Best-practices aren’t good enough for PLM?

October 6, 2009

Picture 19What I want to discuss today is PLM Best Practices. Frankly saying, my thoughts about the topic were accelerated by COFES 2010 theme publishing “COFES 2010: Best-practices aren’t good enough“. So, it brings me to think in loud about what we call “best practices”. I think, you can hear a lot about this in PLM community. Best practices became very popular and had promoted as the way to have an efficient PLM implementation. You can find it in different “envelops” and combinations – best practices, industry solution, express offering etc. But speaking with different people in our community, I identified two main trends, if you will, in everything related to best practices:

1. Support best practices coming from PLM vendors. This community of people truly believes, PLM providers, by supporting best practices will release packages that will be ready to use and will be adopted very quickly by organization. For the small organizations, it will help to reduce the cost of implementation. For the big organizations, it will provide a framework to change way organization work. Customers don’t need to spend time to define processes, models, implementation specific stuff. Just install and go…

2. Support flexible configurable PLM software. This community is actually very opposite to previous one. From the standpoint of these people, PLM vendors have no sufficient knowledge to provide pre-packaged configurations. In addition, they believe in uniqueness of product development processes in the organization (even in the same industry). In their view, PLM software vendors need to focus on producing highly configurable, flexible software that can be customized, configured, adapted for specific customer needs.

So, what is my conclusion for today? I don’t see any of these approaches as a “silver bullet”. And I definitely see advantages of both directions. I’d be interested in open discussion with you to share and discuss your experience, vision and future thoughts.

Best, Oleg

6 Comments | Daily PLM Think Tank, PLM and organization | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by olegshilovitsky

Future PLM User Experience will be flat?

October 5, 2009

I’d like to discuss a user experience topic today. I think, this is a very painful question if we are talking about Enterprise Systems. PLM is not exception and suffering from complicated and not always appropriated user interfaces. I think, indeed, PLM has some advantages on the side of 3D, but in my view, there is a significant portion of non-3D life in PLM too. So, I’d like to pick up “List User Experience” trend. On the positive side, I see power of List in his simplicity. Everything can be represented by the list (except of 3D of course:) ). There are few powerful developments of a list-oriented user interfaces, I want to mention.

Microsoft SharePoint
SharePoint is using a list as a fundamental user interface experience. Everything is represented as a list and everything is transferred to become a list. You can see more details about SharePoint user experience in my previous posts about that – PLM Collaboration, To Catch Wave of Share List?

Micro-bloging and social networks
This is all about Facebook, Twitter, Yammer and other micro-bloging and other similar products.I can see a definite trend in standardizing on list base user interface. Facebook user interface becomes a more “list” compared to what we had before. Products list TweetDeck, Seesmic Desktop and other are all lists-based.

Picture 18

Mobile User Experience
There is not much to say about the iPhone User Interface. Everything is list-based. Lots of other products simulate iPhone user experience to get higher customer adoption rate.

Picture 17

Future Twitter Lists.
Some very interesting future development expected from Twitter. Twitter Lists. This new product from Twitter looks like next level of maturity to experiment with what List abstraction can deliver.

So, what is going in Product Lifecycle Management? Everything is pretty structured and not flat today. May this is our chance to change it? I’m looking forward to your comments.

Best, Oleg

1 Comment | Daily PLM Think Tank, User Experience | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by olegshilovitsky

PLM Prompt: Open BPM tools.. Oh, Yes! It’s free! But where is PLM?

October 4, 2009

Picture 16New week start. Interesting prompt related to free and open source software. Take a look on a quite impressive list of open/free BPM suites (thanks Process Cafe for links).

Free BPM and Process Modeling Tools:

Now, my question is why we don’t see more PLM tools in Open Source, Free or Freemium models?

Have a good week! Best, Oleg

2 Comments | Business, PLM Prompt | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by olegshilovitsky

3D Perspectives: Connect PLM with World Content

October 2, 2009

My new post on DS 3D Perspective Blog today.

Picture 13I’m sure you already had chance to see the new 3DVIA Mobile application, and  I’ll bet you find it really cool. However, all the discussions around mobile applications and 3D got me  thinking about a connection between two worlds created by this application – the virtual word and the physical world.

The virtual world – we live it all the time when using software to create  our products, designs, projects and models. The physical world is everything surrounding us. All products we design and manufacture will live in our physical world.

More on 3D Perspecitve

1 Comment | 3D, 3DPerspectives, Cloud Application, Collaboration | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by olegshilovitsky

Google Wave Server – Is It the Next Collaborative Process Engine for PLM?

October 1, 2009

Picture 1130 September was time for 100’000 happy individuals to get Google Wave invitation. Even I’m not part of these 100’000, internet is full of updated reviews about Google Wave. If you remember, my initial short Prompt about Google Wave - Google Wave is ringing bell for PLM collaboration. So, I will wait for the next portion of Wave invitations, but for the moment I’d like to share with you some additional thoughts about Google Wave and possible applications. Until now, email remains the most widely used collaboration and communication tool. Designers and Engineers are not exclusion from this space. They are using emails too. Interesting, that even if an organization implements PDM/PLM/BPM/ERP, email keeps going as an interface between these applications and people. And I think, simplicity is a key word why people continue using mail for multiple purposes.

Now, let’s think about collaboration between designers and engineers. I think, the following characteristics will turn Google Wave to ultimate design collaborative process engine. Here my four characteristics:

1. One line per item/discussion – “wave”. All communications are in single wave. Single line in your user interface. This “wave” is going up and down as much as discussion and communication is progressing in this Wave. So, wave is a very good boundary for new type of design and engineering processes.

2. End to end visibility (including search and hierarchy). The information inside of Wave is completely available – you can browse and even search, which make it even more powerful.

3. Multiple ad-hoc participants. You can add somebody to the existing wave any time. For groups of designers and engineers, this is a very strong capability.

4. History and play-back. And, finally, wave can keep history of everything you did. This is your discussion summary. In addition, history can be visually presented. No more additional screens with histories and logs. You can see this video.

What is the top missing part in Google Wave from my standpoint to apply this technology for product development collaboration? In my mind, this is a connection to product content – information located in CAD/PDM/PLM software.

Let me know what do you think? Maybe somebody got Google Wave invitation and already is trying it live. Please let me know.

Best, Oleg

16 Comments | Collaboration, Daily PLM Think Tank, Google, Technology | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by olegshilovitsky

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