Vertical PLM Medley

July 16, 2010

My new website and blog is BeyondPLM. The original post is here.

I read an article “PLM’s Vertical Challenge” in High Tech Views. The High Tech article is presenting advantages of industry-oriented PLM implementations. Read it and make your impression. I specially liked the following part:

“We needed something that had an apparel maker’s focus in mind. Otherwise we’d be spending too much time trying to tailor something else,” says Rich Zielinski, Under Armour’s vice president of technical services. “The more tailoring you do, the more a system doesn’t work.”  Companies in many industries are learning that lesson. Having lived through lengthy, expensive, and often fruitless enterprise software rollouts, especially in the areas of ERP and CRM, manufacturers are now reluctant to bankroll the deployment of generic PLM systems in need of major modifications for handling industry-specific requirements and company-specific business processes. They understand that, as the PLM market matures, much of the heavy lifting associated with mapping out critical business processes and industry requirements — for example, in the areas of regulatory compliance or quality management — has already been done by the vendors and early adopters in sectors such as automotive and aerospace and defense.

The problem is very interesting, in my view. Companies are suffering from long time implementation cycles. The alternatives need to found. In the early beginning of PLM-era, CAD/PLM companies were selling toolboxes with a significant portion of services and implementation consultancy. However, 1-2 years implementation cycles, significant budgets and unsatisfied customers made vendors to think about possible alternatives.

PLM Industry Solutions
The idea of industry solutions (or how companies are calling it – industry verticals) isn’t new. If you will take a look on the PLM portfolios all major PLM (and not only) vendors, you can see a standard portion of industry doggy food. The industry solutions reminded me storytelling. In the beginning, industry sales or industry professionals are proving that they can speak to a customer in the “industry language”. Then it turns to the software? The very typical option is to have a pre-configured software package including full pack of documents and presentation explaining how to use it inside of the company. You can see below a top-view on such industry-oriented packages.

Vertical Solution Problems

What is the biggest advantage of Industry Solutions? In my view, pre-packaged functionality. What is the biggest disadvantage? In my view, the same. Engineers have a tendency to work slightly different. Organizations may have their own way to run a development that doesn’t fit 100% to pre-packaged functionality provided by vendors. So, the biggest danger is that customer will need to customize the industry solution to fit organizational needs.

Granularity and Risk Management

How to manage risks in implementing vertical PLM solutions? One of the possible ways is to increase the granularity of the solution you are going to buy and implement. To have small pieces that can stitch together can prevent you from grandiose plans to implement all in a single shot.

What is my conclusion? The best association that comes to my mind when I think about vertical PLM solutions is CD-medley. Do you remember that? You can buy Bach-medley, Mozart-medley, Rock-n-Roll-medley… You can buy a double-CD-medley for a bargain price. It was 15-20 years ago… What can be better? Now we know – iTunes. More granular approach can win over the time. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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PLM and Engineering Documents Identification

July 15, 2010

My new website and blog is BeyondPLM. The original post is here.

The question of identification is probably of the most complicated and always raises lots of interest. I had a chance to discuss early on my blog a topic related to Part Numbers and Part Identification. The discussion raised lots of opinions and comments. You can track them on the following link. PLM marketing and sales speeches are rarely discussing this topic. It assumed as a solved problem. However, I don’t think so. Today I want to discuss multiple aspects related to the identification of drawings.

I read article by Kean Walmsley of Autodesk on his blog – Through the interface . He is discussing the idea of identification of drawings using QR Code. Kean presented various ways you can today handle QR codes in software and how you can organize your work with help of QR-enabled software. He is talking about coming AutoCAD plug-in to do this job.

Another article by Jeff Sweeney of 3DVision Technologies in his bar-coded blog post presents an idea how possible to use bar-code or how he called “1949 year technology” to identify drawings. In his example, he proposed to create an association between file attribute and bar-code and automate processes related to document.

Both articles made me think about different aspects related to identification of engineering documents, and I decided to share and discuss it.

Internal vs. External
Documents are everywhere. However, in my view, most of the organization can clearly differentiate between documents that are belonging to an organization and are under formal control of the organization and documents that circulated outside.

Logical vs. Physical
Most of us are working with virtual documents or files – CAD Files, Related PDF files, Images, Scans and just office documents with embedded design and engineering elements. However, organizations are still printing documents for various purposes. I can see some of them, such as use of documents in the manufacturing shop floor or sending documents together with physical products as part of documents and some others.

Integrations
Inside of the organization your documents are flowing between different people and organizations. You can see more and more organizations are starting to think about a single content management system. In some cases, PLM system is playing a role of a content management system for engineering documents. However, there are lots of situations where documents are distributed between multiple systems- CMS, PDM, PLM, ERP, etc. To be able to identify correlated documents can be an interesting solution.

Archives
The cost of storage is growing down. I’d expect IT in few more years will be discussing an option how to have all data on “spinning disks”. Flash storage is still expensive. So, a question of archiving and identification of drawing in archives can be interesting as well.

What is my conclusion today? I think, the problem of identification is a huge one. With all respect to our paperless future, we are document-driven society. I’m not touching now the future CAD on the cloud without files. We are still in a very preliminary stage in our trials to understand the problem of handling documents globally. There are many aspects that I mentioned in this post, and it seems to me, they are still very distributed within an organization’s boundary and beyond. I can envision kind of layered solution that will solve this problem. I’m looking forward to your comments and discussion.

Best, Oleg

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Top 3 Elements of a Successful Social PLM Strategy

July 14, 2010

My new website and blog is BeyondPLM. The original post is here.

Social is trending these days. We can see this, analyzing the broad change in the Internet trend usages these days. What happens is a shift towards social tools and Facebook is definitely game changer in this space.

So, the new hero was born. Facebook. Is it the new way to solve all existing problems? Well, not all problems, but probably only part of them. The massive introduction of various strategies affiliated with “social” and “Facbook” is trending. I can see many new systems and strategies that just introduced from multiple well established players in hardware, enterprise software companies and small startups. Some examples (not exhaustive list, of course) -  IBM Lotus Social, Cisco Quad, SAP Stream Work,PTC Windchill Social Link, Vuuch and others.

It made me think about comparison between core Facebook use cases and a specific enterprise use case (may be including some PLM-like flavor). The core success of Facebook was built on top of the one mainstream usage – sharing of text, links, pictures and videos between friends, which included a very interested approach in information stream syndication. I had chance to write about that in one of my previous posts – Social PLM: More Syndication and Less Communities.

However, after thinking about this use case in the context of enterprise engineering or manufacturing organization, I came to the conclusion that Facebook cloning may not bring desired results similar to Facebook’s social networking. As Vuuch’s Chris Williams wrote in one of his comments on my blog – following all connections in the organization is not such important step. I found three elements that, in my view, can make your social PLM-effort successful:

1. Data

Design, Engineering and Manufacturing data is a “different animal” from simple pictures, videos and link shared on Facebook. You need to give to your “social PLM” an ability to use right contextual data for social collaboration. This is not a simple task to do. Most of the use cases related to “collaboration” are actually started from the well understanding of data you are going to collaborate with. That’s why many of the pure collaborative systems failed during their implementation in enterprise organizations.

2. Connectivity

Simply put – you cannot be “half-connected”. In order to have a successful social system, you need to establish a broad connectivity inside of the organization. The ultimate way to do it is a still email. Therefore, your goal is to take over email or becomes integrated with email in a very deep way. People can hardly accept a second way to communicate, socialize and collaborate. This is too complex in today’s world.

3. Devices

The last one. Desktop, or even laptop computers, are not playing the role of a single possible device. You don’t have to be on your desk to “make a decision” or to collaborate with your colleagues. So, to support broad set of the devices is another pre-requisite, in my view. That’s why, Cisco’s experiments with their social platform running out of their phone devices looks very interesting to me.

What is my conclusion? Facebook and other social software generated a missive trend in enterprise applications. This trend will impact everything that PLM is trying to accomplish for years. I can see many Facebook-clones today. To create a successful Facebook-clone will require to understand the content and specific characteristics of enterprise and PLM applications. Just my thoughts..

Best, Oleg

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PLM Think Tank – Top 5 Posts, June 2010

July 13, 2010

My new website and blog is BeyondPLM. The original post is here.

This week I am launching my new web site Beyond PLM. I started my first blog Daily PLM Think Tank on plmtwine.com back in 2008. PLM Think Tank is my attempt to discuss innovative ideas and thoughts about Product Lifecycle Management. Now I decided to expand my online experience. I felt PLM boundaries put some restrictions on the topics I wanted to discuss and, occasionally, I felt bound to a specific context. So, I had the idea of Beyond PLM. This is my contribution to the community of people looking for information about Engineering and Manufacturing Software. We live in a world of information. It is everywhere. However, it is still not so easy to get information you need. My belief is that one day information will be easily available where you need it at the time you need it. This is the future how I see it.

Now, PLM Think Tank June’s Top 5:

Open vs. Closed PLM Debates

This post started long debates around openness in PLM. Openness is not a simple topic. My conclusion, so far, is that vendors are selling as much openness as they need at the time they need. Openness can be compensated by other factors, such as, coolness. We are going to see more and more stories related to development of Open strategies. There are clearly two possible options: 1/To create excellent integrated product suites and sell them to customers (i.e. Apple story) or 2/To develop open strategies. My take – I think Open game is hard. However, the prize can be big.

How to Manage ECO without paying $1’500

The idea of this post came from a Google buzz conversation. I think, we came to the point where everybody in the organization is looking how to work differently. It is not only about how much to spend on the particular software package. It is about how to organize work better and simpler. The technology doesn’t matter. I’m taking “microshare” as an option. We need a technology that can allow to user to work in simpler manner.

PLM Lifelike Search Injection

These analyzes and thoughts came out of DS-Exalead acquisition. DS acquisition reminded us again, that PLM space is alive and will continuously provide innovative solutions for enterprises. Search is not a new kid in the PLM solutions. All PLM vendors in the past made deals with providers of enterprise searches: Endecca and Autonomy. It will be interesting to see how DS will merge Exalead concept of SBA (Search Based Application) into their portfolio.

PLM and ALM: How To Blend Disparate Systems?

I’m touching in this post a problem of work with disparate engineering and enterprise systems in the context of PLM and ALM. The landscape of application involved in this product development is very large. The number of applications is growing. The ability to absorb the requirements of all applications into one minimal single standards schema seems impossible. The new and more efficient way to interlink data need to be proposed. We don’t need to bring software build and engineering bill of materials to a single representation. However, we need to be able to interlink data related to different applications to maintain data integrity.

PLM and A Single Point of Disagreement

There is well know PLM statement about creation of “single point of truth”. Is it really possible? I’m discussing some alternative options related to work balancing between different people in an organization. To create an integrated and balanced way to manage product development is not a simple task. PLM is missing this point and assumed the actually data model integration will be created during PLM implementation and will be driven by customers. I can see it as a mistake that makes an implementation process lengthy and implementation costly. To resolve this problem will help to bring a desired simplification into PLM world.

Best, Oleg

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PLM Data Warehouse: Dream Or Nightmare?

July 12, 2010

My new website and blog is BeyondPLM. The original post is here.

PLM is certainly dealing with lots of data about products: design, engineering, lifecycle data, manufacturing, processes. When/If you speak to PLM software providers and some big customers you can hear term “Data Warehouse”. DW term is not coming originally from PLM domain and related more to the general purpose databases and data management field.

This is a very commonly used definition of Data Warehouse from Wikipedia:

A data warehouse is a repository of an organization’s electronically stored data, designed to facilitate reporting and analysis [1]. This definition of the data warehouse focuses on data storage. However, the means to retrieve and analyze data, to extract, transform and load data, and to manage thedata dictionary are also considered essential components of a data warehousing system. Many references to data warehousing use this broader context. Thus, an expanded definition for data warehousing includes business intelligence tools, tools to extract, transform and load data into the repository, and tools to manage and retrieve metadata.

Data Warehouse Technologies

The technologies for data warehouse most commonly are coming from database and data vendors related domains. There are multiple methodologies and techniques to organize data and make available. The most known in this field are bottom up and top down design for data warehouse. Most of the data warehouse methodologies are focusing on fast data retrieval opposite to transactional databases. With all bright insight made around the data warehouse, their implementations are very expensive and, in my view,  data warehousing technologies are under significant pressure to drop cost and improve the agility of implementations. You can often find multiple data-related implementations that may correspond to data warehousing , such as Business Intelligence, Data Integrations, etc. The newest trends in Business Intelligence are stating that Data Warehousing is ruined and the future BI technologies will bring better solutions in this space. Recently, I had a chance to read a very interesting write up made by TEC – Are Data Warehouses as Dead as the Dodo?, which is exploring a promising future of new BI technologies to replace data warehousing need.

PLM and Data Warehouse

I think, PLM is often using “Data Warehouse” term to underline the power of PLM technologies to manage big amounts of product data. In my view, PLM platforms never took serious steps in the implementation of actual data warehousing. Nevertheless, large PLM implementations done for big aero- and auto- OEMs contain a significant amount of product data that need to be available across the multiple departments and synchronized with multiple applications. You can find an interesting story about Boeing and Airbus PLM data warehousing implementation can be found on TechniGraphics web site. At the time of writing this blog, I could download this paper from the following link. Some interesting numbers from this document- the Boeing Dreamliner data warehouse contains about 16TB of data. PLM needs to deal with large amounts of data. To handle it efficiently seems to be a very interesting problem.

What is my conclusion today? Large PLM implementations need to handle a significant amount of data. Today, DMU implementations are requiring to bring multiple elements of design data to handle analysis and validation of complex products. There are many other product-data related problems that often remained unsolved because of technological complexity. What is the technology available to solve this problem? Is it future HD PLM from Siemens? Or maybe Project Lightning from PTC? Time will show…

Best, Oleg

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Free CAD File Conversion In The Cloud?

July 9, 2010

The problem of CAD file conversion in old and has never been easy. Engineers are working in multiple CAD systems and conversion is a real problem. Quite many companies are in business of CAD conversion. The policy and practice of CAD vendors with regards to their ability to open/save competitor’s files are different. The person who needs to solve this problem is either engineer in a small company or CAD manager or IT in a bigger one. What if… we can find a solution for this problem by leveraging internet scale and cloud availability?

I found an interesting web site http://www.online-convert.com/. The idea behind is pretty simple – you have your file to convert, and you can use services. I found it quite useful for myself.


I tried to Google “CAD File Conversion service online” and wasn’t able to find any similar online service for CAD data. I know, many companies have different solutions and services that either provide you with conversion service or selling a translation software. Is it a time to think how to convert it into an online service? I can think about several monetizing strategies of this service. It sounds simple and viable. What do you think about that? Do you know somebody who tried to accomplish it in the past?

Best, Oleg

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Open PLM – A Climb For Losers?

July 8, 2010

Almost two months ago, I had a chance to read a blog article by Mobile Beat with some intriguing name “Open is for losers” by Dave McClure. Take a look and form your opinion. Understanding the overall intention to provoke a good discussion around this topic, I decided to follow this blog post in some time to read discussion and see people’s opinion on this topic. It happened that independently some of PLM Think Tank posts generated some interesting discussion related to the topic of Openness.

Closed Thoughts About PLM Openness

Open vs. Closed PLM Debates

Today, I want to get back and discuss how I see the future of openness in PLM and Engineering Software.

Standards, Formats, Data Models

The discussion about standards and formats is life long. Do you think CAD and PLM industry will be able to generate a reasonable quality standard answering to the needs of industry? Discussions in this field are varying from request to develop independent formats and ends up by requests to disclosure existing data models, formats, etc. I don’t think these discussions may produce results in near future. The development of common formats and models is too expensive and, in the end, will require to have a set of tools to work with. The interesting potential will be to borrow some of the emerging web technologies.

APIs, Toolkits and Platforms

API is the most referenced way to make software open. Combined with a set of patterns, technologies and buzzwords, this is probably the way to do it in real life. The biggest remaining problem in this space is reliability and compliance of these APIs within the time. In addition, APIs and other internal mechanisms are under heavy licensing by vendors. I don’t see any silver bullet these days that can make any major improvements in this space.

Applications and Solutions

The reality of a current situation is that customers are working with multiple applications, products and solutions. In many situations, I can see no interest for a particular vendor to enable easy data migration from one tool to another. Therefore, we can see multiple software vendors or service providers that can help customers to solve this problem.

What is my conclusion today? How To Climb To Open PLM? This is the most important question that needs to be asked collectively in the industry. I think, the industry movement into PLM openness is the indicator of industry maturity. I can see ups and downs on this road. A critical mass of openness needs to be delivered by vendors to turn on the switch of benefits from open PLM. Multiple established vendors and newcomers will need to invest enough resources to make it happen. The remaining players will be able to deliver better solutions. Some of them can probably die on the road. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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Social PLM: More Syndication and Less Communities

July 7, 2010

I’ve been thinking more about what are the gaps in taking PLM to the next level of collaboration. Social trend started on Web 2.0 sites got explored more and growing Facebook population is just another confirmation of the fact that people are looking for new ways to communicate and work together.In the past few months I had chance to share my thoughts about how I see PLM development catching up with various social trends. Facebook is having the most strong influences on the way social aspects of PLM can be developed for the future. You can take a look on my previous posts related to this topic:

The ABC of PLM Facebooking
PLM and Facebook Open Graph
How To Facebook PLM?

Facebook and Content

In my view, content is one of the big misleading elements of Facebook’s strategies. Lots of people are thinking about Facebook as an ultimate way to generate content. However, posting content to Facebook is not creating desired effect. Facebook is predominantly about people communication and not content creation. I found a very interesting observation about what Facebook is doing in Ken Auletta’s book – Googled.

The comparison of Facebook with phone communication where all participants are on the same line made me think there is a potential to create some similarity in product development organization.

Communication and Context
When Facbook is associated with a single phone conversation, it may not be so practical to be implemented exactly in the same for the business in an organization. The biggest difference, in my view, is that fact business by definition cannot be focused on a single conversation between friends. People in the business can have multiple contexts that create need to communicate. There are many examples – projects, ECOs, design discussions and many others. When using Facebook, your context is a single ‘online conversation’ that happens all the time. To be able to provide multiple contexts can be a challenging task for PLM.

Connect vs. Syndicate
In Facebook-like communication, the connection between people created an ultimate way to syndicate information. Is it true for organizations? No, I don’t think so. Connection between people in the organization has a different meaning. The fact I want to stay connected with a person, still doesn’t mean I want to syndicate an information stream coming from him. The syndication needs to be done on the contextual level, rather than on personal. So, community will have less importance to have a successful social PLM implementation.

What is my conclusion? Facebook provides a new paradigm for information sharing. The way doing so is to syndicate on the fly multiple information streams coming from people you are staying connected. This is the ultimate way to create a single conversation and not multiple conversations. What is the value in Product Lifecycle Management? The idea of syndication is extremely powerful. The way it is catching up now with different “communities concepts” and “social product development” stories might be wrong, in my view. There is a fundamental difference between a need of people to stay connected and information sharing. To apply this difference in a successful manner will be a key question in the future of collaborative systems for product development. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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How Big Is Product Lifecycle Data?

July 6, 2010

Product-related data is one of the most important aspects of any PLM implementation. When you talk about PLM implementation, the topic of product-related data (or IP) is very often becomes a center of the conversation.  There are multiple sources of this type of data in the organization. In my view, one of the PLM goals is to have a control of this data and provide tools to manage the overall lifecycle. One of the PLM implementation challenges is to provide wide support for product-related data. The topic I want to discuss is related the ability of PLM product to handle full scope of this product lifecycle data.

I read the article Oracle, SAP working on Exadata support. The core of this conversation is about how to scale up and provide extensive support for big data handling in the organization. Have a read of this article and make you opinion. Mine is simple – both Oracle and SAP understood the size of the potential problem (data size). They are working in multiple directions to find a solution for data sizing in transactional enterprise application. Should PLM care? This is a very good question in my view…

PLM and Product Lifecycle Data Problem
One of the challenges PLM is having for many years is getting control of product-related data. My observation shows that product-related data is not completely controlled by PLM systems in the majority of PLM implementations. Even with a very successful PLM implementation, data is scattered between multiple data sources and PLM is only one of them. In addition to that, product-related data can be located in the diverse set of applications used for product development.

Product Data, Size and PLM value
The full value of Product Lifecycle Management is directly dependent on how what scope of product-related data is covered by PLM. The wider scope can maximize PLM value for organizations. With all current developments, PLM is looking on starting from design to manufacturing strategies and development of social-oriented application, sizing can easily become one of the potential bottlenecks related to the ability to support large scope of data.

What is my conclusion? I think, to understand sizing of product lifecycle data is important in order to build right operational and strategic plans related to data management. Data is growing fast. Future PLM implementation can suffer from problems related to data sizing. How to scale up PLM implementation in terms of size can be one of the most important questions in the future. Just my thought…

Best, Oleg

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PLM Wood and Open Source Termites?

July 5, 2010

Last week I wrote about PLM and Open Source Big Games. One of my conclusions was that PLM Open Source can become an interesting option in PLM and Enterprise space when it comes as community based development and include the ability to leverage existing Open Source projects  Today, I wanted to come with the example that matches this pattern. SAP is a well known big enterprise outfit that has some stakes in Product Lifecycle Management too. I had chance to read the following article by CMS Wire about CoreMedia Open Source Content Management portal platform for SAP users - CoreMedia Web CMS Readies to Woo SAP Portal Users.

I found this read interesting. SAP Portal developments can be considered as a “dead wood”. SAP has their own portal strategy. In addition, SAP and Microsoft’s partnership brings lots of Microsoft SharePoint stuff in this space as well. However, CoreMedia open content management platform, can be proposed as an open source option to drive some user attention in this space.

The following two quote is very interesting:

Interestingly, many of SAP’s known features — such as collaboration and KM (Knowledge Management) — CoreMedia chose not to support — focusing mainly on the infrastructure/delivery capabilities — citing the fact that they wanted to avoid any “dependencies” on those features based on what they heard about SAP not developing those capabilities in the future.

CoreMedia is already doing some personalization and social software features in the Web CMS, but later on the roadmap we should see more of that being done for SAP customers, so that they can use inherent to SAP transactional data (from CRM, ERP, etc.) to enhance their existing online engagement offerings. Transactional data managed by SAP is becoming more valuable on the web, as organizations are looking to drive the web more dynamically and to have a more personalized website. Hence, more attention to CoreMedia’s Content Application Engine (CAE) in the second phase.

PLM Open Source Platform?

CoreMedia example made me think about what can be a potential open source platform for PLM? All available PLM platforms in the market today are proprietary platforms developed in the last two decades. The cost of any of these platforms is high. To develop a new PLM Platform can be mission impossible. However, you can think about potential injection of open source components into these platforms. This can be a gradual process that will make a transformation into PLM platforms towards additional openness and significant cost saving for customers. The focus of such injection can be around infrastructure and not around end user modules. It will allow to lay a foundation for the future community development and contribution.

What is my conclusion? PLM. Wooden Platforms. Open Source Infrastructure Termites. It can be an interesting option to disrupt existing PLM software. Remember Jim Brown’s Who Will Disrupt Entrenched PLM Vendors? The Open Source option was there too… The potential benefits are clear to me – cost, openness, community benefits. There is a danger too. The complexity of PLM projects is very high. A significant level of integration requires to make PLM projects successful. Will Open Source Platform be capable of handle it?  What do you think about that? Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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