Crowdsourcing is the contemporary trend in globalization of product development. It involves outsourcing the task to undefined large group of people or community through an open call unlike which were traditionally performed by an employee or contractor. Collective intelligence that emerges from collaboration and competition of individuals helps to achieve effective decision making. Conventionally Product Lifecycle Management tools are used for collaboration among the individuals of same organization, suppliers, manufacturers, customers, strategic partners. PLM is normally used as single source of truth for patented information hence need to be very secure. The PLM and Social Media collaboration can be done by a secured crowdcasting methodology, where care needs to be taken for protecting the intellectual property of the host organization.

1. Product Development using Social Media
and PLM
September2011

2. Product Development using Social Media and PLM | September2011
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Abstract ............................................................................................. 3
Abbreviations .................................................................................... 4
Market trend/ Challenges .................................................................. 5
Social Media Framework for PLM ..................................................... 6
A Platform for Idea Generation ......................................................... 6
Product Vigilance .............................................................................. 7
Virtual Volunteer ................................................................................ 8
Social CRM to PLM Inputs ................................................................ 8
Data Mining ....................................................................................... 9
Application of Smart Devices integration in Social Media for PLM . 10
Conclusion....................................................................................... 11
Reference ........................................................................................ 12
Author Info ....................................................................................... 12
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3. Product Development using Social Media and PLM | September2011
Abstract
Crowdsourcing is the contemporary trend in globalization of
product development. It involves outsourcing the task to undefined
large group of people or community through an open call unlike
which were traditionally performed by an employee or contractor.
Collective intelligence that emerges from collaboration and
competition of individuals helps to achieve effective decision
making.
Conventionally Product Lifecycle Management tools are used for
collaboration among the individuals of same organization,
suppliers, manufacturers, customers, strategic partners. PLM is
normally used as single source of truth for patented information
hence need to be very secure. The PLM and Social Media
collaboration can be done by a secured crowdcasting
methodology, where care needs to be taken for protecting the
intellectual property of the host organization.
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3

4. Product Development using Social Media and PLM | September2011
Abbreviations
Sl. No. Acronyms Full form
1 PLM Product Lifecycle Management
2 SME Subject Matter Expert
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4

5. Product Development using Social Media and PLM | September2011
Market trend/ Challenges
Currrent trend in today’s world is towards integrating the social
network with smart devices. With the evolution and the ease of
features in smart devices, there may not much difference between
computer and smart devices in near future. Looking at this trend
many consumer electronic companies are looking for a framework
to integrate social networking with smart devices. “Unified
Communication & Collaboration” (UC&C) by NEC and “Social Media
Listening Command Center” by DELL are a step towards efficient
usage of smart devices. The portability offered by smart devices and
social collaboration can be used in PLM for crowdsourcing the ideas,
product vigilance, proactive product recall, social CRM integration
and a unstructured data repository to gather structured product
feedback/ requirements from a larger audience for a better product
development.
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6. Product Development using Social Media and PLM | September2011
Social Media Framework for PLM
Social media consists of various platforms. Out of all the platforms
following listed platforms can be useful to provide input for a PLM:
Collaborative Authoring/ Content Development – Helps to build
a central knowledge repository. Dilution of knowledge
concentration due to various factors can be avoided. Subject
Matter Expert can review and certify the content, which is a step
closer towards developing a mature product related literature for
product lifecycle management software.
Question & Answer Portals – Helps to provide wider visibility to
questions, issues related to a product to a mass community. The
collective group intelligence helps to achieve faster and efficient
results and answers. The less experienced audience can
experience from the knowledge of the experts.
Communication Platform – Communication platforms like
LinkedIn help to connect the professionals and communicate in
relevant common product business, product technology specific
groups. The constructive discussions can trigger new ideas, report
existing issues. The aggregated experience of group can help to
solve the problems, suggest new ideas in an efficient manner.
A Platform for Idea Generation
Marketing Collateral/ Artwork Idea Development
There are various online platforms which help for collaborative
graphic idea development. These platforms allow hosting a contest
for developing graphical content, ideas which can result into
marketing collateral or a successfully approved artwork which can
be used by the product development company. Due to high number
of product lines in consumer industries, there is an ever increasing
need to develop extremely creative and innovative artwork and
collateral literature development. The online platform like hosting a
contest allows an organization to have multiple options to select
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7. Product Development using Social Media and PLM | September2011
from in less available cost. This also allows manufacturer to reduce
the recurring cost to a better demand based service model.
e.g. http://www.99designs.com
http://www.brainrack.com/
Packaging Design Development
There is a lesser risk to intellectual property of packaging design
than actual product design. The packaging CAD work can be
divided into various tasks. The mass packaging, container designing
ideas can be sprung out from social media collaboration. The
common platform also helps to report and gather various packaging
related issue like:
 Protection against external influences that can alter the
properties of product
 Protection against biological contamination
 Protection against physical damage
 Tamper proofing, Child proofing, Anti counterfeiting
Product Vigilance
Pharmacovigilance
Pharmacovigilance (abbreviated PV or PhV) is the pharmacological
science relating to the detection, assessment, understanding and
prevention of adverse effects, particularly long term and short term
side effects of medicines.
It is gaining importance due to increase in stories of drug recalls and
negative marketing techniques used by competing organization.
Even if clinical trial involves several thousand of patients, there are
certain less known side effects on other part body, allergic
conditions, and negative interaction with another medicine
combined.
Spontaneous Reporting is core data generating system for
Pharmacovigilance. Social Media has powerful web-based and
mobile communication technology. Very mature tools for
collaborative content development (wiki), multimedia content
communities, Review and opinion polls etc.
Such useful information is present in social media in unstructured
format. The same can be extracted by subject matter expert and
converted as structured information. The structured information can
be given as input for PLM system. In many parts of the world the
spontaneous reporting is submitted voluntarily in electronic format
using predetermined format by ICH. Most of the countries it is
mandatory for a physician to submit the spontaneous reports of
Pharmacovigilance. When such reports have been ported using
power of social media, we are able to reach to mass audience,
providing them friendly UI. Then same can provided to SME for data
mining and which in turn becomes as an input for a PLM system.
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8. Product Development using Social Media and PLM | September2011
Input for Proactive Product Recall
Product recall is a decision to request back batch of entire product
due to discovery of safety issues, product defect to limit liability for
corporate negligence, avoid costly legal penalties, and avoid
damage to publicity, brand name, and reduced trust in
manufacturer. This involves fixing the problem and delivering the
safe, defect free product back to consumer. Some countries have
very strong consumer protection laws which involves heavy penalty
on manufacturer due to high risk introduced and failure to recall
voluntarily. The social media collaborative platform helps to connect
all the end users, sellers, resellers, service providers, distributors.
This can help to identify the safety issue or the product defect in
early stage. The Manufacturer can invoke voluntary product recall
and avoid legal penalties which would have been caused by late
detection of the product defect.
Virtual Volunteer
Crowds need a leader to get a direction and achieve a common
goal. Online micro-volunteering enables undertaking micro-tasks.
People engaged in virtual volunteering undertake a variety of
activities from locations remote to the organization or people they
are assisting, via a computer or other Internet-connected device,
such as:
 Researching subject
 Designing Graphics
 Providing Legal, business and domain expertise
 Online tutoring and mentoring
 Answering questions
 Moderator for Online discussion forum
 Manage other online volunteers
Volunteers in field of locomotive industry can help to give better
input by opting to go for telematics Data Logger, which can provide
large amount of data that can be sampled and analyzed to provide
input to PLM.
Social CRM to PLM Inputs
Social CRM allows capturing voice of customer and gathering
product features. There are certain problems introduced in certain
products due to the after sales service/ replacements. The
connection of social CRM with PLM helps to eliminate these issues
at design/manufacturing level. This also helps to identify various
types of scenarios the product is used. The product usage can be
classified into three categories.
 Normal Use – The product used in the scenarios it is
designed to be operating. All the operating conditions,
parameters are in specified threshold limits. The product is
normally designed to not fail in “normal use” kind of use.
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9. Product Development using Social Media and PLM | September2011
e.g. Using a vehicle in city condition, using medicine in
proper dosage
 Abnormal Use - Abnormal use involves operating the
product little above the threshold conditions they are
designed for. The product should not normally fail is such
“Abnormal Use” kind of use.
e.g. Using vehicle for 10% more weight than its threshold,
using washing machine for making lassi/ buttermilk.
 Abnormal Abuse – Abnormal abuse involves extreme
scenario in which product is operated. The product is bound
to fail in such scenario.
In case of automotive, aerospace and shipping products it is
possible to capture the usage data by application of advanced
telematics.
Data Mining
Data mining is required to gather information from the data in social
media. Convert that information into a structured format. The
processed structured information can be used as input for new
product idea, issue, and defects.
 Subject Matter Expert
Subject matter expert is a person with domain knowledge of a
specific field. The human expertise can be utilized to gather the
unstructured information in social media and can be provided to
PLM system. SME are required to sign off any kind of content
obtained using social media to validate the authenticity of the
information. The role of SME is very important in bridging the gap
between social media and PLM system.
 Software Tools
Ubiquitous Human Computing is the phenomenon of dis-
aggregating a task into component pieces and then parcelling them
out around the world. The Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is a
crowdsourcing Internet marketplace that enables computer
programmers (known as Requesters) to co-ordinate the use of
human intelligence to perform tasks which computers are unable to
do. This even uses micropayments as a reward mechanism for the
requestors.
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10. Product Development using Social Media and PLM | September2011
Application of Smart Devices integration in Social
Media for PLM
NEC has introduced UC&C architecture to integrate social media
with smart devices.The architecture creates common interface
across all smart devices supporting Android, iOS, Windows 7 and
blackberry. PLM collaboration not necessariliy always involves
heavy CAD interactions. Many of the workflow approvals can be
pushed on as a client component on a smar device. This will help
the PLM platform to reach through smart devices around the clock
reducing dependency on computers. It serves as a important feature
for people always on move to approve or review certain workflow
activities in PLM.
The Social Media Listen Command Center by Dell, allows to monitor
relevant topics in social media, to gather voice of customer. It even
helps to monitor information in various language. It can be efficiently
used for product vigilance and monitoring.
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11. Product Development using Social Media and PLM | September2011
Conclusion
There are certain microtasks like collaborative authoring, virtual
volunteering and Question & Answer portal, which does not have
any danger of exposing patent data. PLM can be effectively used for
Crowdsourcing these microtasks.Overall PLM and Social Media
conglomerate works very efficiently in consumer driven industries
like automotive, aerospace, pharmaceuticals, consumer product
goods as a platform of idea generation, product vigilance and social
CRM. This also gives PLM an advantage of exploiting very robust
smart device integration with Social Media.
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12. Product Development using Social Media and PLM | September2011
Reference
Crowdsourcing
http://what-is-crowdsourcing.com/
http://www.cimdata.com/newsletter/2011/4/05/04.05.01.htm
Crowdcasting
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowdcasting
NEC’s UC&C
http://www.nec.com.au/media/docs/nec-ucc-release-d7a6373f-
2622-49b9-9bb7-a991cfa2dff6-0.pdf
DELL’s Social Media Listening Command Center
http://en.community.dell.com/dell-
blogs/Direct2Dell/b/direct2dell/archive/2010/12/08/dell-s-next-step-
the-social-media-listening-command-center.aspx
Author Info
Kapil Jadhav is Technical Manager in PLM
practice for HCL. With post graduation in
Software Engineering, Graduation in Computer
Engineering from National Institute of
Technology, Surat (India), he has around 9
years of experience in delivering IT solutions &
consulting to clients in discrete Manufacturing
Industrial Equipments, Automotive, Aviation,
and Pharmaceuticals. He has wide range of
experience in PLM implementation using Enovia
Matrixone, Oracle Agile PLM and Aras
Innovator with reputed customers like GE
Energy, GE Aviation, Cummins Engine
Business Unit. Currently he is focusing on
Green Design Workbench & other PLM
initiatives.
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