Interesting definition of PLM vs. not PLM provided by Brad Holtz yesterday during his opening presentation on COFES 2009. I think, this is first time I’ve seen “PLM” and “not PLM” definition on a single slide.
I will be glad to hear you feedback for this discussion.
5 Comments | 
Analytics and Research, Daily PLM Think Tank | Tagged: PLM definition | 
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Posted by olegshilovitsky
Last week I discussed the option of having a new PLM format. http://plmtwine.com/2009/03/31/should-plm-20-come-with-a-new-plm-format/. My conclusion is that the new PLM 2.0 format can be proposed to handle available PLM IP and share it among organizations and people. I see various scenarios possible – supply chain, design collaboration, etc.
Today, I wanted to show what is possible, in my view, as a technological opportunity to merge this PLM 2.0 format of data with the capabilities of AWS (Amazon Web Services). AWS keeps this data on a cloud storage. Take a look on the examples of Amazon usage that keeps public cloud sets – http://aws.amazon.com/publicdatasets/. I think that the Amazon service is the most mature these days, but I expect that newcomers will propose hosting opportunities for data storages. To communicate with this storage in an exchangeable format can be the ultimate opportunity for streamlining processes for product development.
So, I think that in the context of cloud capabilities such as AWS, the need for new PLM formats to be able to encapsulate data sets of product related information has become more urgent. How we can create something that allows us to distribute product IP and data? This is a question that requires answers.
5 Comments | Daily PLM Think Tank, PLM and organization | Tagged: Hosting, PLM Data | Permalink
Posted by olegshilovitsky
I’d like to get back to the idea of how to reuse potential of social networks in organization. In the past, I discussed about how to use micro-blogging for collaboration in an engineering organization. One of the questions came after was how to collaborate with right people in organization. In this context, I’d like to share with you some interesting results based on a collaboration profile I created using product Mailana. This particular profile was generated based on my twitter network and allows me to explore my contacts in the net. So, you can see who your peers are and how you communicate with them, i.e. frequency of messages, topics for collaboration etc.
I think that this user experience has a great potential to improve the way we collaborate inside of the PLM system around product development. This type of tool allows us to focus our collaboration around a specific person and see contextually all topics we need to discuss with this person. Today most of our collaborative scenarios follow around tasks (i.e. ECO). In this situation, we come to a particular topic first and need to discover the right people with whom to collaborate or discuss about the particular task. But this is not always the best way to work – people are not always available and you jump between topics basically based on people availability.
My idea is how can we manage our collaboration around people? The scenario of collaboration can be changed and improved to start the collaboration from a person. At the time you start to collaborate with that person, you can see the summary of all topics related to the person and you can improve the way you work with him or her. Simply put, when you speak to your colleague or manager, you will have a summary of all open issues / designs / ECO.
So, people will become the focal point for collaboration.
Leave a Comment » | Daily PLM Think Tank, PLM and Social Environment, Productivity | Tagged: Collboration, People, PLM, Social Environment | Permalink
Posted by olegshilovitsky
I’d like to get back to Excel discussion. I think that Excel is a really good application. And I don’t believe that somebody will argue with me… I’ll go even further and say – Excel is too good! Excel is used everywhere. Manufacturing enterprises heavily rely on Excel in order to manage literally everything. I wrote in one of my previous posts “How PLM can beat Excel…” and got responses like – Nobody can beat Excel.
I see that many companies are trying to take Excel to a different level. In most of the cases companies are taking the Excel User Experience and building storage models on the server. In some cases, companies allow you to share Excel files for multi-user access or, as alternative, load information from Excel files into a database. The common denominator for all these activities is that a useful and successful Excel user experience tries to get into the collaborative space where people share data and information, and manage enterprise processes. There are only a few companies in this space like Expresso and SmartSheets, but there are much more that are trying to say “Don’t call us Excel online”. Actually Microsoft themselves have entered the race of trying to overtake Excel upstream. Therefore MS Excel Services provides capabilities to render information in an Excel-like way on an internet browser.
Now, there are a few questions I’d like to address Is this a real deal for enterprises? Just to move data in an Excel-like way? In this case, perhaps PLM companies need to refocus from management of processes in the enterprises and shift to management of Excel in the enterprises? This is a type of dream – we will be able to talk to zillions of Excel (sheets?) engineering users created in their organization and just moving them into the cloud space 
? Done deal! Solved problem! No need for mails, no need to create anything more complicated! Everybody can access information, collaborate etc. Huh?… Something is wrong. In the past, we said that this applies to multiple newcomers in the technology world – VMS, DB2, Oracle, Access, Java, XML, UML… I can continue this list. The problem is not technical – the problem is not a technical solution. Probably there is NO technical solution to the problem! In my view, this problem is an engineering problem. We need to engineer our product data (actually Product IP) in a similar way that we engineer our product itself (plane, car, telephone etc.),
Moving to Excel on the cloud, online, or in any centralized storage in the enterprise will not solve the engineering problems of your enterprise data management. You still need to decide how to manage information in your enterprise. You still need to decide how to manage Product IP. And this is a fundamental need and role that belongs to a PLM system. Excel will not solve your problem in my view – it can only provide you with an easy to view user experience to handle data for the user.
I will be glad to hear you feedback for this discussion.
8 Comments | Daily PLM Think Tank, PLM User Experience, Productivity, Technology | Tagged: Enterprise Data Management, MS Excel, PLM, User Experience | Permalink
Posted by olegshilovitsky
I want to ask a straightforward question – how is user experience important for building a successful enterprise application (such as enterprise PLM)? I think I hear your voices – yes, yes, yes… So, I think we need to go and shop for some good technologies that will help us to improve the user experience of the systems we develop. I see that the time of boring web UIs and multiple screens with data, trees and grids are over. So, I have come to RIA (Rich Internet Application) technologies that allow us to develop cool user experience for our enterprise data management mustangs.
I was inspired to read Flashy GUIs versus Longterm Business Benefits blog article discussing how RIA may or may not be important for enterprise applications. So, my question was – are we ready to pay a premium price for user experience that will remind us of iPhone, Xbox, PlayStations and RIA enabled websites? My conclusion is yes. I believe that today’s business PLM definitely needs something that allows us to get a higher acceptance of end users in the enterprise.
So, if you are ready, here are some choices on your way to enhance the user experience of products.
Adobe AIR platform provides a framework to develop a rich user experience. The important thing is that you can build an AIR-based application based on PDF templates and without affecting your current product. Microsoft Silver Light sounds like a visible new competitor in this space. There are some other technologies and products, but in general, my feeling is that – yes, RIA is moving forward and PLM needs to get aboard this train.
Below you can find some more examples of RIA apps:
Adobe showcase for branded rich Internet applications (RIAs)- NASDAQ and eBay.
4 Comments | Daily PLM Think Tank, PLM User Experience, Technology | Tagged: PLM, RIA, User Experience, User Interface | Permalink
Posted by olegshilovitsky
Personalization is one of the today’s trends in product development. More and more manufacturers are discovering the ability to develop products that fit particular customer demands. What is especially interesting is to be able to design and develop products following social demands. I think involvement of individuals in product development is a very interesting trend we are watching now. People are interesting to be involved into product design, they want to impact.
This is place where, I think, today’s PLM technologies can leverage some latest development in the field of Web 2.0 and more specifically, social search. In the chain of social influence –> people demands –> people –> product requirements –> product development, <people> are the missing link in the chain. If we can stay connected with people during the full product development cycle, we can find the special power we are missing.
Social networks today provide the ultimate source of information and connection to people’s minds. How can we use it practically and connect product development to people behaviors, wishes, interests and preferences? I will try to translate this need into practical technological requirements:
1. The ability to mine data in social networks according to specific product behaviors, requirements, needs.
2. To allow people to impact by providing feedback on ongoing product development.
I will take as an example the development of the next model of mobile devices such as mobile phone, GPS system or PDA. Development of these type of products have very a short timeframe which needs to focus on the assembly of the most important requirements for the next product model. These requirements include product features, product look and feel and they need to balance with the right product price to fit a specific customer segment. So, what if the product development environment based on PLM system capabilities were able to mine social networks and the assembly summary of people’s demands? This sounds promising to me… but is only the half of it. The other half is the ability of PLM systems to expose information about a future developed product using social media tools in the social networks , and collect people’s feedback. Now we have a closed loop of product development with social involvement.
I’d like to write a few words about what products example I see today. First of all, the development of vertical search tools. These search tools are tuned for specific needs and can discover particular trends in all available social media – blogs, wikis, Internet forums etc. Next is a search developed specially to follow information in social networks – Facebook, twitter, LinkedIn etc. And finally, development of tools allowing us to expose Product Content (design, features, functional characteristics) out of current development systems (CAD, Industrial Design Tools etc.).
I’m very interested to hear your voices in this discussion – from the standpoint of product development tools as well as a consumer of various products.
10 Comments | Future Trends, Market and Technology, PLM and Social Environment | Tagged: CAD, Industrial Design, Requirement Management, Social Development, Social Software | Permalink
Posted by olegshilovitsky
Everybody wants to have “live access”, right?! I think that the marketing world has finally found the right word to explain our expectations from today’s systems. We want them “live” – that means being available all the time (24×7) from any device. I checked this out on Google Trends and discovered support for my hunch – the “live” trend is growing
http://www.google.com/trends?q=Live
How does this apply to CAD, PLM, AEC, BIM, GIS and other product development systems? Here I found some similarities in the latest development of leading companies:
Dassault Systèmes presented their strategy last year for V6 and PLM 2.0. DS focused on live access to Product IP. DS 3D Live product was introduced the year before and presented a new user experience in 3D. This can be used virtually everywhere to present (Live) information about product.
And this is practically very beneficial – you can go (3D)Live and see what you mean with regards to current design, manufacturing and other aspects of product development. It’s also possible to have what DS terms “Lifelike experience” – the ability to virtually experience the product before it has actually been manufactured – drive your virtual car, fly your virtual plane etc.
So, it was more about the so-called PLM world. What happens on the other side – AEC, BIM, GIS? I actually found very similar picture. What I actually discovered was many activities focused on the creation of live or virtual cities. This is very interesting since it actually echoes the same concepts of Live Access to building and construction data.
So, I asked myself – is Live Experience going to provide a common trend between multiple products in product development, manufacturing, construction and building spaces? Will people be interested in having 3D access to product models, city landscapes and building information? What I see as most promising is the ability to share PLM and AEC, BIM spaces together, since all products, buildings and cities exists in the same virtual world that we will build.
Leave a Comment » | Daily PLM Think Tank, Future Trends, PLM User Experience | Tagged: AEC, BIM, CAD, GIS, Lifelike Experience, Live, PLM | Permalink
Posted by olegshilovitsky
I’m sure you will agree that one of the definite goals of PLM is to organize product related information. Finally, I can find all my product models, relevant drawings, BOMs, customer requirements, manufacturing plans and suppliers bids. Unfortunately, when I look at the existing PLM systems, I see that this is not always simple. Companies utilize multiple software tools to design and manufacture products. Sometimes companies need to develop special software tools to follow specific information related to their catalogs of standard, existing and future developed products etc.
I started to think about the approach we can take for a PLM system to make it significantly simpler compared to what we have today. Actually a few analogies helped me come up with this idea. My MS Outlook contains lots of mails. A while ago, I tried to categorized mails and put them in relevant folders. But this proved to be very painful, as it had been in the past. I started to develop taxonomy for my mails at first, but after a few month or trials, I decided that I will keep all mails in a single folder. But then I had trouble finding what I needed, so I decided to mark my mail with categories. So, today these tags (categories) lets me find relevant mails in seconds.
Another example is my home computer system with photographs. I can sort them according to multiple criteria. In the end, I finally understood that this is mission is an impossible task, so I put the photos in a calendar-based order and started to mark the photos with tags. Actually, I found that there are many available tagging systems you can use today.
Now, how can I use this experience to help me to build a more efficient user experience for PLM/PDM systems? My proposal is as following – TAG EVERYTHING– products, models, projects, users, documents, ECOs (Engineering Change Orders), BOM etc. With this total tagging approach, we will be able to build an environment that is tuned for a specific company. What is more important is that it will also be customized for a specific user’s need. Users will be able to build tagging systems within time and justify needs and tags usages. Lately, we can eliminate unused or obsolete tags (even if they were created by a specific user).
There are a few systems I evaluated that allow you to tag everything on your computer and are simple to integrate with your PLM system. I’m sure to build these tagging capabilities is relatively simple for existing PLM systems.
Here are some examples:
And, in the end, I found this approach in the core of Apple Mac. So, this is an open call. What do you think about this approach for PLM? May be you know systems that have already implemented this? Please share your experience.
14 Comments | Daily PLM Think Tank, PLM User Experience | Tagged: Classification, Folksonomies, PLM, Tag | Permalink
Posted by olegshilovitsky
Everything in our life is seems to be a project. It can start from a very simple set of tasks that a designer needs to follow up and end with complex product development that needs to plan the work of hundreds of developers, suppliers, manufacturers etc. So, in today’s product landscape I can see two orthogonal trends – the development of specialized project management tools deeply integrated with PLM (or even becoming part of PLM portfolio) on one side and general purpose project management tools on the other side. And when the time comes to make a decision – how can companies and end users can decide what is the right choice? What are the benefits of each approach? Will they get married or divorced? Although the difference between these two approaches is obvious, is a clash already inevitable? Let me summarize short how I see both of these tools.
General purpose project management tools are providing best practices of project management and their main focus is on product productivity, simplicity and general acceptance by customers. So, in their view, a product should be simple, with a sufficient set of features and excellent user experience. Product landscape in this category is heavily impacted by Microsoft Project. On top of the general purpose PM tools, there are a number of more specialized project management tools following specific industry and other best practices (i.e. project methodologies, regulation and other specific industry practices).
PLM project and program management. By recognizing project development needs during product development, more dedicated Project Management tools were developed by PLM providers (i.e. DS ENOVIA MatrixOne Program Central, TeamCenter Portfolio Program Project Management). The main point of these tools was to merge Product Lifecycle Management capabilities with product development. By doing that users have a much more dedicated environment focused on the specific needs and characteristics such as product information, automated tasks etc.
Both approaches have advantages and disadvantages, in my view. General Project Management tools are targeting a wider customer audience, and can provide higher feature level, usability and lower prices. On contrary, these tools are sometimes too generic, disconnected from ability to work together with PLM tools and inside of PLM environment. PLM PPM (Program and Project Management) is heavily focused on specific tasks related to product development, better connected to rest of PLM design and engineering tools. At the same time, these tools are more complex and sometime lack behind of modern user experience, look and feel compare to mainstream general purpose tools. These special tools normally have higher price tag and higher value for end users.
In addition, I’d like to point at two more segments – Microsoft Tools and on demand (SaaS) project management tools. Microsoft offers Microsoft Project as well as promotes the active usage of Microsoft SharePoint for project management together with MS Project. With a very high market share, Microsoft provides a premium tool in terms of feature and functions and, of course, is an attractive offering. On-Demand tools as an opposite, offers a simplified set of tools, focusing on extremely fast learning curve of users and a fast adoption rate.
So, where is the silver bullet for manufacturing companies? When specialized PPM tools can definitely provide value, given the current economical situation, my prediction is that customers will try to follow a less expensive offering and will try to integrate general purpose project management tools within the product development environment. This trend will be clearer for smaller manufacturers compared to SMB companies. With this landscape, I think that PLM vendors need to focus on content integration between general purpose project management tools and PLM content. This combination will allow vendors to reduce the cost of PPM (Program Project Management) tools and improve the integration between enterprise systems in the companies.
29 Comments | Daily PLM Think Tank, PLM and organization, PLM User Experience | Tagged: PLM, Project Management | Permalink
Posted by olegshilovitsky
Well, finally it happened 
(April 1 SpaceClaim Twitter AddIn Prank) – the first CAD system to present integration with Twitter. So, is it April-1 joke or something positive happens?
I’d try to analyze the following product capabilities – DS 3DLive support for IM, Vuuch Design Discussion, SpaceClaim with Twitter… My conclusion – CADs are learning social language.
But let’s try to analyze it…
DS 3DLive introduced enablement for IM (Instant messaging and online video collaboration). This is a powerful capability, in my view, to allow designers and engineers working in a 3D environment where they need to communicate with peers and get in touch with experts. The capabilities of 3DLive allow full 3D collaboration including video, snapshots and synchronous redlining. These basically can eliminate the need of designers and engineers to use mails and other mainstream collaboration tools to transfer 3D models and drawings back and forth. Combined with MS OCS or IBM Lotus, 3DLive is a collaboration tool. But where is the social network? This is not straightforward– collaboration tools like MS OCS /SharePoint of IBM Lotus actually supporting social networking, can connect designers and engineers to their peers inside of the companies and outside.
From the preview of Vuuch.com which I got the chance to see at SolidWorks World 2009 this year, my impression was that Vuuch is trying to focus on the productivity of designers and engineers by eliminating having to use email for collaboration. The Vuuch collaboration server (hope this is the right name J) allows users to manage all discussions thread and connect them to design models, drawings in the CAD environment, and in the regular portal user experience.
Although it’s not clear what SpaceClaim users will do with tweets, this is an opportunity to have a shortcut to Twitter based communities in their working environment. This is a step in productivity improvements.
So, I want to ask why CADs need to tweet? What are benefits? I can see a main trend in the willingness of designers and engineers to improve collaborative capabilities they have in CAD environment as well as stay connected to their social peers. These social peers can be co-workers, potential customers, suppliers and other people that can help them in their daily work. I think is too early to say if this is the future of Web 2.0 and CAD in creating something together, another flavor of PLM 2.0, or something else, but something is definitely happening there…
14 Comments | Daily PLM Think Tank, PLM and organization, Productivity | Tagged: CAD, Social Tools, Twitter | Permalink
Posted by olegshilovitsky
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