procurement folks can’t only rely on internal manufacturing knowledge like they used to. They need tools like SEER to fill the gap and move the cost knowledge base forward.”

We agree with Mr. Galorath. This is another step, another piton to secure Product Cost Management onto the PLM cliff, as PCM continues to climb this steep hill.

This is the first integration point between independent Product Cost Management software companies and the PLM/ERP world since September 2012, when Siemens PLM purchased Tsetinis Perfect Costing³. PTC has built some level of cost tracking ability into Windchill, and Solidworks (owned by Dassault) has developed the first couple versions of a costing calculation module for their product.

There is still a lot of ground to cover. There are quite a few independent product cost management software tools that have costing intellectual property that can accelerate the process, especially if the big PLM companies acquire them or partner with them. When that will happen is anybody’s guess, but for now it looks like CATIA users, at least, have a viable solution for composites costing… and maybe more in the future.

1 For more information, see the Hiller Associates Industry Week Article: Your Should-cost Number is Wrong, But It Doesn’t Matter

2 Per www.morningstar.com, trailing 12 months COGS, 3/13/2014

3 Siemens buys Perfect Costing Solutions (Tsetinis), Hiller Associates, September 2012

2012 Product Cost Management Revenue Assumptions

Product Cost Management, Software Tools (for PCM, ERP, PLM, etc.) No Responses »

Apr 172013

Hello Internet and Product Cost Management industry! We’ve had strong interest in our latest article on the 2012 revenues of the Product Cost Management market. There have been several good questions that have made us want to clarify some of the assumptions in the analysis, so that people are clear on what is and is NOT included in the estimate.

Most importantly, this is an estimate of the REVENUE of the group of included vendors today in 2012. This does NOT represent the Total Addressable Market for Product Cost Management software.

The total addressable market is many times larger than the revenue of the included vendors that are estimated in 2012. In fact, we plan to write follow-up articles that discuss the total addressable market, as well as the growth rate of the current vendors in reaching that total addressable market Here’s some of the assumptions we made in the analysis:

Only the Vendors noted are estimated – The uncertainties do not explicitly take into account other vendors. They reflect the fact that most of these are private companies whose numbers are not public and that vary from year to year. Obviously, it matters where one draws the line in the analysis.
Focused on the estimation of manufactured products, not construction – there are many products in the market that focus on construction estimation, for example estimates for building an office building, an oil platform, a refinery, etc. We consider this a wholly different market. In our own experience we have rarely if ever see the companies that specialize in construction estimation also compete for the same customers for which the companies listed in this Monday’s article compete.
Not focused on job shops – there is also a separate market for software used by small “job shops.” These are small, mostly family owned businesses, that typically manufacture one type of part, for example sheet metal, machined castings, etc. Some of the included vendors may sell to a few job shops, but there software is capable of being used by bigger enterprises.
Generally Available Software – We only included vendors whose primary business involves selling a legitimate “generally available” software product (not a consulting business with internal tools)

Given these constraints, we believe this group represents over 90% of the revenue in the market today. If you know of other competitors who meet the criteria above and make over $2 million USD a year in revenue, let us know.

Keep the questions coming! We are glad there’s so much interest.

2012 Revenues in the Product Cost Management Software Market

Product Cost Management, Software Tools (for PCM, ERP, PLM, etc.) 8 Responses »

Apr 152013

Hiller Associates received a question this week from a business school asking us what the revenue of the product cost management market is. That was a very interesting question, and one that we have thought about before. However, we’ve never actually sat down to think about the question formally. So rather than answer the person privately, we thought it might be helpful to everyone to discuss this in a public forum.

Product Cost Management Software Companies Hiller Associates

Companies included in the Revenue Aggregate

There’s good news and there is bad news with respect to the estimation of the size of the Product Cost Management market. The good news is that the market is fairly self contained, i.e. there are only a certain limited number of players in that software market. However, that’s where the good news ends. There are several challenges to estimating the market size:

Private companies -80% of the players in the product cost management software market are privately held companies, either venture funded, or privately held by a small group of founding owners and managers. Therefore, their revenue numbers are closely guarded information that is not publicly available. This includes the PCM company that our managing partner, Eric Hiller, founded and at which he was the CEO and then the Chief Product Officer for many years (aPriori).
Bundling – the second challenge comes with the fact that some of the larger players bundle product cost functionality into the price of another larger product. For example, Solidworks Cost is a bundled-free option that is included whenever someone buys their professional or premium level Solidworks CAD product.

There is is one other good piece of news, which is that Hiller Associates knows most of the players in the market and speaks with them regularly. For some of them, we do know the revenue, and for others, we have a good idea. Obviously, we cannot share revenue numbers of an individual company, but this inside information will help us move the estimate from a wild guess to an educated guess.

Taking a look at the figure on the left, you will see the companies that we have included in the estimate. These are all the main players that we know of in the market. If there are others that we’ve missed, we’re very happy to learn about them and consider if we should add them to the market sizing.

2012 Revenues in the Product Cost Management Software Market

Those of you who follow this blog or have worked with Hiller Associates know that our philosophy is that point estimates are very dangerous and, often, not even that useful. Knowing the uncertainty around a cost number is just as important as having a point estimate of what that number is. We feel this holds true with any financial quantity. Therefore, we will provide a range of the size of this market. Please see the figure on the right, which shows are estimate of the total revenue of the company’s above for 2012. When given the uncertainty factors that we have discussed above, we feel the total market has a large range. Total revenue could be as low as $60 million or as high as, perhaps, $115 million.

Current market revenue of Product Cost Management Hiller Associates

Click to Enlarge!

Other questions that people should ask are how much of this revenue comes from services and how much of this revenue comes from actual licensing of product. Some of the companies included are primarily product companies, and most of the services that they offer are tightly bound around the product. Such services would include training on the software, implementation, and customization. However, there are others in the group that also maintain general consulting businesses. For example, several of these companies offer classes about product cost or subsets of product cost management, such as design for manufacturing & assembly (DFM/DFA). These are general classes which only relate peripherally to their products.

Estimate Methodology

To do our estimate, our methodology was to estimate the revenue of each of the included companies individually. We also did an estimate of the service percentage of their revenue on an individual company basis. Then we added up the aggregate numbers. You will notice from the estimate figure to the right that when all the numbers for service and product revenue or aggregated, there is approximately a 60/40% split between product and service respectively. This ratio of product vs. service revenue seems approximately correct, per our experience in the market.

It’s important to understand, that this estimate is four the actual revenue of these companies in 2012. It does not reflect the total addressable market for product cost management software, which we believe is woefully on realize that this moment. This is the first our discussions about revenue in the product cost management software market.

NEXT TIME: Growth Rate in the Product Cost Management Software Market

It’s not the club… it’s YOU! (Lean = Vertical Integration = Better Product Cost Management Part 2)

Product Cost Management, Software Tools (for PCM, ERP, PLM, etc.), Uncategorized 2 Responses »

Feb 212013

Last week we talked about the struggle in corporate strategy between Core Competency structures and Lean manufacturing. Whereas Core Competency thinking naturally leads to more outsourcing and extended supply chains, Lean manufacturing would advocate for a geographically tight supply chain, often with more vertical integration.

So, what does this have to do with Product Cost Management. The answer is “knowledge.”

The Lack of Manufacturing Knowledge In Design

One of the biggest complaints that I get from my clients is that their teams have lost or are rapidly losing product cost knowledge in the last 10 years. This is especially acute with design engineering teams, but also effects other parts of the organization, such as purchasing. Years ago, the engineering curriculum at universities became so overloaded that manufacturing began to be pushed to the side in the education of most engineers (excepting the specific “manufacturing” engineering major). In fact, at most top engineering schools today, there is only one high level survey course in manufacturing that is part of the required curriculum.

However, manufacturing and its evangelistic design missives (design-to-cost, design-for-manufacturability, design-for-assembly, etc.) were still learnable skills that the young engineers and others could pick up on the job, over time. This is because most product companies were not only in the business of final assembly, but also in the business of sub-assembly, as well as manufacturing components from raw materials. These companies employed large amounts of manufacturing engineers who were resources for the design and purchasing teams. Even for parts and subassemblies that were purchased, the suppliers were likely close by the design centers and had long standing relationships with the OEMs.

Designers and purchasing people could literally walk down to a manufacturing floor in an internal plant or drive a few minutes to a supplier. Conversely the manufacturing engineer would walk upstairs to question engineering about a design. This is nearly impossible when suppliers are often in different countries and the firm that designs does little manufacturing themselves

The Effect of Lack of Manufacturing Knowledge on PCM Tools

One of the ways that industry has tried to remedy this situation is with sophisticated Product Cost Management software. This software codifies a lot of the tribal knowledge that resided in the manufacturing engineers head. However, these tools assume that the tool users have (1) the will and (2) the skill set to properly use a PCM Software.

There is no doubt that the PCM and DFM/DFA tools today are far more advanced than they were, even ten years ago. However, the value one derives from a tool is not a function of the tool’s capability alone. There is a bottleneck problem of using a tool to its full potential. We could say that the value the PCM tool actually gives to the organization equals:

Value of PCM Tool = (Will to use tool) * (Ability to use tool) * (Potential of the tool)

People often forget about the ability component, but this is true with any tool. People buy expensive tools, e.g. golf clubs, hoping to improve their performance. However, 90% of the time, they cannot even use the set clubs they have to their full potential. Worse yet, often more expensive or sophisticated tools are more powerful and have the potential to give more value, but they are often less forgiving of errors. If you don’t know how to use them, they will HURT your performance.

In the past, with a Lean (vertically integrated and geographically close) supply chain, people used primitive PCM tools (often only spreadsheets). On a scale of 1 (worst) to 10 (best), on average what I hear from industry is that there capability to use the tool was higher, but the tool was limited and cumbersome. The users, including design engineers, knew what decisions to make in the tool, but the tool was cumbersome. Currently, we have more of the opposite problem. The PCM tools are better and much easier to use, but most design engineers are somewhat baffled on how to make what seems like the simplest of manufacturing input decisions in the tools. The “Will to use the Tool” is another problem altogether that is beyond our discussion today. However, my experience, in general, would be represented by the following table:

These results will vary company to company, and even, from design team to design team within the company. Regardless, I wonder if we are at a breakeven state from where we were in the past today in the value we get from PCM tools… or maybe, we have even lost ground. The sad thing is that the PCM tools today ARE more user friendly and requires less of an expert to use. However, is the loss of manufacturing knowledge in design engineering is so bad that it has overwhelmed the PCM tooling ease-of-use-improvements?

What Can You Do to Help the Situation in Your Company?

Obviously, nothing is as good as the osmosis of manufacturing learning that occurs from a tightly coupled, geographically close, and vertically integrated supply chain. However, the state of your firm’s supply chain is likely out of your control personally. There is some positive movement with the re-shoring and re-integration trends in industry, in general. However, there are steps you can take to improve the value your firm derives from PCM tools.

Send Engineers Back-to-School – do you offer (or better yet, mandate) classes in Product Cost Management, DFM/DFA, Target Costing, etc. for your design team? This should be part of the continuing education of the design engineer. I am not talking about training on the PCM tools themselves (although that is needed, too), but general classes on how different parts are made, the different buckets of cost, the design cost drivers for each manufacturing process, etc.
Design Cost Reviews – This is a very low tech way to create big wins. Design reviews in which design engineers review each other’s work and offer cost saving ideas should be a regular facet of your PCM process. Even better: include the engineer’s purchasing counterpart, company manufacturing experts, and a cost engineer to lead the review
Embed Experts – Does the design team have at least one advanced manufacturing engineer or cost engineering expert for no more than 20 design engineers? If not, you should consider funding such a resource. Their salary will easily be paid for by (a) the cost reductions they they help your team identify for products already in production, (b) the costs that help the team avoid in designs before production, and (c) the speed their efforts will add to time-to-market by helping the team avoid late changes and delays due to cost overruns.

In the past, vertical integrated, geographically close supply chains helped Product Cost Management in a passive way. The pendulum may be swinging back to that structure. However, even if it does, don’t rely on the “passive” Product Cost Management to help. Take the active measures described above and get more value out of your PCM Software investment.

Today’s Product Cost Killing Tip — Control the Evil Robot Overtolerancer!

Product Cost Killing Tip, Software Tools (for PCM, ERP, PLM, etc.) 2 Responses »

Feb 112013

There were a lot of comments last week to the article we posted with the title: Only 17% Percent of Companies Meet Product Cost Target

Many people complained about the dearth of knowledge of the design engineer in Design for Manufacturability. In the discussion, we also started to propose some solutions to overcome this problem. However, one comment that sparked my interest was a comment about WHY design engineers often overtolerance parts that went beyond “they don’t know any better.” The comment paraphrased was:

A big problem we have is that we are making parts directly from the CAD model. A lot of Catia based models have a general tolerance of +- .005 [in.] on the entire part .including fillet radii and edge breaks. …these features have to be penciled off with a ball end mill instead of using a standard tool with a radius on it can kill profit on a job when you miss it when quoting.

That is a fascinating observation. There is no doubt that the Product Lifecycle Management companies will be pleased as punch that people are finally taking their drum beating on “model is master” seriously. FYI – I agree that the model should be master and that drawings should be generated from the 3d master data. However, this improvement to PLM adherence highlights what happens when new technology (a tool) is foisted upon a problem without without understanding the current processes and outcomes that the incumbent tool is satisfying. In this case, the old tool is paper drawings. With the incumbent tool, there was a title standard block that for companies, and that title block would give helpful bounding constraints such as:

Unless otherwise specified:

All dimensions +/- o.o1 inches

All radius and fillets +/1 0.02 inches

Etc.

That helpful and protective title block may not be there with a 3d, model onl,y strategy. All the evangelism on “tolerance by exception” goes right out the window what the CAD system now has default values that are overtoleranced by definition. The CAD system itself becomes… The Evil Robot Overtolerancer.

The good news is that the Evil Robots can be controlled, and you don’t even need anyone named Yoshimi to help you do it. However, it will require some thought, before you change the default tolerances in your CAD system. Some considerations to think about are:

What were the default tolerances in the title block on your drawings when the drawing was master?
Can these tolerances be reduced?
How surgically will your CAD system allow you to set default tolerances?
Do you need different tolerence ‘templates’ depending on the primary manufacturing process. E.G. tolerance defaults may be very different for a casting that is machined than for a piece of sheet metal.
How will you make your design engineers aware of these new default tolerances?

Whatever decision you make, make sure all the right people are at the table to make it together, including design engineering, the drafting team (if separate from design), purchasing, and manufacturing (including suppliers, if parts are made externally). If done thoughtfully and correctly, the setting of default tolerance will bring the Evil Robot Overtolerancer under control. If these changes are made in a vacuum or carelessly, you may find that you have made the Evil Robot 10x more powerful as an agent of chaos and profit destruction.

You want to be dealing with the friendly Autobots, not the Decepticons, right?

That’s today’s Product Cost Killing Tip!

If you have Product Cost Killing tips that you would like to share, please send them to answerstoquestions@hillerassociates.com.

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

PCM Technique / Cost Models, Product Cost Management, Software Tools (for PCM, ERP, PLM, etc.) No Responses »

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

World Map of Product Cost Management

Product Cost Management 41 Responses »

Apr 102012

On the last blog post (Product Cost Management – What is it?), I talked the different ways that my colleagues and I have seen the meaning of Product Cost Management take shape over our careers and PCM’s development. I offered what I believe is a good operating definition of PCM:

Product Cost Management – An agreed, coherent, and publicized system of culture/goals, processes, people, and tools following the product lifecycle, that ensures the product meets its profit (or cost) target on the day that it launches to the customer.

This definition can certainly be fleshed out further. I was at a conference a few weeks ago and heard a great presentation on social media by Overdrive Interactive. Part of the presentation was showing their map of the social media sphere that has become viral on the internet and the de facto standard many people use to orient themselves to the social web. I really liked that idea, and I’m a big believer in 1-page maps that give the reader an overview of a complex subject, as well as a starting point to dig for deeper detail.

What does Product Cost Management look like from a graphical viewpoint? I believe that it looks like the attached map (click on the diagram to enlarge the map or DOWNLOAD IT IN .PDF FORMAT.

Like any other major discipline that product companies follow, PCM contains four main areas:

Culture, Goals, and Incentives
Processes (tied to the product life cycle)
Team Structure and Participants (tied to the product life cycle)
Tools/Software that can help
CLICK TO ENLARGE!

Culture, Goals, Incentives – before attempting to put in place any process, people, or tools, the organization first has to ask the tough strategic questions. Where is our organization today in the PCM journey? To where does we hope to get and by when? And the big question: What is the priority of PCM and how much investment (honestly) will we make to close the gap from between today’s state to our goal? Once the company answers these questions, it can talk about the strategic structures that drive behavior (roles, incentives, and leadership support).

The next two continents on the PCM world map (PCM Processes, and PCM Tools/Software) follow the product lifecycle, and need to integrate with the company’s product development process. Different processes and different participants are appropriate at different points in the cycle.

Finally, we have the PCM Tools available to take on the journey. They fall into different buckets as follows: (a) homegrown tools (including Excel), (b) general platforms (e.g. PLM, ERP) that may be customized, and (c) specialty Best-In-Class (BIC) tools that focus on PCM processes. In the PCM World Map, many of the major BIC software systems are shown in a 2×2 diagram. We’ll discuss the 2×2 in more detail in a future post, but I don’t want readers to think there is a “magic [best] quadrant” in this 2×2. It is simply a descriptive conceptual diagram

One important thing for people who are navigating the map to realize is that Culture, Process, Team, and Tools are all interconnected and influence one another (see the top right in the header of the map). For example, if you are at the beginning of the PCM journey, it is likely that your company is not ready for all the processes shown. It also may only use one or two of the tools. The company may not have reached a capability level to benefit from some processes, people, or teams. Despite the inter-connectivity of the system, the best place to start when beginning the PCM journey is with the Culture (see blue arrows on the left of the map).

Like all high level maps, there are cities and even countries shown on it that have more detailed maps of their own. However, most companies would do well to focus on understanding the geography at the world level first, before hoping on a plane to a specific city. We can worry about street maps once we decide which cities we are going to visit!