Episode 9: Building Smart from the Start: Implementing PLM in a Hardware Setup with Christoph Klimt

In this episode of the Share PLM Podcast, we are joined by Christoph Klimt. Christoph has completed his bachelor’s in engineering and master’s degree in mechanical engineering at OTH Regensburg, while writing his master's thesis at BMW Group. 

He then started his career at Bertrandt Group, where he gained extensive engineering knowledge and methodical experience as Concept and Project Engineer. As Virtual Vehicle Lead and later Head of CAD/ PDM at Sono Motors, he was responsible for the optimization of the complete vehicle package and strategy implementation for product data management. 

He brings great mobility experience and a special focus on the optimization of the innovative Smart Pedal Vehicles at Mocci.

Here are the key topics we unpacked:

⚉ Implementing PLM Early in a Startup Journey
⚉ Prioritizing User Experience from Day One
⚉ Electric Bikes for B2B and Addressing Unique Market Demands
⚉ Sustainable Design, Digital Transformation, and Out-of-the-Box Configuration
⚉ Scalable PLM for Startups
⚉ Real-Time Collaboration, Exploration, and Peer Learning
⚉ Cloud-First Approach for Security and Scale
⚉ Rethinking the Role of IT in PLM Adoption
⚉ Standard Processes Work for Startups—If Used Wisely and Planning for Scalability from Day One


CONNECT WITH CHRISTOPH:
⚉ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christophklimt/ 

CONNECT WITH SHARE PLM:
⚉ Website: https://shareplm.com/ 


Join us every month to listen to fascinating interviews, where we cover a wide array of topics, from actionable tips, to personal experiences, to strategies that you can implement into your PLM strategy.

If you have an interesting story to share and want to join the conversation, contact us and let's chat. We can't wait to hear from you!

Transcript

[00:00:12] BEATRIZ GONZALEZ:
Hello everyone and welcome to the Share PLM podcast, I am Beatriz González, CEO of Share PLM and joining me, as always is Jos Voskuil. Hello Jos, how are you and who is with us today?

[00:00:25] JOS VOSKUIL:
Hi Bea. Great to see you again. We had a good time in Spain together. Now I'm back in the good weather and today it's interesting, we're meeting with Christoph Klimt. And I saw Christoph the first time when we were in the Three DX User Conference in D Hague, where I was impressed by his calm approach on talking about PLM and a startup, which looks like a catch 22.

So I'm curious to learn more and discuss with him what he's doing. But first of all, welcome Christoph, it's great to have you here. And please introduce yourself and your passion in the business where you're working now.

[00:00:59] CHRISTOPH KLIMT:
Yeah, sure. Thanks for having me. I'm Christoph Klimt. I implemented 3D experience as a PLM system in two startup companies, which was Sono Motors and now Mocci.

[00:01:12] JOS VOSKUIL:
Okay, and you have a passion for PLM or a passion for design and startups?

[00:01:17] CHRISTOPH KLIMT:
Both, actually. I think you cannot do one without the other properly, in my my opinion.

[00:01:23] JOS VOSKUIL:
Okay, because sometimes ago I discussed with Helena on the challenge of PLM and startups. That PLM is more about organizing and structuring where in a startup you want to have this result out your first product. Can you tell us something about the PLM journey at Mocci? How did it start?

[00:01:41] CHRISTOPH KLIMT:
Yeah. I started around two years ago actually. We had the challenge, or actually it was quite an early, early phase where I started and the challenge was not that extreme yet, but I decided to implement as early as I could. Because I met the experience from the last company, if you wait too long that you will have a rising demand on processes and, and you don't really have the time to implement them.

[00:02:06] JOS VOSKUIL:
Yeah, it's great proactive thinking. But did the rest of the company also absorb like your proactive thinking, or did you have to push them?

[00:02:15] CHRISTOPH KLIMT:
Of course it's always a process also to include everyone. I think the main thing to start with is the user experience. If it's easy to use and as a good experience, people accept it much faster. So this is why I tried from the beginning creating a dashboard that's easy for everyone to use.

[00:02:33] BEATRIZ GONZALEZ:
What kind of users or people using the system. Are they engineers, is it more in the manufacturing?

[00:02:40] CHRISTOPH KLIMT:
We started with the engineers. We started with CAD of course, because for them the need ist the highest I would say. Butright now we also have a lot of people in organization and operations using it. We have logistics using it as well or around supply chain manufacturing using it.

We're using the manufacturing BOM as well, wiith the essence, so yeah, I would say the spectrum of users is quite diverse.

[00:03:08] BEATRIZ GONZALEZ:
Maybe for the listeners we explain what products are selling Mocci, maybe?

[00:03:15] CHRISTOPH KLIMT:
Yes. We are producing… A good idea. Yes. Yeah, we are producing electric bikes, with the specialty that it goes to B2B customers, mostly delivery services or fleet management. So the special thing about these bikes is they have a really low downtime and the part of the bike that breaks most of the time is the chain. And we replace the chain with a red bow wire system.

[00:03:42] JOS VOSKUIL:
And coming back to the startup, how did you get, I would say, investors motivated to work on this? Are you also into the business case of Mocci and the startup? How much storytelling do you need there?

[00:03:54] CHRISTOPH KLIMT:
From the business side, I mean, there's not many products like that on the market. Most bikes are more optimized for private customers. And the demand that those companies have our customers is quite different from that.

[00:04:09] JOS VOSKUIL:
But is it unique? I mean, if you have no competition, then it looks like there is no demand in the market.

[00:04:15] CHRISTOPH KLIMT:
No, no. The demand is quite high. And compared to that there's not many products that go specifically in this direction. That's what I mean. So from that point of view, the product is quite unique.

[00:04:26] JOS VOSKUIL:
As a member of the PLM Green Alliance, I love this kind of sustainability initiatives. And I also would like to dive deeper. How much are you also here in the concepts of the circle economy, new business models, repairable modular products? Are you dealing that we've also in your design and business?

[00:04:43] CHRISTOPH KLIMT:
Yeah, so actually for the bike company it is, reducing prototypes is also important, but not as big of a topic because we can very easily, we don't have any homologation or anything. So we can use prototype parts, for example, mount them on bike and drive it on the public road. But still we want to reduce iterations mostly.

We want to be more efficient in our work in terms of reducing development time. Because we don't have that amount of development time that you would have for example, for developing a car.

[00:05:17] JOS VOSKUIL:
When I hear reducing development time, I hear digital transformation model based and virtual worlds. Is that also the type you are designing your products on a modern virtual manner?

[00:05:28] CHRISTOPH KLIMT:
Yes. Exchange of data is quite a topic for us. We don't want the, or we cannot afford actually in the development times that we have the classical export of data, sending it to supplier, importing it again. We bring our suppliers directly to the PLM system. Andwe steer the whole transformation process with issue and change management directly.

[00:05:53] BEATRIZ GONZALEZ:
What is your implementation strategy are you configuring the system or you are selling customizations to support your process?

[00:06:01] CHRISTOPH KLIMT:
We don't do any customizations. We try to use this because we are a really small company and we're trying to use everything out of the box. And actually it works quite well for us. We don't have anything customized. We use the cloud solution and. And mostly the only out of the box functionality except for attributes maybe.

[00:06:21] BEATRIZ GONZALEZ:
So based on your experience in this kind of startup companies, smaller companies, what would be your advice for smaller companies that wanna implement PLM starting from the out of the box solution?

[00:06:33] CHRISTOPH KLIMT:
So my advice would be to start implementing as early as possible. Because it's really down scalable. If the process works in implementing a process when already the demand is quite detailed, is more difficult, it's better to start very, very early and then iterate the steps.

[00:06:52] BEATRIZ GONZALEZ:
Yeah this is more kind of Agile approach right? Agile mindset.

[00:06:57] CHRISTOPH KLIMT:
Yes, exactly, and it's really what I mentioned is it's down scalable. Mostly the user licenses are linear. So when you have more users, you pay in a linear way, you pay more. Of course there's some discounts, but overall the costs are quite low, only implementing a PLM for a few users.

[00:07:16] JOS VOSKUIL:
Can we zoom a little bit on those numbers? How many users do you have in, and what type of roles are they in general?

[00:07:22] CHRISTOPH KLIMT:
Yeah, we have 17, actually at the moment we have only six, seven, I would say, in real hardware design with Catia. And the rest is all the basic, PCS license actually. We only use the basic license except for manufacturing uses the MBOM tool as well.

[00:07:44] JOS VOSKUIL:
Yeah, so all the listeners don't know all the terminology from PCS, et cetera, but those are foundational licenses. I understand. With startups, often you also get experienced people in the company from other businesses, and they come with their mindset and their tools. Did you face that also, or do you have, say an open-minded group of people that say, no matter what you do, we will work with you in collaboration mode?

[00:08:10] CHRISTOPH KLIMT:
Of course that's always a topic as well. But I think if, the tools are good enough to cover all of the demand, then it's quite easy to convince people. What's the hard part is to convince people about the value of the collaborational work...

[00:08:25] JOS VOSKUIL:
Okay.

[00:08:25] CHRISTOPH KLIMT:
...and of the single source of truth.

[00:08:28] JOS VOSKUIL:
Okay. You mentioned if the tools are good enough. What do you mean by that? I mean, every vendor has the best tools.

[00:08:35] CHRISTOPH KLIMT:
Yeah, I mean in specifics of, but for example, Dassault is not as strong on manufacturing as Siemens is, and Siemens is not as strong of creating complex shapes, for example, as Dassault is. So there's always pros and cons about everything, but as small company, we cannot really afford to have a variety of tools.

[00:08:57] BEATRIZ GONZALEZ:
How was the process when you selected the system itself, do you have more than one option or?

[00:09:04] CHRISTOPH KLIMT:
Yeah. To be honest, in this case, I took the decision I had to be quite fast. So I took the decision for Dassault 3D experience. In the last company, I did take a bit more time. I started also at a very early phase, but it was already around a hundred CAD engineers working on the project.

So the demand for collaboration of work was higher. Actually it was one company doing everything first, and then it was split up to different companies, which was better from a specialization point of view. But from a collaboration point of view, the there was an instant demand basically for a more collaborative way of working together.

[00:09:45] JOS VOSKUIL:
I think, when you mentioned Siemens and Dassault they are, I would say, in foundation now, completely different in my terminology. Teamcenter is very much coordinated way of working where people synchronize with the backbone. That's where we say single source of truth and the experience is more, yeah, real time collaboration. And you work in the context of a virtual product or was that a learning curve for the people in your organization?

[00:10:11] CHRISTOPH KLIMT:
Yes. Still is. I think because when you are used to a certain way of working, the hardest part is to start from scratch. To really rethink if you do the work and put it maybe in, start, in another tool and the tool is exactly the same. It's not a big effort, but to start to stop the way of thinking.

I was the same. I worked for big companies before, automotive companies and I was working mostly with PowerPoint, actually. I think it was a huge part of my work.

[00:10:45] JOS VOSKUIL:
So really coordinated. Huh?

[00:10:46] CHRISTOPH KLIMT:
Yeah, exactly. And now we are completely working in model-based issues. We don't do any presentations. We work on the 3D directly.

[00:10:54] BEATRIZ GONZALEZ:
How is your training strategy?

[00:10:57] CHRISTOPH KLIMT:
My strategy is actually even changing from CATIA V5 to CATIA V6. We had the strategy of just giving access to everyone, giving everyone the licenses and letting people try out, and then iterating if there's any issues. Mostly in a way that we had a collaborative meeting and we discussed who had which issue and how can we resolve it together.

[00:11:19] JOS VOSKUIL:
Did you do everything yourself or did you have support from external partners? Both technically or organization wise?

[00:11:26] CHRISTOPH KLIMT:
I had support from our PLM partner.

[00:11:28] JOS VOSKUIL:
Mm-hmm.

[00:11:29] CHRISTOPH KLIMT:
Yeah, in a technical way. Organizational, since I had done it before, I knew what I was doing.

[00:12:40] BEATRIZ GONZALEZ:
Yeah, Mocci is very lucky to have you Christoph, that you can, you know the process, the product, you know the systems. So I suppose that the team trust you to embark on this transformation.

[00:12:52] JOS VOSKUIL:
And what is the next big challenge for you in Mocci, scaling up or diving deeper?

[00:12:59] CHRISTOPH KLIMT:
Yeah. Scaling up. We're working also on some new products. And for the PLM topic, I want to start simulation also with SIMULIA, but also efficient, modern way, I want to use MODSIM for example.

[00:13:15] JOS VOSKUIL:
Right. Yeah.

[00:13:17] CHRISTOPH KLIMT:
And yeah, trying to get the whole development because our development was done mostly externally. It will most probably happen again, but I want to have all the results on the platform so we can access them better in the future.

[00:13:33] JOS VOSKUIL:
And if you work internally, model-based, how are you able to push your suppliers also to work with you in the model-based approach? Or are they still in the 2D drawing mode?

[00:13:43] CHRISTOPH KLIMT:
It depends. We have drawings for every part still. I'm trying to get rid of them, of course. But for metal parts suppliers, especially in Europe, there's drawing is always necessary.

For plastic parts, it would be also fine with 3D annotations if you have every supplier on the platform. Yeah. For purchase parts, we don't, we don't use any drawings.

[00:14:09] JOS VOSKUIL:
But you're, yeah, you're not on the scale of an OEM that you can push the supply chain at the moment, I think, and that's the challenge, right?

[00:14:15] CHRISTOPH KLIMT:
That's the challenge of being a small OEM. Yes.

[00:14:19] BEATRIZ GONZALEZ:
If a company needs to start onboarding suppliers in the PLM system, what is your advice, what they should consider, and what are the first steps to start doing it?

[00:14:30] CHRISTOPH KLIMT:
So for some reason, the highest discussion is always around the license costs. I think for the enterprise licenses, if you want to make your life easy as a company, it's best to provide them directly. Because as soon as you advise the suppliers to get the licenses themselves, there's going to be discussions, there's going to be IT involved and everything.

It's best to provide the licenses and don't do any exceptions. Not as soon as you send CAD data via email, people will always ask for the easiest way.

[00:15:03] JOS VOSKUIL:
Right.

[00:15:04] CHRISTOPH KLIMT:
If you ask people, it works quite well. We are doing this also with international suppliers. It works quite well with the data exchange and what's always a big advantage about the 3D is you don't have the language barrier because the 3D is, is an ambiguous in that manner.

[00:15:20] JOS VOSKUIL:
And I think as you mentioned in the beginning, you're working on the cloud, so it's easy to scale up. You don't need an IT overhead. Do you have to deal also with additional IP security or do you actually in the platform?

[00:15:34] CHRISTOPH KLIMT:
No. We have all of the companies that we work together sign an NDA, but in general, the platform is secure enough for us.
Actually our IT department, we started off with servers and also planned servers in the beginning for the PLM. But very soon we realized that the security level that the source systems offers much higher than what we can provide as a company.

[00:15:56] JOS VOSKUIL:
Yeah, exactly. That's a trend I see in many more, smaller, mid-size companies that the IT overhead to be secure can be so big that it's preferably to have on the cloud and outsourced.

[00:16:08] CHRISTOPH KLIMT:
Yeah. Yeah.

[00:16:10] BEATRIZ GONZALEZ:
How do you communicate with the users? Is it easier at your company because you are at the same office or what are your communication strategy, like telling people that you were saying, okay, changing to CATIA V6, you need some kind of communication in advance, right?

Telling them it's going be available, the try save some time or no? So how is your direct communication with the team?

[00:16:33] CHRISTOPH KLIMT:
So for externals, they still use CATIA V5, so we work in a hybrid structure.

[00:16:38] BEATRIZ GONZALEZ:
Okay.

[00:16:39] CHRISTOPH KLIMT:
This is also our intention that if we work with an external company that would use, they can use any CAD system that they want to. Internally, we are using CATIA 3D experience. But yeah, we're a small team, so it's quite direct communication. Yeah.

[00:16:56] BEATRIZ GONZALEZ:
So you have regular meetings or emails or you have a key users call or everyone is key user?

[00:17:05] CHRISTOPH KLIMT:
We used to have in the beginning, but only topic based. If somebody has an issue, usually we discuss it openly. The technical topics are steered via the issue management.

[00:17:16] JOS VOSKUIL:
I was just thinking, again, I saw in Germany just started this discussion on EBOM, MBOM, SBOM, and your presentation in D’ Hague was also about EBOM, MBOM, and SBOM. How do you see this, I would say, classical way of working with BOM structures compared to a modern model based approach where you have a more maturity of the model and the the BOM is a derivation? Do you have this trend inside your company also, or are you still sticking to the real, the typical BOM structures evolution?

[00:17:45] CHRISTOPH KLIMT:
That's a good question. Actually, when I joined at the beginning, we tried to make it as simple as we could, and we tried to have one BOM that fits every need. And very soon we realize that it's not really possible because alone from the release process you need to release manufacturing works sometimes just starts when all of the parts are released.

[00:18:08] JOS VOSKUIL:
Mm-hmm.

[00:18:085] CHRISTOPH KLIMT:
From that point of view alone, it has to be a separate BOM. There's, it's a whole different level of requirements, but it's also a whole different part of the process where you start with the MBOM.

So it's better to differentiate it completely from the start and then trying to put everything into one structure. And the same goes for service. The same goes for service. Yeah.

[00:18:32] JOS VOSKUIL:
Yeah, exactly. Because there, you bring your experience from other companies. I mean they have maybe 10 years legacy and they never worked with an EBOM and an MBOM historically and they are suffering, because there is something like a hybrid problem.

And this brings this probably also to the experience question. I mean, if you look to your career, experience is what you get when you don't get what you expect. And what would you say is your biggest experience so far that you want to share with the audience?

[00:19:00] CHRISTOPH KLIMT:
So the biggest surprise that I had actually, is somehow both times I implemented, I tried to, of course I first implemented the CAD department and then try to convinced the rest of the departments by the user experience. But actually now I'm thinking the team I should have asked first was the IT department.

Our IT was wanted to have an on-premise solution first because they thought they had more control over it. But, IT department or actually departments that know about data management, they're actually easiest to convince when you show them the level of security, as you mentioned before, that it has. And also the amount of management that's necessary for an on-premise solution.

[00:19:48] JOS VOSKUIL:
That's a great experience. And I think, yeah, I see it happening in other companies also. I mean, you need to involve IT also. You hope that the business leads and not IT, but they need to be involved and they are probably the most skilled in understanding what is happening.

[00:20:02] CHRISTOPH KLIMT:
Yeah. Yeah. And in some companies, PLM is part of the IT department, which is a different challenge, but in the companies where it's part of the engineering, I would definitely involve it as well.

[00:20:15] BEATRIZ GONZALEZ:
And Christoph my last question. As you have experience so soy in big enterprises that have PLM, what are the key aspects that differentiate one PLM implementation from another, one depends on the size of the company, so what are the key points that are totally different?

[00:20:35] CHRISTOPH KLIMT:
I think that the difficulty in a big company is the amount of legacy data that's there. And I think that's mostly it actually. Because in a smaller company, we don't have that much data. We don't have processes, or we have a need for processes, but don't have this amount of processes there. So if you implemented a big company you have everything basically and try to model it into the system.
In a small company, you're starting. And you don't really know what the processes will look like in the future, but you try to implement them. And you can also learn, because many CAD or many PLM tools actually have pre-made processes that can be 100% used for a small company.

[00:21:21] BEATRIZ GONZALEZ:
Yeah. What about the number of users, the number of people, what things would you do different in a big enterprise and a small one Karta?

[00:21:31] CHRISTOPH KLIMT:
Probably similar in my opinion because, my philosophy is to try to get engineering to work completely in PLM, same as, for example, supply chain would work completely in a ERP system. And ideally, you have the information for every role, whatever they need in the right system. So engineers don't have to check the ERP system and supply chain people when there's a supply chain tool that has the relevant information from the PLM, don't have to be inside of the PLM system.

[00:22:04] BEATRIZ GONZALEZ:
Okay. Jos do you have any other question.

[00:22:07] JOS VOSKUIL:
Yeah, I was just thinking, when we talked about the big and the small companies, and the processes, this reminds me of a blog post I wrote in 2008 when I just started writing blog posts and saying, PLM is important for SMB. And then often I got a comment in the smaller companies say, we don't need PLM because if we have a problem we come together and we sit around the machine, or we sit around the design. Where the big company says, well, we don't want our people to move, right? So we, we need to build processes so that the information is flowing between all the people.

And that was 2008. But, wow, at that time file base was the driver for small and medium companies. But like you said, you installed already also a PLM platform for the small companies that even on one time.

[00:22:56] CHRISTOPH KLIMT:
Yeah, I would do it now. Because I know the way that small companies do it, when you start doing a process in a very manual way and you are growing really fast, so my last company was growing from 80 people when I started to over 400 after three years. I saw processes being defined on a white paper that were not sustainable and not long term.

And you also have, you also have a lot of efforts implementing them. So, and changing them also. So I think the difficulty for us as small companies is to check that everything is upscale.

[00:23:37] BEATRIZ GONZALEZ:
Yeah. Very good. So, Jos, do you have any other question?

[00:23:42] JOS VOSKUIL:
Well, I think, I'm happy to see Christoph again, like also D’ Hague experience. He's really explaining in very brief and direct answers what he's doing. So thanks for that, Christoph it, it was a pleasure to hear more details from your implementation and your business.

[00:23:58] BEATRIZ GONZALEZ:
Yes. Thank you very much Christoph for joining us today and thank you so much to all our listeners for tuning in.