Comments on: PLM and ERP: Why it doesn’t fit?

By: Indies

Indies — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 09:41:18 +0000

Indies…

[...]PLM and ERP: Why it doesn’t fit? « Daily PLM Think Tank Blog[...]…

By: olegshilovitsky

olegshilovitsky — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 23:28:16 +0000

Krishna, Thanks for your comments and insight! I agree with you, PLM started as a “product development” oriented and never been “product information” oriented. PLM pushed towards business processes to fulfill demands on enterprise organization to sell to the C-level. In the end, organization is driven by processes and this is what PLM is trying to do. However, PLM data platforms are weak and cannot support marketing demands for PLM. As opposite, ERP built strong business foundation on top of the ability to manage financial and operational assets in the organization. Both PLM and ERP are fighting for dominance… The potential future path contains two possible options – PLM will develop stronger product data backbone to absorb ERP systems; ERP will push towards their better capabilities to manage engineering data and leave PLM systems in “design space” only. Great discussion! Best, Oleg

By: Krishna Prasad

Krishna Prasad — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 14:24:32 +0000

A wonderful post in deed!
If geeks allow, I want to express here my thoughts,on PLM and ERP- a ill tuned love song,I put PLM more as product centric view, where as the ERP is business process centric view.These two should be separated while understanding the both.As of now there is no such solution which fulfills both the requirements, Just every S/W vendor is trying to make his mark and keeping sockets for plug ins (an extra buck from third party S/W),do these things really help manufacturers or business houses in their product Life cycle /business planning?
Have the S/W vendors really understood the PLM or just because it is buzz word as on date so lets-make-most-of it while the sun still shines?
Have the Manufactures/Engineers really understand what they want from PLM in terms of technology and management system? are they clear about it?
As of now, no one ever talked about product management after the product is sold out and is with the user/consumer
As of now PLM only refers to Product development, cost control/management of production, manage it as an asset, and disposal(if it is an internal asset) what about products that are sold to consumers/users how to manage it, how to get the data on the usage? durability,condition monitoring, disposal plans disposal compliance?

I am of the opinion that ERP should be built on the PLM Base as an extension, rather than PLM as an extension to ERP, whcih should solve all the Problems of EBOM and MBOM
I agree with the olegshilovitsky.

Regards

By: olegshilovitsky

olegshilovitsky — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 05:33:43 +0000

Andy, Certain system behavior driven by a functional scope. The segmentation between ERP and PLM becomes more and more problematic as soon as both systems coming to Bill of Material story from both sides (manufacturing and design). Do you have a specific tool in your mind when you are saying “system where the EBOM and MBOM can co-exist and share data elements”. Conversely, you just talking about possible service/custom development? I see an interesting contradiction between what you said and today’s trend of OOTB (Out of the Box) functionality demands in PLM world. I can imagine that customers are interested to low their expenses during implementation. However, from your perspective it locks them on a specific system (either PLM or ERP). Frankly saying, I never had chance to see out-of-the-box integration between PLM and ERP. This is something that doesn’t exist, for the moment. Best, Oleg

By: AndyF

AndyF — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 22:44:06 +0000

The “war” between PLM and ERP is one that has been created by the software vendors. The various vendors want to grab all of the business for themselves and therefore they create code which is monolithic in nature. These large applications are designed to hold the data hostage within the application rather than sharing.
If you reject the usual solutions to PLM and ERP then you can find tools that avoid the “war”. It is possible to build a system where the EBOM and MBOM can coexist and share data elements. That actually isn’t a difficult problem to solve but you probably have to solve it yourself. If you’re buying off the shelf tools from the major software vendors then you’ll have an issue. The software vendors aren’t really interested in solving business problems, they are busy trying to lock their competitors out of the market.

By: olegshilovitsky

olegshilovitsky — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 12:41:55 +0000

Martijn, Thank you! Your D4x is an excellent example. Not to build multiple Bill of Materials, but to create single one for all. I’m sure you had chance to read

Seven Rules Towards Single Bill of Materials (http://plmtwine.com/2009/10/14/seven-rules-towards-single-bill-of-material/) and BOM: Overstructured, Understructured or Lean? (http://plmtwine.com/2009/10/20/bom-overstructured-understructured-or-lean/). I just see it so in place of what you said about your practice.

Best, Oleg

By: Martijn Dullaart

Martijn Dullaart — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 11:51:27 +0000

Oleg, Douglas. Great post. I want to come back to your “design for logistics” statement. Because I agree. At my company in one of the divisions we introduced what we called D4x (Design for “Anything”), what we mean by this is that we wanted the engineers to design the EBOM in such a way that it would represent not only the requirements from a customer and Engineer perspective, but also all requirements from Manufacturing/Logistics/Service.

Also we currently have an PDM/PLM application (custom build) that supports the Functional and product structure approach. This works really well, also for easily configuring new variants within a family of products.

By: olegshilovitsky

olegshilovitsky — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 01:29:06 +0000

Douglas, Great thoughts! Thank you for your deep insight. I agree, the most interesting topic is future morphing of EBOM and MBOM in somewhat allowing 1/efficient manufacturing; 2/allowing a modular approach in product design and manufacturing. Is it about what people calling lean? I think your examples with WW2 just confirm that lean is the only way when you are in the extreme situation. Best, Oleg

By: olegshilovitsky

olegshilovitsky — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 00:52:53 +0000

Chris, Do you think ‘social’ will become a new universal hammer to resolve enterprise software problems we have today? Some of my thoughts on this in another post about “social platforms for enterprise”. I see adding of social features as an interesting approach, but in the end, social features and capabilities will migrate to sort of platforms (with few major players)…. Today I see all social features as a very nice add and right direction to make platforms more mature in the future. Best, Oleg

By: olegshilovitsky

olegshilovitsky — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 00:49:22 +0000

Chris, Very interesting point. I think mashup can reduce the ownership problem. But, if on the fundamental level, BOM and Part Master ownership will continue to be an issue for ERP and PLM (as it happens these days), mashup will not be able to provide a good solution. How do you know what source of data to mash-up? Thanks! Oleg