A Serendipity Called Object Sets?

The most important point in the ROI argument for SAP PLM (or any PLM solution for that matter) is the reduction in product development cycle time. This reduction is achieved basically in 2 ways – by streamlining the whole process of creating and managing product definition, and by efficient reuse of available designs, knowledge-base and network. To be able to quickly find out existing objects that could be reused, we need robust classification and search functionalities, and SAP PLM has both of these. PLM Search has been likened to Google search for design engineers because of its ability of searching objects of different kinds based on a keyword or phrase. But is that always sufficient? Perhaps not. There are certain scenarios where you need more than a simple keyword search, and complementary features like Object Sets can play an important role in future, which is what I want to suggest in this blog.

Let’s first look at how the whole thing must have evolved. When you want to be able to find an object – a physical object - easily, you are expected to organize all objects nicely. So, on a shop floor, there should be ‘a place for everything, and everything in its place’. This is the first and obvious approach, even when it comes to enterprise software. You classify things (material masters, documents) based on various attributes and search the objects based on a combination of values for one or more attributes. But this approach has two problems inherent in it: Firstly, you must have a complex classification hierarchy and myriad characteristics to capture all possible information in a structured way, and then ensure that each object is classified properly within that hierarchy. Not a very attractive idea for a modern enterprise where the database just keeps growing every day with a lot of ‘unstructured’ information coming in continuously. This is where Enterprise Search, or PLM Search comes in. For every word or phrase you enter as the search criteria, it produces a limited set of objects which possibly has what you are looking for.

There is no doubt that this ‘cross-object’ search capability of PLM Search comes very handy in most circumstances, but does it cover all possible scenarios? Let us say, you are a bike manufacturer with 20 main models and 200 variants, and you want to make a list of all rubber parts in models exported to a specific market. How do you use PLM Search here? It’s quite easy to find which models are exported to that market – the sales folks will give you that data, or you can find through classification within product structures. Let’s say now you have a list of 25 product variants that are sold in the market in question. Separately, you can compile a list of all rubber parts that are used in all the models. Imagine now you have a list of 300 unique rubber parts. What next? Of course, someone can write an ABAP report that will explode the BOMs for selected variants and then filter them for rubber parts. What if such a situation occurs often? I think there is a potential solution – the object sets.

The object set is a feature that came with EhP7, and is currently available only in SAP PLM for Process Industries. With object sets, you can create collections of objects of your choice, and share them with others. One important use case is in recipe formulation where you can add an entire object set to a recipe instead of individual substances. As of the moment, object sets apparently do not support BOMs. But if they did in some near future, SAP could potentially extend PLM Search to work within object sets. You get the idea? In our example above, all one has to do is add the variants to an object set, and perform a search within. The result could be defined as a new object set that people could share with each other for augmenting with more objects. You could think of entirely new workflow scenarios where object sets interact with each other and with people.

Comments? Thoughts?