PLM Wave Or “Good Enough” Collaboration

August 5, 2010

Six months ago, I posted “Collaboration Trends or Why I Stopped Using Google Wave?“. After Google’s announcement about Google Wave termination yesterday, I read it again. Actually, I found it very consistent to my feeling back in January 2010. Here is my top 4 list of Google Wave problems:  (1) Isolation. (2) Another application to run. (3) Documents and other Google App integration. (4) Inbox management.

In all streams of information related to Google’s decision about the wave, the following tweet got my top score. If you remember, Google Wave supposed to re-invent email. During all of my experiments with Google Wave, I wanted to bring it back to my email. Does it mean email is so good?

Email and “Good Enough” Principle

How many times when you asked a developer about a particular feature, you’ve heard the following answer – “but, this is cool…”? I agree, coolness is a definitely important factor. However, when it comes to some zones in our life, coolness is not what we expect. There is something I call – mainstream communication. Email is part of this. You want to have a predictable result from sending email. Email works in a seamless way. Email is the one, I need. Yes, it is 20 years old with almost no change. But sometimes, it is simply “good enough”.

“False Start” and Collaboration Demands

I’m sure you are familiar with the term – “false start“. I think we have a sort of false start in many efforts related to collaboration. When it comes to phone calls, chat, video, screen sharing it seems to me reasonable. However, sometime, we need to take a breath and… think. Not to collaborate, but think. Therefore, one of the Google Wave features, such as, “typing together” – a cool Google Wave feature, can be considered as a ‘false start’. And this is not the only one…

PLM Collaboration

Some of  my initial thoughts about PLM collaboration in the context of what happened with Google Wave. I see lots of them are ‘false starts’. It is related to multiple situations when “collaborate” is a goal in products we are making. However, don’t forget – collaboration is just a tool to get results. So, to have it email like, maybe not a bad idea at all.

What is my conclusion? One of Google’s principles of “good enough” solution worked against Google with Wave. Email is good enough. There is no need for Wave. Despite the face, people hate email, I think, most of the people are feeling very comfortable with an email solution and new “sparkling” Google Wave innovation was only a new toy to play with. Users voted for proven old fashioned email to stay in their comfort zone. I think, there are some lessons learned to all PLM innovators in the “social collaboration” space. I will come with some of my thoughts about that later.

Best, Oleg

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Wikipedia: PLM Open Source Reference?

August 5, 2010

It becomes very common to use Wikipedia for most research projects. It becomes an ultimate source of information open for everybody. Do you think Wikipedia can become an open source reference for the information about software for engineering and manufacturing? Kind of Open Source PLM reference place?

What is a good source of knowledge about CAD, PDM, PLM and other systems? What can be used as a consolidated information reference? Think how much time we are spending in discussions about terminology, names, useful practices? What if Wikipedia will become this sort of knowledge? To understand current “state of the art”, I spent some time browsing PLM-related resources on Wikipedia. Here is my list of the references and my conclusion.

Terminology

I found quite complicated to work on well known TLAs. The search for PLM, brings the following definition:
Product lifecycle management, the process of managing the entire lifecycle of a product. In addition, multiple searches for relevant terms are available. One of them stated as a PLM (marketing) is very far from product lifecycle management definitions and hardly can be a reference.
Some of other useful links - CAD, PDM, PLM, CAE, CAM. .

Companies

This part of Wikipedia is in a good shape, in my view. Most of the companies are represented. Sometimes, you can find interesting link redirection caused by company acquisitions, renaming and re-branding.

Autodesk
Aras (wasn’t intuitive to find- who may think searching for Corp.?)
Arena Solutions
Bentley Systems (was confused by multiple links to Bentley cars)
Dassault Systems (contains lots of links on deleted pages as a result of re-branding)
SolidWorks
PTC

Siemens PLM (recently renamed as Siemens Industry Software, according to upFront.eZine)

This is, of course, not a full list. I just started to come with some initial list and examples.

Standards

I found as a very complicated task to find PLM related standards. I found STEP (ISO 10303) pages in a relatively good shape. Also, list of “Engineering Standards” returned by Wikipedia search contains a list of interesting resources.

Other Resources

I found PLMPedia as a good resource of information about PLM. The PLMPedia initiative belongs to the Russian forum isicad.

What is my conclusion? I think the industry need to have a good reference source. Wikipedia is an excellent open source reference that can be adopted and used by lots of engineers and developers. These days I can see quality of industry is in supporting “open source reference”. Wikipedia is a good candidate for such information placement.

If you are aware about any additional information resources related to CAD, PLM and other engineering and manufacturing software, please send me links or comment on blog.

Best, Oleg

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PLM Collaboration: 5 Questions to Ask Before You Make a Choice

August 3, 2010


Collaboration is a widely used term, and I found it sometime even overused. Collaborative development, Collaborative PDM, Collaborative PLM, Collaborative design, etc. Collaboration market has grown rapidly over the past few years with many companies are trying to get slice of this huge market space. However, I found, people usually can be confused when they need to decide about what collaboration tool to choose. So, I wanted to come with this list of questions that may help you in during this choice.

1. Where will your team be working?
This is a very important question to answer. Despite a wide adoption of the internet, the availability of high-quality fast internet lines is going down significantly if you move outside of North America and Europe. You need to take into account how the tool of your choice will perform in such a situation.

2. What is the scalability of a tool?
Another, obvious, but extremely important case is a scalability factor. How the tool will be able to scale up. There are multiple characteristics, I’d propose to use here: 1/ the ability for more than 2 people to participate in a collaborative session; 2/ the ability to scale up with the number of people in an organization; 3/ ability to run multiple collaboration sessions concurrently.

3. What is the level of integration?
You definitely want to have a tool that able to provide you integration with your environment – operation systems, virtual environments, design tools and many others. For design and product development, the integration with CAD viewers, CAD systems and other specific tools can be a significant portion of your decision.

4. How stable is a company producing the tool?
There are two main criteria you want to analyze with regards to a company-vendor stability. 1/ the newcomer factor; 2/ merger and acquisition factor. There are many newcomers who are trying to provide solutions in this space. You want to estimate the level of risk in working with a new vendor. Another one, you need to estimate what is the potential of a company-vendor to be acquired and stop providing a support for functions that will be important for you.

5. How bleeding edge do you need to be?
This is last, but not least. New technologies are fascinating and important. However, you need to decide and balance between new technological beta versions and stable applications that need to be used in a production environment. Your team will not appreciate multiple disconnects, interruptions and other “premature effects” that usually coming with new products.

What is the conclusion? Collaborative tools are very important, in my view. Global development environment, manufacturing and need to support your customers and vendors can put collaboration tools in the list of mission critical applications.

I know, it is hard to come with a short list. Nevertheless, this is my initial shot. I’m looking forward to hearing if you had an experience in your decisions related to collaborative tools. Please share it with me.

Best, Oleg

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Chrysler, PLM Platforms and Business Realities

August 2, 2010

I read news from the last week – Chrysler Group LLC contracts with Siemens PLM software for product design and development platform. It wasn’t a big surprise, since initial information about it leaked into the news back into May 2010. The news about large companies switching over big software vendors are always provoking. Each time it presented as a big deal for winning company and complete disaster for another side. However, I don’t have an intent to discuss particular details related to Siemens-Chrysler deal. Navigate your browser on Chrysler CATIA Siemens PLM and you will get a full list of news articles and relevant blog posts. I’d like to use this news as a context to talk about how I see present and future of PLM platforms in a modern business environment.

Business Realities
Modern enterprise landscape is very dynamic. It can be characterized by high dynamic of environmental changes, unstable business conditions, multiple M&A activities. In such realities, PLM-related decisions becomes even more complicated than usual. This situation brings a complex of questions: How to maintain multiple systems? How to work with multiple projects/programs? How to define a roadmap for the future PLM platform development in a company?

PLM Platforms and IT Landscape
I can see a significant trend towards the development of integrated PLM platforms. The initial signs of this trend became visible 3-5 years ago. In my view, today, the strategy of major PLM providers is to develop solid PLM platforms with a significant vertical integration. The objective of such platforms are to provide a stable and well adjusted set of integrated design, engineering and manufacturing planning functions. We’ve seen the formation of such a platform based on Siemens TeamCenter unification, DS V6 platform as well as PTC products. The maturity of these platforms is a good sign for users. At the same time, coupled with the business reality, they can introduce the new problems – PLM platforms transformations and impact of dependent organizations (i.e. Suppliers). These new problems are introducing a potential significant impact on engineering and corporate IT.

Flexibility and Openness
Thinking about business realities and PLM platforms, my ultimate conclusion is that in the next ten years we’ll need to be extremely focused on two aspects of PLM platforms – flexibility and openness. Ability of PLM platform to make flexible adaptation to changes can become a key factor in the future platform implementation. PLM will need to support acquisitions and transformation related not only to the business, but also to engineering and manufacturing activities.

Can We Achieve A Single Point Of Truth?
Part of PLM vision is well known as an ability to provide “a single point of truth” for a company. One of the fundamental questions I’d like to ask if this vision will keep up in the future. With an increased level of complexity, growing number or business systems, bigger scale and fast changes, the “single point of truth” vision can remain as a vision only. I had a chance to discuss it in one of my previous posts – PLM and A Single Point of Disagreement.

So, what is my conclusion today? Changes in large enterprise systems are very expensive and painful for the organization and eco-systems (contractors, suppliers, customers, etc.). The result of having multiple systems can create significant difficulties in operation and management. On the other side, changes may take long period of time and become an on-going effort. The future of large enterprise systems is interesting. My take – watch this space.

Best, Oleg

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