Miki Lumnitz’s Weblog

Here is Jim Brown’s Blog Post on ENOVIA SmarTeam

www.mbtmag.com/plmblog

Jim Brown

One-to-One: SmarTeam and the Small to Midsize Manufacturer
January 9, 2009

I had the chance to talk with … some of my friends at SmarTeam the other day about their support of small to midsize businesses (SMB). To be proper, these are my friends from Dassault Systemes ENOVIA SmarTeam which is a part of the ENOVIA set of solutions. But to me, it will always be SmarTeam. They laid out a very well thought through approach to helping smaller manufacturing companies achieve PLM benefits despite some of the inherent challenges of the SMB. Given this continued strategy, I expect that SmarTeam will have continued success in the SMB market, and more importantly their customers will have more successes with their PLM strategies.
What’s Special about SMB?
SmarTeam understands the challenges that smaller businesses face when they approach an initiative like PLM. In fact, they quoted some of my benchmark work from Aberdeen Group back to me in helping describe, which is always interesting when you see how companies use your research in practice. Some of the key points that SmarTeam recognizes about SMB are: 

• Differences in Organizational Structure – for example, individuals tend to wear more hats and operate in much flatter organization structures
• Finance and Risk – clearly, these companies don’t have the same resources that their larger competitors do, and are willing to accept much less risk in their initiatives
• Processes – these companies frequently do not have the same enforcement of standardized processes that larger companies do, and tend to be more dynamic by nature

What do They Offer the SMB?
Why is it important that SmarTeam understands the environment SMBs work in? It’s not, unless SmarTeam is willing to tailor their solutions to help companies overcome these barriers to implementing PLM. SmarTeam’s "Express" offerings are designed to do just that. These Express offerings are designed to offer: 

• Out-of-the-box functionality – standard best practices and engineering methodologies 
• Modularity and Scalability – the ability to implement only the functionality needed, with the ability to add in new capabilities readily in the future 
• Low TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) – low cost to procure the software, but also to implement and maintain it

The approach that SmarTeam takes fits very well with the concept of the PLM Program approach to Implementing PLM. For any company, but particularly for a smaller company, it is important to pick and choose the right sequence of PLM initiatives based on company strategy. Companies have seen the most success, according to my benchmark research at Aberdeen and my personal experience, when they develop a PLM strategy but then implement it in smaller, incremental steps. This is exactly the approach that SmarTeam is trying to support by providing a scalable solution that incorporates best practices for common processes like change management or design collaboration, and provides an infrastructure that can be leveraged to add in new capabilities over time. This helps to reduce project risk and to allow smaller investments with shorter payback, so the PLM Program can pay for itself as it progresses through a series of reasonably sized, predictable projects. Couple that with a Microsoft-centric architecture to reduce risk and total cost, and it sounds like a very good option for smaller companies.