This case study shows how Pentair’s PLM Systems Manager, Carlos Moreno drove a highly successful PLM effort globally across the company’s multiple business units by recognizing realistic priorities for the program from the start. To systematically reduce risks, early planning concentrated on the target of collaboration, to set a realistic scope and to establish careful phasing. Implementation benefited from a framework addressing four priorities for decision making — operational excellence, functional alignment, cost containment, and technology advancement.

The success of the program establishes PLM as a strategic tool that enables innovation, extending payoff well beyond cost savings, process, and knowledge reuse. For Pentair the far greater payoff from the implementation was developing a clear understanding of common process for each of its business units. Eighty percent of the benefits flow from the common shared definition, simplification, and collaborative communication of development processes. By documenting and digitizing processes value stream mapping is initiated which then assists in streamlining process. The PLM program implemented at Pentair moves automation out of the cost containment category and turns it into a strategic tool. With forty workflows now supported in templates, each provides the flexibility to be customized with minimal work to individual, specific environments. ENOVIA SmarTeam and SolidWorks clearly represented critical strategic contributors and partners in the success of the effort. If cycles are automated, and then digitized, enormous possibilities emerge.

Number of pages in report, 12.

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