Our Services

DSA has extensive experience assisting clients in transitioning Product Development practices and integrations to the Supply Chain to higher levels of productivity and measurable return on investment. We are capable to assist with; implementation of PDM to automate engineering administrative tasks, extend the PDM application and redesign processes to enable Collaborative Product Commerce (CPC) and eventually conduct systemic/holistic reengineering of product development and it's integration to the supply chain to achieve an optimized PLM environment. Follow the links below for a review of all of our service offerings. For more specific information on a service or our services in general complete the Contact us form.

Establishing a Corporate PLM or Global Sourcing Strategy

Many corporations lack a Corporate PLM and/or Global Sourcing strategy. In absence of a well-defined strategy significant opportunity can be lost to better integrate the global organization and dramatically reduce the total cost of ownership for PLM and Sourcing assets (millions of dollars wasted). In absence of some very key strategic objectives, each business unit will implement PLM and Sourcing Environments that will be difficult to integrate to the rest of the businesses across the corporation. As a result, the costs associated with integrating the enterprise to better leverage your design reuse and buying power globally become costly, hard to implement and maintain (again millions of dollars of lost opportunity).

DSA Analysts can assist you to define a Corporate PLM and/or Sourcing Strategy that will:

• Increase the utilization of your PLM and Sourcing assets
• Establish a strong base of integrated process and technology
• Dramatically reduce the cost of implementation for all business units
• Enable a significant increase in the leverage of buying power
• Enable a significant increase in Design Reuse and Design Share
• Etc.

Specific Action Project Planning

Whether you are executing a PLM initiative or establishing a Global Sourcing Environment, effective planning on the front end is vital to the successful execution of the initiative, DSA staffs and methodologies are highly developed and proven over multiple projects across multiple industries. The deliverables you can typically expect from our planning stage method include but may not be limited to the following:

• Establish Clear and Measurable Objectives
• Establish Clear and Manageable Scope
• Identify Value-added enhancements to Technology and Process
• Establish a Measurable Return on Investment
• Establish Phases and Time to Value
• Establish Cash Flow and Total Cost to Value
• Define Resource Requirements
• Assess Risk and Plan for Mitigation
• Assimilate all Findings and Deliver a Program Charter
• Deliver a Capital Approval Request

Cost Benefit Analysis

DSA provides a comprehensive service to enable the creation of a measurable justification aligned to strategic and operational objectives. The results of our benefits work will better enable your PLM or Sourcing team to establish scope, set measurable objectives for improvement of people, policy, procedure and technology and secure the capital, expense budgets resources and executive level support to meet a well defined and measurable set of objectives.

Working with DSA Analysts in partnership you will be able to identify:

• Re-curing business problems & the measurable value to resolve
• Opportunities to increase design reuse
• Opportunities to leverage global buying power and reduce cost of commodity spend
• Opportunities to create better Product Concepts
• Opportunities to better quantify cost to design during proposal stage for project organizations
• and ETO organizations
• Opportunities to reduce Time and Cost to Market
• Opportunities to better manage the Global Sourcing environment and create a logical gated
• lifecycle process for Global Sourcing
• Opportunities to dramatically improve Design Engineering Productivities
• Opportunities to increase design yield
• Etc.

Technology / Vendor Selection Assistance

Through application of our Fully Threaded Lifecycle Method, DSA can assist you to conduct a detailed assessment of your process & technology requirements to meet a well-defined set of program objectives. The requirements work at this stage is executed to enable prospective vendors to understand New Targets for Process Design and participate in a technical Bake-off that will drive them to demonstrate how the technology will better enable process not just meet some bulleted list of requirements.

It is only with this type of approach to vendor evaluation and selection that you can establish a realistic Time to Value, Cost to Value, and understand the Quality of Deliverable functionality attainable so that you can properly set management expectations for each.

DSA has assisted a number of clients to select PDM, CPC, PLM, KBE and SRM technologies best suited to meet specific objectives and requirements for measurable process improvement.

DSA continually evaluates PDM; CPC, PLM, KBE and SRM suppliers to create sophisticated and weighted analysis of strengths and weakness across the top suppliers. By combining our vendor evaluation database with a structured vendor evaluation/selection process, DSA can position our clients to make an optimized triangulation of:

• Time to Value
• Cost to Value
• Quality of Deliverable Functionality

Process Analysis & Design, Migration to Best Practice

Our process analysis & design experience spans almost two decades. Over these years we have made a number of significant breakthroughs in the science and now possess what is perhaps the most logical and sophisticated process analysis and design methods/tools available in the world today. We like to think of our method and tools as a Turbo-charged version of Six Sigma.

It is additionally important to note that among a number of breakthroughs we have achieved in the process science, we are perhaps the first organization to integrate proven and enhanced process analysis and design methods to proven software delivery lifecycle methods at the work product level Fully Threaded Lifecycle Method.

Improving any process requires the creation of an affinitive relationship between:

• Policy & Procedure
• Jobs & Organizational Structures
• Management & Measurement Technique
• Values & Beliefs
• Technology

It is important to remember that the migration to best practice comes from process reengineering - not from the implementation and integration technologies alone. Vendors provide capability to meet generally accepted practice. Migration to Best in Class requires that you reengineer your processes to meet specific targets inside your organizational context.

Project Execution Planning & Management

DSA Project Management staffs are highly experienced senior professionals capable of establishing effective plans and setting practical management tactics to enable:

• Scope Control
• Budget & Cost Control
• Schedule Control
• Quality Control
• Risk Assessment & Mitigation Planning
• Change Management
• Optimized Resource and Asset Utilization
• Communication Management

Typical project plan and control components include:

• Technical Plan – Strategy, Tools & Methods
• Resource Plan - Fully resource loaded and costed schedule
• Validation Plan – measuring quality of execution method and delivered functionality
• Taxonomy Based Risk Assessment & Mitigation Planning

Infrastructure Design

Physical system and network design services to create a physical architecture for PDM, CPC, PLM, and SRM implementations while accounting for Current State compatibility and the evolutionary trends in physical infrastructure.

Detailed Process/Application Design

Our primary market is the provision of senior level Solution Architects, Process Analysts and Program Management staffs who have broad industry experience and are familiar with a variety of PDM, CPC, PLM, KBE and SRM application & process environments.

These senior staffs are equipped with the best methods and tools available in our industry today and can provide a high value-added consultive capability to support your process / technology initiatives.

Our application of a Fully Threaded Lifecycle Method and senior staffs will enable your team to:

• Increase Project Performance
• Reduce Project Complexity
• Better manage Risk and Tradeoff Analysis
• Create a tighter relationship between Process Design and Application Design
• Reduce Time to Value
• Reduce Cost to Value
• Increase the Quality of Deliverable Functionality

Implementation Assistance

DSA can assist to configure, extend, integrate and customize and validate a variety of PDM, CPC, CAD, CAE and KBE tools to met specific design requirements. Additionally, we have made a fundamental change in our design method to enable the creation of a build instruction as opposed to a functional specification to better enable our management of offshore build where developer rates are currently one-third U.S. rates.

Training

DSA can assist our clients to create training material to teach staffs to execute the new process design not just to use the new technology. Our training method is an integral part of our Fully Threaded Lifecycle Method. As such, we are able to provide training that is more relative to the individual user groups impacted by the new process and application capability.

We are able to do this as we have integrated the process design to the training materials by making the process model the baseline document and integrating the training instructions/exercises to the various process models which describe the newly designed process and application of new technology

Far too often, we see training staffs deliver training materials/classes that only train the user community how to use the new technology. The result of any process / technology initiative should be the creation of a highly optimized and repeatable process design. That being the case, the user community should be given training that assures they are capable of executing the whole process design in a repeatable way. This will assure consistent execution of process, will better enable ongoing process measurements, make it easier to manage the new process environment and will better enable continuous improvement.

When creating our unique training method as part of our Fully Threaded Lifecycle Method, we took our cue from this useful premise put forth a number of years ago by the Software Engineering Institute at CMU;

If you can’t define it, you can’t repeat it.
If you can’t repeat it, you can’t measure it.
If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it – and that’s bad!

Finally, our process based training method enables the project team to integrate the process design and training exercises in a single normalized view that can be accessed on-line to provide instant access by any user regarding the execution of process and technology.

Go to the Training Course Outlines to get more information on DSA Standard training classes.

Standards Compliance

DSA can assist our clients and PDM vendors to create system functionality that will enable adherence to quality standards including:

ISO900
QS900
APQP
ISO 10303 for exchange of Product Model Data

Change Management

Assistance to plan for inclusion of the Stakeholder community in the analysis, design, verification and use of the PDM system including group or one on one sessions to inform staffs regarding their use and role in the Future State automated environment.