Microsoft Future Data Visualization, 3D Lifelike Experience and more…

April 6, 2009

Microsoft Future Data Visualization, 3D Lifelike Experience and more… A picture is worth 1000 words. We all know this… if we can visualize, we can easy find something we weren’t able to see before. I was looking at some amazing futuristic videos from Microsoft about future data visualization. Look on this – I’m sure you will find it cool.

ms-visualization-1

 

Think about the products we design and manufacture without tools. Can we experience product usage that will allow us to have all data and information about these products in our hands? Here we come to the idea of Lifelike Experience from DS. This is really cool and I’m sure you will enjoy future videos too.

 

Now I’d like to come to some practical ideas we may have tomorrow. When you experience a product, and try out the product design, features, configuration, and materials, you need to connect them to real life. Think about a product that you will modify that will have the ability to let you see data about all the problems your customers have with this particular product. Or think about simple information – how many users use this cell phone when you try to change its design. Finally, think about how many complaint people wrote on the blog about the specific product you design… More practical usage are products like 3DVIA composer.

3DVIA Composer. This is information you can share and experience today in manufacturing and with consumers.  I think , in the future we will more examples of how to visualize data and product information. 

 

 

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Posted by olegshilovitsky

PLM Content Downstream Usage, Googlenomic and Futuristic Search…

April 3, 2009

I’m getting back again to the topic of PLM content. I think this is one of the most exciting topics we can talk about. This is actually “Product” – PLM. This is all the knowledge we create about products from different aspects – starting from “why we need it?” (Requirements), continuing through “how will we use it?” (Function) and ending up with “how can I dispose it” (regulations, etc.). PLM pretends to manage all or this product information or, how I prefer to call it, PLM content.

Content is King. Therefore, PLM, having this goldmine, needs to think about how to use this product data downstream. If you take Google Maps as an example, I see how Maps (actually GIS content) was connected to provide valuable information for us. In this case, a simple Map was used to provide contextual information for application behaviors around Google Map.

So, in the case of PLM, having information about product models, usages, and lifecycles, we can try to release this information for people downstream and allow them to access it using various scenarios–

Buying experience: I want to have information about the product I’m buying.

Social experience: I want to have information about who is using this product.

Lifecycle experience: I want to have information about this product in the past.

There are many other scenarios as well.  I’m sure we can find the ways to use product content in downstream applications – asset management, support, maintenance. Let me know if you see any other examples that excite you…

Now, how is it possible to use it? In this context, I want to bring a few examples of futuristic search  solutions from Behance Network Projects. Yes, this is not available today. But look on how we can use product content in different ways. I think that many of the examples below will exist in the near future.

behance-project-1

behance-project-2

behance-project-31

5 Comments | Daily PLM Think Tank, PLM and Social Environment, PLM User Experience | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by olegshilovitsky

Is it time for a synchronized Bill of Materials?

April 2, 2009

In my previous post “Search for the right BOM – I’m feeling lucky? “, I started to discover possible ways to handle Bill of Materials in the organization and extended enterprise. Thank you all for your comments. I think we had a good conversation, so  I’d like to continue now in slightly different direction. Before I speak  about the diversity of Bill of Materials I’d like to say that the core of this approach is to have multiple Bill of Materials for various aspects of product development (such as Design, Engineering. Manufacturing, Maintenance etc.). So, we have multiple Bill of Materials. These multiple Bill of Materials are managed normally by different systems. By using of this approach we have several possible combinations of BOM within an organization. 

But there is opposite approach: There are NO multiple Bill of Materials. Instead we have systems that define a single BOM for the organization where all relevant pieces of information are connected and synchronized. According to the type of information you are looking for, you can extract a subset of this information from the overall Bill of Materials system. This overall BOM structures managed and synchronized among all groups within an organization. Therefore, this approach can simplify the way different pieces of product-related information are managed in an organization.

synchronized-bom

 How can you organize this synchronized Bill of Material overall? There are many technological approaches that can be mentioned here – PLM with federated Bill of Material capabilities, data warehousing, business intelligence, PIM, and enterprise search. Even if these approaches are sensitive from the standpoint of synchronizing information between different enterprise systems, all of these technologies have the potential to be used for this purpose.

 I would be interested to know if you see the practice of a synchronized Bill of Materials applicable in your organization. 

15 Comments | BOM Management, Daily PLM Think Tank, PLM and organization, Technology | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by olegshilovitsky

Can we build PLM bottom up?

April 1, 2009

This week, I have been getting more intense feelings about  “trying to find a new solution for an old problem”. So, giving into this feeling, I was thinking about PLM user adoption. Looking at many blog posts and strategic presentations, enterprise software caught my eye. And so the next question was, what about user adoption?

I think that the most important things to speak at this point is how to get users to use your product. So, with this perception, I feel that global enterprise deployment is probably important, but we need to present it in a way that will be different from the typical top-down enterprise architecture approach.

 plm-bottom-up

 So, there are a few practical ideas I’d like to introduce in order to build your PLM from the bottom-up.

 1.    Set of problem-oriented tools

These tools will be oriented on how to work on a specific area- design, bills of material, projects etc. Tools need to be easily available for all people in the organization. You need to invest only a small amount of time to learn it (as you do with Excel)

 2.    Adaptable data and process models.

Today’s enterprise data modeling is very complex, in my opinion. Lots of time is spent on designing and changing data models/schemas. We need to come up with small data blocks (maybe a new PLM data format? – see my previous blog article).

 3.    Portal Tools and Enterprise Search

These technologies are becoming more and more mature- SharePoint from Microsoft, Content Management Tools from OSR vendors, IBM and others. You can choose your IT stack and follow it.

 Well, this is sort of a dream, but I’m sure you will be glad to discuss it with me and perhaps bring examples of your implementations. 

Leave a Comment » | Daily PLM Think Tank, PLM and organization | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by olegshilovitsky

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