The home of QR_'s Industry Reflections column, the PLM Essentials series, and topically pertinent thoughts from across the QR_ business and wider industry.
QR_ Insights
A founding principle of QR_ is to approach PDM from a people rather than systems centric worldview. With this in mind, we publish a series of Quality Reads aimed at offering up insight and real-world examples.
‘Industry Reflections' covers the key challenges faced by both start-ups and established manufacturers, as we navigate a world of increasingly disruptive technology.
'PLM Essentials' touches upon the aspects of PLM any business must get right to accelerate their complex engineering product development, including how to create processes and systems that will help your organisation deliver the innovation it requires to thrive in an ever more competitive marketplace.
'Recommended Reads' explores recently or frequently encountered questions and conundrums through a data lens, with insight on how to best address them.
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Latest Publications
Women shaping the future of Product Data Management
Product Data Management (PDM) is pivotal in modern industrial processes, ensuring efficient product development and management through organized data. Despite its crucial role, women remain underrepresented in PDM, highlighting the necessity of gender diversity for innovation. A diverse workforce brings together individuals with different backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences. This diversity of thought fosters innovative problem-solving approaches and encourages creativity within the organization. When teams are composed of individuals with varied viewpoints, they are more likely to challenge assumptions, explore alternative solutions, and generate novel ideas. This diversity-driven creativity can lead to breakthrough innovations, competitive advantages, and adaptability in an ever-changing business landscape.
Find out moreHow the automotive sector can help the MOD equipment plan
By now, most of us have read one of the media articles covering the National Audit Office’s unveiling of the metaphoric elephant in the room, which is the unaffordability of the MOD equipment plan due to a £16.9bn ‘black hole’. In this article, QR_’s Shane Mason takes a high-level look at how practices from the automotive sector should be considered as a means to help reduce costs for the MOD equipment plan.
Find out moreReshaping a people-centered industry: 7 takeaways from the Reuters Automotive USA 2023 conference
The power of data and proper data management are increasingly being embraced by manufacturing businesses as they embark on the journey to become truly data-driven organisations. Quick Release is uniquely focused on this, connecting the operating model silos to curate timely, accurate and human centric information flows. Recognising that the foundation of a Data-driven Organisation is data quality. QR_‘s experience has led to an approach to NPD and PDM that connects silos, and marries the efficiency and precision of a best-in-class process of timely, accurate, and human-centric insights.
Find out moreAI and your Bill of Materials: why token limits are nothing new
Traditionally BoM validation is conducted either manually by engineers that understand the product (e.g. BoM Audits, Build Matrices, Commodity Quantity Checks etc.) or through simply building the product (either virtually or physically) and finding the errors that result. Both methods are highly costly in time and material waste. These experiments aim to find a third way, by using the recent advances in Foundation Models to create a smart and repeatable method of performing fast and accurate AI powered BoM Validation at scale. These some early reflections on working with LLMs in this context. | Image: “a large language model in the style of the earliest computing 1950s”, generated by Midjourney.
Find out moreFilling the System Integrator gap to drive effective enterprise transformation
When referring to business capabilities, from PDM to PLM, Industry 4.0, manufacturing execution, etc., driving change requires a combination of strategic and operational leadership. As Lionel Grealou, business advisor and founder of Xlifecycle Ltd, put it in one of his Industry Reflections: “Implementing new capabilities involves continuous levels of business alignment and change management to ensure effective adoption. A key challenge in appraising capabilities is maintaining objectivity—considering relevance against the business plan, and/or the product development plan (NPD), as well as the ability of the organization to change.”
Find out moreSecuring PLM investment: preparing and pitching board-level business cases
Like road-cycling grand tours, PLM strategies and roadmaps require timely cross-functional teamwork, ongoing expectation management, and adjustments in anticipation of and in reaction to changing requirement landscapes and technical factors.
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