Episode 2: From Projects to Products: Unveiling FLSmidth's Industrial Equipment PLM Transformation

In this episode we talk with Head of Solution Architecture, Johan Mikkelä, about his experience working in PLM. We discuss FLSmidth's Industrial Equipment PLM Transformation and the impact it made. 

Do you have any questions, topic suggestions, or know a PLM person who would be a great fit for the podcast? Let us know by visitng SharePLM.com/podcast. 

Transcript

[00:00:02.050] - Claire

Welcome to the Share PLM podcast, the show that explores the vast universe of product lifecycle management.

[00:00:09.250] - Helena

Hello everybody. Welcome to share, PLM's, podcast. My name is Helena Gutierrez and we are here today with Johan Mikkelä from FLSmidth. I know Johan from the past. We have been working together on some projects and he has a very long history in heavy equipment industry, also a long history in the PLM domain. So we are very excited to have you here today. Johan, welcome.

[00:00:35.370] - Johan

Thanks Helena. And thanks for the opportunity to join. Maybe I should just give a quick introduction of myself to the listeners. So my name is Johan Mikkelä, it's a Finnish family name, but I live in Sweden and work for Danish company. I've been working with mining equipment suppliers for the last 25 years and I've had the opportunity to dive into the engineering product management field for the last 20 years.

[00:01:07.670] - Helena

You have such a long, impressive background. It's very interesting to have you here and discuss about your experience and it's.

[00:01:15.920] - Jos

Great to see you and hear you, Johan. I also have a history with FL Smith. This is Jos Voskuil, I'm a PLM coach and working together with Helena on this podcast. I'm curious, we talk about PLM at FLSmidth. Why do you think FLSmidth needs PLM? What are the business reasons for PLM?

[00:01:37.930] - Johan

We are long, long history of engineering company. We've been engineering equipment for 140 years and this is really the heart of the company, the engineering itself. But we're becoming more and more product focused and I think it's this will to become more product focused that also drives the need to have system support for it.

[00:02:04.310] - Helena

Was that flow of focus the reason why Fsmith embarked into a PLM journey?

[00:02:10.890] - Johan

It was one of them. Our PLM journey began long before I started with FLS, actually somewhere in 2010 or something. And there the driver was really to try to harmonize the company, working more similar and having global processes. And in conjunction with that, both PLM and ERP was introduced as a way of driving it.

[00:02:39.240] - Jos

So you and I discover we always talk about capabilities, but in the end the decisions are made on business. So what did the management expect from the PLM implementation? Was it quality, speed?

[00:02:53.830] - Johan

At that time? I think it was very high focus on quality and also being aware of the status so that we were delivering to our customers on time and in full. That was one of the key drivers to get both control and visibility to risks of not doing it.

[00:03:14.900] - Jos

And how did you follow up on that desire for PLM? You were not at the beginning of the PLM, but how did you get into this environment of working with PLM as a person? How did you get familiar with it?

[00:03:28.870] - Johan

Oh, that's a very long history. This was when I was working with product development and the first versions of inventor were just started to be used. And I got involved in this because we needed to wait to find the models and parts that we had to design. So actually my first deb into it was writing a manual of how to store and how to name CAD files to make them reusable. So that's where I started from.

[00:04:02.130] - Helena

In what company was that, Johan? Where were you at the time?

[00:04:06.350] - Johan

At that time, it was a Swedish company called Svedala Industry, which was later bought by a Finnish company called Metso.

[00:04:15.410] - Jos

And that was very much an engineering focus?

[00:04:18.190] - Johan

Very much product management, engineering focus. I think I had a very good opportunity at that time because Svedala Industry at that time were very mature when it came to thinking about product and product management. And that was really the main reason for also not thinking about the CAD just from an engineering perspective, but also to use it in marketing and those areas.

[00:04:44.870] - Jos

Right, so you're mentioning also marketing. I think also the big challenge of PLM is always to move from engineering to the rest of the organization. How did it happen in your cases?

[00:04:55.710] - Johan

So if you look at where I'm now in FLS, this is still a challenge for us. We are very much talking about the engineering community when we talk about PLM and struggling to extend it further in the organization, which is normally when you get also the big benefits. If I look at earlier attempts, I think there it's a little bit mixed experience sometimes when thought about it as product management from the beginning and not driven from an engineering perspective, there has been better success in extending it. As I said, I had the experience of doing this with marketing, driving the move of engineering into 3D, which also meant that there was a clear interest and drive from that side.

[00:05:50.830] - Helena

Why do you think, Johan, that many companies start PLM from the engineering angle? Why do you think it's like that?

[00:05:59.170] - Johan

Yeah, that's normally where you have the initial challenges and also the knowledge. I think in terms of change management and document management, you don't have that embedded in other functionalities as deeply as within engineering. And I would assume that it's very different from company to company as well.

[00:06:21.320] - Jos

Exactly. I think one of the lessons I always learned was that people say it's engineering that creates the data, so that's where we have to start at creation.

[00:06:30.710] - Johan

Yeah. And I think that's been definitely true here in Flsmid. It's also been true of some of my past experience. But where I see where we have been able to rip the biggest benefits of PLM, that's when actually it's more driven from a product management perspective. And engineering is kind of a second step. So first you look at which products you want to have, what markets you want to approach, and from there after that, you start doing your engineering. So I think that's also where I've seen the biggest gain when moving into PDM / PLM space.

[00:07:09.560] - Helena

Coming from the heavy equipment industry, Johan, do you think the biggest benefit come from that product domain or do you see service being the more powerful driver for a PLM implementation?

[00:07:31.410] - Johan

So I started off on the aftermarket side when I worked in federal industry and I think that has helped to see me that there is really the long term benefits is coming. There being able to identify a product on the field and which spares and where parts are suitable for that, and being able to give a customer a quick response on his request.

[00:07:58.990] - Helena

Yeah, I agree with you, Johan. Usually when for this type of industry, looking at the lifecycle component, it's very powerful looking at the end. So you are right, it starts with the creators in engineering, but I think it also helps to look at the end and what are you going to get at the end of the life cycle?

[00:08:19.910] - Jos

Yes, maybe, Johan, you can elaborate on that on the different type of implementations. I always look in companies who is leading the implementation? At which level is it on the level of head of engineering? Is it technical management or even on sea level? Can you give some examples from your experience on that?

[00:08:40.070] - Johan

I think it has to be on sea level. We often talk about PLM being a journey and it is. You're never finished and you need a really strong backing because you will face resistance, you will face backfires in the project and if you don't have that sanction, that's when your implementation will normally halt.

[00:09:02.830] - Jos

You were saying you have to have it on sea level. Are you able to talk PLM on C-level in your companies?

[00:09:10.240] - Johan

Not the system as such, but the outcome you can always discuss. So, for example, aftermarket and the ability to respond quickly to a customer call and what's needed for it. So I think you really need to talk about the use cases that you can improve by implementing PLM than talking about PLM. It's just one of the means achieving it.

[00:09:38.310] - Jos

Exactly. Are you saying to your C-level we talk about digital twins or are we talking about PLM?

[00:09:46.570] - Johan

I think the digital twin discussion is coming more and more as we talk about IoT. So connecting the product and the value from the sensors on the product to a virtual model, it is something that we're all talking about right now. I think we're all struggling a little bit on how do we make it commercial, how do we earn money on it. Exactly.

[00:10:16.470] - Jos

Helena, you had a question?

[00:10:18.790] - Helena

No, I was reflecting on Johan's response and I think it's very wise advice to how do you frame the message so that you get the buy in from the management, which is at the end, the fuel of a PLM implementation. And it's not always simple. So I was listening to how you put it in these kind of outputs or use cases. Can you give us one example of that?

[00:10:45.230] - Johan

One of my favorites, and I mentioned it already here, that's kind of your response rate to customer in terms of can you respond within 4 hours to a customer versus doing it in four days? You cant clearly see a difference between the win rate of those proposals. So instead of saying if we should really implement the PLM system, the question should really be do we want to improve the win rate of our proposals? Is that an important thing to do for us? And then as a way of achieving it, yes. We need to have good data management and a good view to our installed base so we can achieve it.

[00:11:30.220] - Helena

Yeah, I think that's a great example. It's a very concrete and a very clear outcome that I think management will buy and you can tie it to PLM. One question we discuss leadership. How have you, as a person evolved since you got into PLM?

[00:11:55.670] - Johan

I've learned a lot. I think I've always been managing multinational teams. So today I have a team which is based in Germany, India, Denmark, US. So it's many different cultures to work with. But what I found with everybody is that being transparent is a key for good and for bad. But really to be honest and tell what you can answer and what you cannot answer and what you know and also what you don't know, I think that's been a really key to be able to work with the team and building trust in the team.

[00:12:47.910] - Jos

So in the paradigm of people, processes and tools, we talk a lot about the people and I see you also have the challenge of a lot of cultures. I think that's something I also discovered in my career that culture is so important. What kind of leader are you in the team? How would you describe yourself, your role in a PLM engagement?

[00:13:10.500] - Johan

I am very visible, I would say, in the start of initiatives. I very much like the forming of the project and the setup. I also very much like to work with the team in developing the business case and linking it to the business. Then I kind of lose, unfortunately, interest when it comes to too much details. But I guess becoming a little bit of age. I've also learned that to trust that there's others that do that much better than me.

[00:13:52.970] - Jos

You're good in delegating. You trust the people doing the right way.

[00:13:59.640] - Johan

I still wish I can get even better on it, but I've learned and come a bit on the way of doing it.

[00:14:07.600] - Helena

And having worked with Johan, I think that trust, collaboration and transparency are key values that you have in your team. Do you have any tips for leaders dealing with also multicultural teams? How do you foster collaboration in those kind of teams?

[00:14:26.750] - Johan

Transparency? We'll come back to that. So that's still there. Always also communicate. You can never over communicate, but I think also be very specific. I tend to when talking to a team, one of my favorite things is just to put one or two projects saying these are the top ones and then everything else. Yeah, let's do it if we can. But keep a focus on a few things, I would say.

[00:15:01.780] - Jos

Staying with the people, johan, you say you cannot over communicate and what about over educate or under educate? Do you have any opinion on that?

[00:15:10.500] - Johan

Yeah, I think unfortunately, in today's hectic business, it's easy to get under educated, it's easy to start skipping you going to seminars, it's easy skipping attending webinars because there's always a meeting you can do or something. I think that's a risk that I've fallen into and now trying to get out of as well and connecting like we do today, to share experience and learn from others.

[00:15:46.110] - Helena

In your experience, Johan, I wanted to ask that as a PLM professional, what is the best way to learn PLM? What would you recommend to someone who is 20 years ago in your career, newbie PLM professional? How can they learn PLM?

[00:16:06.550] - Johan

I would say get into PLM project to PLM implementation. The scale doesn't matter that much. I think it can be at one location. Yes, it is different if you roll out something globally, but it's just more of basically the same. So getting understanding of how people are receiving it, how people are getting word about change, experiencing that, I think, and you can do that on a very small scale. It can be department implementation, but you learn a lot from it. So I think that's on the hands on part and then myself, I've always enjoy reading. So, I've been following Jos´s blog and also beyond PLM and some of the industry blogs and I think that's also a good way of educating oneself in following those discussions.

[00:17:01.590] - Jos

So we are talking about the people and then the processes. What about processes? How much do you think PLM is unique? Or you have to define unique processes or how much can you use from existing knowledge that exists in the field? For example, about processes.

[00:17:16.080] - Johan

I think we're going more and more towards engineering process. Product management is becoming more and more commodity. We're not that unique anymore. So I see a similar drive also. We're kind of lagging a little bit behind, but on the ERP side, where we go more to predefined industry solutions out of the box flows more out of the box software as a service solutions, but we're not still there yet. But I see a clear move in maturity and business also in those discussions about going in that direction.

[00:18:05.530] - Jos

And what do you think about you have two statements. You have people say we should use everything out of the box and you have others that say, no, our company is unique, we have to build our processes in our implementation. On which side of the pan handle are you?

[00:18:23.250] - Johan

So I am on the side. I have kind of a motivate. You should standardize everything that doesn't matter. Then you can have discussions about what really matters. If you really should customize it or buy some additional software doing it or something. But I've had some really good experience with this, that if you standardize everything that doesn't matter, once you need to standardize the rest, it's much easier. It's much more fluent. With one of my previous employers, we put a lot of focus on the many years to standardize CAD platform drawing attributes, standard material libraries, all of this. We didn't have a PLM system as such. We have drawing vault, basically. But once we implemented a PLM system, it just was done because everybody was already talking the same language. All the tough discussions, if you call it how you put the suffix for drawing or not, those were had. You didn't have to do it. So once you kind of plug in the PLM side, it just worked and it was really nice to see.

[00:19:48.330] - Jos

Right, so here you mentioned the important part of aligning people on terminology and processes even before you start implementing a PLM system. That helps a lot. Often I think we see in the field the opposite. People have a tool and then they start to try to align people around the tool instead of being aligned before using the tool.

[00:20:09.300] - Johan

Yeah, no, I've had lots of good colleagues and lots of people in my team that's smarter than me. But we have had lots of discussions. Should you do the perfect thing or should you just be striving to move forward? And I'll always be of the opinion that if you can do a little bit at the time, all of a sudden you have a big leap forward. So instead of trying to do everything perfect from start.

[00:20:38.270] - Jos

The big challenge I see in this approach and Helena, you might not agree with me is that if you agree upfront before you start implementing it's like the Ford saying if you ask people what they want, they want faster horses. You might be consolidating too much the past instead of imagining the future. How do you deal with that, especially now with Digitalization? I think we are in a transition phase of working different.

[00:21:05.270] - Johan

Yeah, it's a very good question that I don't have a good answer for. I wish I had. I probably could earn a lot of money on it. It is really tricky. It is educating and educating and educating people. I think that's the only way to get people to understand it. And it takes time and you have to do it bit by bit. Exactly.

[00:21:37.700] - Jos

And that's one of the points. I often mention that people are complaining about the PLM vendors. But for me the PLM vendors are always the ones that project what could happen in ten years from now. So you could have your IDs. You don't have to implement it exactly, because nobody can do it like that. But at least you can build your what is the car of the future or the system of the future. How do you deal with that? How do you look at the PLM vendors?

[00:22:06.410] - Johan

No, but it's interesting. And they always, of course, have a vision and an optimal way of doing things which might be very far from your own reality. So I see their vision more as a help of building a company vision. And then you need I think sometimes I'm struggling with when you introduce your vendors directly to business, everybody thinks you can go to the Ferrari straight away, and then you find out also that the Ferrari is not always working that good, because not everything in it was ready.

[00:22:49.350] - Jos

The wheel is missing or-

[00:22:50.910] - Johan

Yeah, exactly. So sometimes it's hard to set those right expectations towards business. I think it's very good to have business involved directly with the vendors, and for the vendors to have that channel into your company as well. But you need to manage the expectations and that relationship quite carefully.

[00:23:12.350] - Jos

And then usually in a PLM implementation in the triangle, you also have implementation partners. What are you looking for into your implementation partners? Which skills should they bring?

[00:23:24.530] - Johan

Very much on structure, I think, for a program or project, I think that's maybe where you sometimes struggle in your own company, you have a lot of good and very knowledgeable experts on CAD, on configuring the system, or building enhancement on the system. But to get all of this to play together, that's sometimes missing, because that's not something you do every day. So I think building structure and organization very much, and then I don't see that much on expertise as such. My experience from the companies I've been in is quite often you have that internally. You don't need to go looking for it.

[00:24:19.650] - Jos

Exactly. I mean, also my favorite is that you build your knowledge internally in your company. However, sometimes the people that have the most interest and are the most knowledgeable are also the most busy people.

[00:24:32.390] - Johan

Yeah. No, you can of course use externals to backfill kind of your existing ones and free them up. But quite often there's such an experts in their field, so you can't really release them either. It's going to hurt somewhere.

[00:24:53.790] - Helena

What tips do you have there, Johan, to engage people and get them to own the PLM?

[00:25:03.330] - Johan

It's the same, I think, coming back to transparency, so that people understand and have been participating also, I think inclusion as well in the discussions. Why have you selected something? Why did you choose setting something up as it is? It's a bit of a struggle because people are changing, of course, and we see that with our current environment, which was set up way back, and a lot of those peoples are not there. Some of the decisions taken is really questioned today because it's different people that's there. So the other thing I can look back and see that I wish was more documented that is, why did we take certain decisions? Not really actually exactly how the system is configured, that you can always find out. But why was it configured like that some years back? Because I think that's sometimes being questioned today and many times for good reasons, but sometimes for really good reasons, we also find out why a decision was taken.

[00:26:10.630] - Helena

Documenting the reasons for the why. And when you mentioned that coming back to the why and to the basic questions, is it more a one side communication or getting people to understand the why, what's in it for them? Or do you really think that they need to be part of finding out the why?

[00:26:31.310] - Johan

I think it's a big advantage for them finding out. It also being a part on these discussions, back and forwards and trials and finding out that something didn't work that everybody thought was a good idea, which might kind of lower your ambition level a little bit. Because sometimes when you ask people, they're always asking for being up here or on a very high level, but then when reality hits them, they don't have time to go there. And then you built in a bunch of kind of overhead in your process or in your attributes that you never really can benefit from.

[00:27:14.380] - Jos

Exactly. What I also learned is that you really have to focus on the 80% and when you talk with experts, they always talk about the 100% and you have to be clear when you talk with them, are they asking those special things because they are expert or is it also valid for everyone? I think that's one of the lessons learned I had in the beginning. I did everything what the experts in the company did and we tuned the system for that, but it was too complicated for the rest. That was one of my lessons learned. And you want what was your most embarrassing or most important lesson learned in your PLM career so far? Where would you say here? I completely saw something different than I expected.

[00:27:58.250] - Johan

 I think it's coming back to something similar that you mentioned that sometimes you think you're smarter than too many other people and you can see a way of doing things, but it doesn't help if you're smart, if you cannot convey that to somebody else. So it can be really frustrating seeing that. But I see this in front of me, we just do like this and then you have a really good solution for your business. But if you can't convey it, it doesn't matter really. So this with communication and being able to exemplify and tell it in the use of stakeholders language, that's really something I wish I would still become a lot better on. But also that I started to really focus on a lot earlier.

[00:28:52.090] - Jos

Yeah, that was also one of my lessons learned in my career. I started as a teacher in physics and when you're a teacher, indeed, you know everything, especially your audience is there to learn from you. And in the beginning I had the same behavior when I start implementing PLM and there like you, I realized you have to listen to the others. It's really translating the messages to your understanding. And this brings me to storytelling. How important is storytelling for PLM in your environment?

[00:29:22.550] - Johan

I think it's critical to be able to tell what you can do with it instead of what it is. We are engineering company at core but still I think the attention span when you start talking PLM and systems with C-level is very short. But if you can talk about how you can increase your win rate on your proposals or how you can reduce your percentage of scrap when you're manufacturing something, it's a different discussion.

[00:30:03.730] - Helena

I agree. And do you have any tips there for companies who are starting? How can they think about those messages that get the value from the management?

[00:30:15.190] - Johan

I think we look at it from the end point instead of from the start point. Really look at what is it you want to have changed when you're done, what will work differently and try to describe that reality and then work your way back and saying what are the changes I have to be doing to reach that?

[00:30:40.990] - Helena

That's a very good tip and I think it's very useful.

[00:30:44.910] - Johan

Because I think that's also a way you can cut things more in pieces that you can do parts of it exactly.

[00:30:51.600] - Jos

And you mentioned already PLM is a journey, so you can have a high ambition but make it into reachable steps. I think it's also very important so that you can celebrate continuously some success instead of being frustrated that you're not still yet at the top of the market.

[00:31:10.490] - Johan

No, nothing. You will never have like a perfect project or perfect program. But one needs to ensure that you make enough progress and that can sometimes be good enough.

[00:31:21.160] - Jos

Unfortunately for people, the world is changing so we have to adapt continuously. And talking about change, how does sustainability come into the picture? Is it related to PLM? Is it still on the corporate level? Like in many companies?

[00:31:37.230] - Johan

It's still very much on the corporate level. I personally see huge potential for PLM and around the whole material management and simulation area to really take a step forward in it. But I think right now, from a company we are not yet there, the discussion is starting. I guess there's an effort also to get this and right now I don't think we're really prepared yet to put in that effort. But it's getting closer.

[00:32:07.850] - Jos

Exactly. I think that's what you hear everywhere on the field it's a matter of education and like in PLM, connecting people on the floor on the exact level to implement a strategy and to build it. And that takes time.

[00:32:23.710] - Johan

Yeah. And I also see we see now maturity and regulations and so on there. So the requirement is coming more and more both globally and especially on a European level. And I think that will drive and kind of force us over the edge in the end. It's something that we have to do to be able to do business. It's just a health factor.

[00:32:45.630] - Jos

I think with PLM you have a secret weapon once the sustainability strategy has to be implemented. You say we have the source of the product and the design data and we can control it. We know what we are doing. So you have your secret weapon.

[00:33:00.710] - Johan

Yeah. That would be really nice to be able to use all the data we have collected now over the last years.

[00:33:08.750] - Helena

Apart from the sustainability, what other trends do you see in PLM coming in the next years?

[00:33:16.830] - Johan

If I look at the industry where I am and with the colleagues and former colleagues I talk with, I think there's a different acceptance nowadays in the industry to move more to standardized and out of the box processes. There's a general tiredness of complex upgrades, costly upgrades, a lot of disturbance in business with upgrades. So I think we will start seeing these software as a service offerings creeping up to mid size companies from the small ones which are already using it. Then the other thing I would like to see is this whole talk about kind of I don't know what you say, data freedom, but today it's always a big thing moving from different systems, converting or migrating data. It's the main challenge of changing to something better. Today it's actually getting the data with you that you have invested a lot in. So I hope and see also some encouraging initiatives looking at standardization of data exchange and data formats. So I think that's rather trend that I would like to see come through.

[00:34:35.590] - Jos

Right. I think that's a wishful thinking. We hear a lot. I mean standards people say the standards are too slow or too complicated and therefore let's not do it. Yeah, but from your way. Yeah, that's the way. Also the standards don't get developed because if we don't have enough companies pushing for them, they will never become mature.

[00:34:55.310] - Helena

Yeah, we are coming to the end, but maybe a couple of last questions. One question I personally have for you is what advice do you give to companies who are just starting the journey? What should they focus on?

[00:35:11.090] - Johan

Really cutting it small pieces and making a lot of small successes. It doesn't have to be the stories that ends up on your Intranet or on your LinkedIn. There's a lot of small victories to be had and each one of those will really matter in the end. So I think that's probably the most important.

[00:35:36.490] - Helena

And do you connect those small victories or small wins to the big picture or do you see it as more an organic initiative?

[00:35:44.790] - Johan

No, I think that's important that you have and keep alive a vision of where you want to end up. Otherwise it's very easy to get derailed. So you don't have to have your maybe two year plan or that, but if you can have a three to five year vision and then you execute in very small steps towards that. I've been, unfortunately, in three big programs to investigate and develop a proposal for global rollouts of PLM systems. And they have all been very good and interesting and motivating to do, but they've all fallen on once you're done with all the program planning and estimation and calculations, the situation has changed so much so people can take decision on it.

[00:36:43.330] - Helena

How do you cope with that change?

[00:36:48.050] - Johan

It can be frustrating. And then I took the decision to leave one of those companies after two of his proposals had been turned down. But I've learned that instead to try to chop it up, make smaller, more easily understandable implementations or pieces of implementations.

[00:37:09.530] - Jos

The trend we see now is agile, minimum, valuable products, step by step, by learning. And I think that also fits very nice in the SaaS approach because then you can scale, you don't have to buy and implement a big system upfront, you can start and grow as you understand it.

[00:37:27.970] - Johan

Yeah, and you can start kind of from a basic level where you may be focusing on engineering or something specific that gives you a very quick value, but also is not too big change to chew for your users and stakeholders and then you can slowly build from that.

[00:37:44.860] - Helena

I think very good. I think we have time for last question. Jos, what would you like to ask Johan still?

[00:37:52.410] - Jos

I think first of all, I enjoyed talking with somebody from the field, Johan. I think we went through a lot of different topics around PLM and I discovered also mainly on the people and the process and the politics side. And I think that's the interesting question. How important is then technology for you? Because we have discussed the people side, there is also the technology side. How important is the technology for you?

[00:38:17.940] - Johan

I'm very interested in it and follow it closely. But I think when we talk about PLM and for the success of PLM, I think technology is not that important. Yes, it can fail on it, but I haven't seen it happen. But I can imagine it can happen if you really don't do your due diligence before. But otherwise, I think it's much more about your people you have, your skills, the support you have from the top management and where starting from in terms of what we talked about trying to fix your CAD templates fix? Your basic change management processes. If you have all of those things in place, I think matters a lot more than if it's a Siemens Tassel or PTC or something else.

[00:39:10.670] - Helena

Thank you very much, Johan. I also really enjoy the conversation. I think you can see the 20 years plus experience. Very nice to have you here.

[00:39:19.400] - Johan

Thanks. It's been a fantastic journey, and it's really great fun to discuss it and also see that there's a lot to be done still within the PLM area in all types of levels and also new things coming in, like sustainability and digitalization, which puts an interesting twist to it.

[00:39:40.590] - Jos

A question for the audience of this podcast. What are the questions that we should have asked Johan? What did we forget? Or are there any other topics that you want us to discuss in future podcasts with Johan or others? Because we also want to learn from you. Thanks, Johan.

[00:39:55.600] - Johan

Thanks for having me.

[00:39:56.480] - Helena

Thank you very much.

[00:39:57.420] - Jos

See you next time.

[00:39:58.400] - Johan

Thank you.

[00:39:58.810] - Helena

Bye bye.

[00:40:00.610] - Claire

Thanks for listening to today's episode of the Share PLM podcast, where we bring PLM professionals together. Do you have any questions, topic suggestions, or know a PLM person who would be a great fit for the podcast? Let us know by visiting shareplm.com/podcast.