Excel Kingdom and Thoughts about PLM Data Openness

June 19, 2013

Data is a fascinating topic these days. The amount of data is growing and it raises lots of concerns on both – consumers and business sides of the world. Last week I’ve been blogging about web data common project. Openness is another interesting issue that debates by many people today. Semantic web blog posted about session discussing open data on the web at the Semantic Tech and Business conference last week made by W3C eGov consultant Phil Archer. Navigate here to read more. Most of us is associating open data with linked data. One of the most interesting discovery mentioned by the article was the fact of Excel data dominance on the web. Here is an interesting passage:

“JSON and CSVs are the kings,” he said. “If you look at open data portals, CSVs [which get converted to JSON files] outweigh Linked Data by a mile,”

He brings an interesting story about Open Knowledge Foundation describing CKAN platform enabling publishing CSV files in a semantic way to the net.

The OKF is responsible for the CKAN platform that the U.S. open government data portal, data.gov, now incorporates. “CKAN,” Archer said during his presentation, “is a really important platform and basically it’s about publishing CSVs, and it spits out a bit of RDF data.” He also noted that Dr. Rufus Pollock, founder and co-director of the Open Knowledge Foundation, has proposed a new standard for a data package that includes CSV and JSON. Frictionless Data, now in alpha, includes as principles using web-native formats like JSON. It defines a data package for delivery, installation and management of datasets, with a Simple Data Format (SDF) at heart whose key features are CSV for data, single JSON file (datapackage.json) to describe the dataset including a schema for data files, and the reuse wherever possible of existing work including other Data Protocols specifications.

The story of CSV dominance on the web made me think about the future of open data in manufacturing and enterprise organizations. Organizations have zillons of Excel files located everywhere. Packaging of data in a semantic way makes a lot of sense and it increases the openness of enterprise software platforms including PLM.

What is my conclusion? Openness is important. Companies of all sizes are struggling with the amount of data located in Excel files. It is not reliable and actually not open. To access data from Excel files and make it available across the organization can be interesting imperative forcing company to be more open. PLM original intent was to drive companies stop poisoning organizations with Excel infusions. However, the implementation is far from the ideal. PLM technology providers should make a note. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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Cloud PLM and Google Loon Sunday Dreams

June 17, 2013

Sunday is a good day to dream and think about something completely crazy and impossible. More than four years ago I started to explore the potential of cloud PLM on my blog. If you are long time readers you can probably remember my Where is PLM on industry cloud map? or PLMosaur, Traditional PLM and SaaS Newbies. Cloud PLM is a real thing these days. PLM vendors are approaching cloud PLM is a different ways. Nevertheless, cloud PLM is here and real manufacturing companies are using cloud PLM every day.

However, here is the thing – you can solve technical issues related to configuration of cloud-based software, you can improve security and certification. However, even if it sounds strange, the connection to internet is something that really hard to get in some places in our planet today.

I’ve been reading about Google Project Loon during the weekend. Navigate to Google’s blog to read more. Google has an ambitious plans to bring internet to places in the planet that today are disconnected. It also means that cost of internet connection will be going down. Take a look on the video explaining Google tech in details.

What is my conclusion? Yes, Google Loon is still a dream. However, think about some tech that we keep in our hands these days. Even 5-10 year ago we didn’t think it would be impossible to run video calls from mobile phone and use cloud based software on tablets to solve engineering simulation tasks. Maybe in 5 years, Google Loon will solve internet connectivity problem and open an additional opportunities for engineering and manufacturing? Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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Cloud PLM and disruptive technology economic impact

June 14, 2013

We love word “disruptive”. It is so nice and tasty. However, very often, we use it without thinking twice what does it mean. Read materials from many startups and large companies – you found lots of statements about “disruptive technology” or “disruptive innovation”. Wikipedia article provides a very decent definition of what disruptive innovation and technology mean.

A disruptive innovation is an innovation that helps create a new market and value network, and eventually goes on to disrupt an existing market and value network (over a few years or decades), displacing an earlier technology. The term is used in business and technology literature to describe innovations that improve a product or service in ways that the market does not expect, typically first by designing for a different set of consumers in the new market and later by lowering prices in the existing market. The term “disruptive technology” has been widely used as a synonym of “disruptive innovation”, but the latter is now preferred, because market disruption has been found to be a function usually not of technology itself but rather of its changing application. Sustaining innovations are typically innovations intechnology, whereas disruptive innovations change entire markets.

I’ve been reading McKinsey Names the Most Over-Hyped (and Under-Hyped) Major Technologies Out There article earlier this week. McKinsey made an analyzes of projected economic impact of disruptive technologies. I found the diagram interesting.

Navigate here if you want to read a full report. I also found the following passage notable.

In its latest report, MGI set out to answer an even more unanswerable question: What will be the economic impact of the dozen most “disruptive” technologies, including utility devices that talk to each other, cars that drive themselves, and printers that can print printers? Their summary graph is the image that kicks off this post. In a sentence: There’s mobile Internet, and then there’s everything else.

What is my conclusion? To predict a future is one of the most risky things. McKinsey ranked cloud as #4 by a potential economic impact. In my view, cloud can make a difference. Will cloud drive future difference of enterprise software and PLM systems? Pure speculations… Nevertheless, I like McKensey’s numeric approach. PLM vendors must take note – the time of fluffy marketing is about to end. Data first. I’m looking forward to see numbers presenting an economic impact of cloud enterprise systems and to compare with a traditional enterprise software stack. Interesting time. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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CAD, Cloud Folders and Search Apps

June 13, 2013

Dear Mr. Manufacturing CIO. I have good news for you – engineers in your your organization are already using cloud services. However, let me point on bad news too – people in your organization are using cloud services. Navigate to my previous blog – PLM cloud concerns and Dropbox reality for engineers. You can learn that 34% of engineering department is second biggest group of people saving data in the Dropbox. Which means CAD files and Excel spreadsheets are going to the cloud.

Thinking about expanding of cloud services in engineering and manufacturing departments, you find Folder paradigm as a dominant one dragging people and data to the cloud. You can easy come with a long list of well established companies and many startups – Dropbox, Google, Microsoft, etc. Only very lazy people these days are not developing a service that store your data to the cloud.

However, by making access to cloud folders easy, these vendors created an opportunity for engineers to bypass PDM vendors (again :) ) and just use cloud folders exactly in the same way they’ve been using local and network drives to store and share engineering data. Maybe you remember my old blog – A moment before CAD files cloud mess… A year ago, I discussed what will happen if uncontrolled stream of CAD file data will be placed on the cloud. So, it happens now. Mr. CIO has nothing to do with that, in my view. People like to collaborate using Google Drive and Dropbox.

Here is the question – how to organize a mess? I want to get back to search topic again. In my view, search might be a good solution for that. Think about finding a way of organizing data by searching the right content and exposing information in an easy digestible way. I’ve been watching videos about startup Docurated – NY based startup focusing on how to get an easy access to documents by providing search, classification and visualization of documents

What is my conclusion? The idea of organizing data via search is not new. However, the tricky part is to do it in a way which will allow easy and painless way to get access to folders and files. Another aspects – focused application for a specific tasks. People are tired of complicated product suites. Simple apps is valuable alternative. To have small app to get job done is right way is a sweet spot for many startup companies these days. Maybe not only for startups… PLM vendors need to take a note here. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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About PLM Islands and Russian Search

June 11, 2013

Recently, I’ve been talking a lot of search paradigm and findability in PLM. In many aspects, web search changed our life. Search remains one of the fundamental user experience in consumer space and web. We search for tasks, locations, emails, friends, events and many other things. Search is different when we speak about business. Enterprise search as a software that helps to search information inside applications data sources inside a company is around many years. However it is a different type of solution even today. In PLM domain, we can different patterns of search development by vendors. I described some of them here – Multiple Facets of PLM search.

One of the most interesting patterns related to search are actually starts after you find a desired sources of information. One of the trends here is to simplify user experience and make search rich and actionable. You probably familiar with Google Rich Snippet functionality. It presents a combined set of information about the result and some actions (sometimes buttons and sometimes other user interface elements) that can lead you to a target web site or specific activities. However, Google is not alone in their strategy to make information access easier and actionable.

Here is another example of actionable search user experience. It called Islands and it presented by Russian search company – Yandex. Navigate your browser to the following article – Think Google’s rich snippets are useful? Russia’s Yandex goes one better. The following passage explains how Yandex islands functionality works:

Let’s say the user searches for “Moscow Berlin air tickets.” A normal search result will link to an airline’s website. A rich snippet will also present direct links to the airline’s booking or special offers pages, perhaps along with the airline’s telephone booking number and its opening times. An island, or interactive snippet, could present a form through which the user can check into their flight online or begin the booking process based on real-time data – right from within Yandex’s search results.

Yandex Islands and Google Rich snippets made me think about some user experience transformations in PLM user experience. Think about transforming results into actionable information. Couple of examples. Working with document reviews scenario. You search for documents and have the ability to access multiple viewable including sharing and review actions. Another one is more related to structured processes like engineering change order (ECO). This scenario can start from ECO search. When you found a specific ECO, can get an access to important ECO details (description, dependencies) as well as make action (review, approve, etc.). I’m sure can come with more examples how to turn regular PLM scenarios easier with the use of rich search user interface.

What is my conclusion? User experience excellence. This is what matters these days. It is about how to innovate by focusing on small details of interaction between users and software. It is about how to optimize information and action flow. To eliminate additional clicks, switches between screens and bring some consumer practice to enterprise systems like PLM is the goal. It can be an interesting step towards future PLM excellence. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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Why PLM should care about Web Data Commons Project?

June 10, 2013

Big data is one of the biggest hyped buzzwords of the last two years. With all hype around, it is very hard to find a good definition when it comes to a simple question about what “big data” means for every specific case in your industry and your applications. The following definition is how wikipedia describes big data:

Big data[1][2] is a collection of data sets so large and complex that it becomes difficult to process using on-hand database management tools or traditional data processing applications. The challenges include capture, curation, storage, search, sharing, transfer, analysis,[4] and visualization.

Web is an interesting place to dig for new sources of information. These days web is going much beyond just web pages and database driven websites. Web contains lots of structured information that can be used by businesses. Manufacturing companies are one of them. Information about products, customers, interests, priorities – this is a new goldmine era for web researchers.

I’ve been skimming the information from semanticweb.com website. The publication about Web Data common project caught my attention. Web data common is about structured data on the internet. Here is an interesting snippet about what it does:

More and more websites embed structured data describing for instance products, people, organizations, places, events, resumes, and cooking recipes into their HTML pages using markup formats such as RDFa, Microdata and Microformats. The Web Data Commons project extracts all Microformat, Microdata and RDFa data from the Common Crawl web corpus, the largest and most up-to-data web corpus that is currently available to the public, and provide the extracted data for download in the form of RDF-quads and also in the form of CSV-tables for common entity types (e.g. product, organization, location, …). In addition, we calculate and publish statistics about the deployment of the different formats as well as the vocabularies that are used together with each format.

Dig a bit inside to learn about statistics of structured data. You can see some information here – Additional Statistics and Analysis of the Web Data Commons August 2012 Corpus. According to this statistic, product-related information is the most popular in the data corpus researched. Look on the following passage:

Products in RDFa. We identified three RDFa classes, og:”product”, dv:Product, and gr:Offering, that are used each on at least 500 different websites for describing products. og:”product” is the most popular class, being used by more than 19,000 websites.

In addition to that, product data was found in websites using microdata and microformats.

Reviewing all Microdata classes that are used in more than 100 different websites, we could identify four classes, schema:Product, schema:Offer, datavoc:Product, and datavoc:Offer, that are frequently used to describe products or offers. The following table shows the co-occurences of these classes with other product-related classes on the same website. For instance, 4,308 websites provide product data together with aggregate ratings for these products.In addition to the class co-occurrences, we analyzed which properties are frequently used to describe schema:Products. The table below shows that schema:Product/name, schema:Product/description, schema:Product/image, and schema:Product/offers are the most frequently used properties.

What is my conclusion? Manufacturing companies are looking how to improve the decision process related to products. The potential leverage can come from the analyses of web data about products and services. PLM vendors can think about non traditional approaches to get information about products and customers. Important. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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PLM, Data and Automotive Manufacturing

June 7, 2013

ford-data-plm.jpgCAD and PLM vendors have a long history of development product for automotive industry. Major OEMs and their suppliers were one of the first customers long time ago in the history of the computer systems for design and manufacturing. The days when car development was mostly about mechanical design with a small amount of electric wiring are gone completely. Today car manufacturing is a complex process and every car contains over 100M lines of code. The question about how to make improvements in car design and manufacturing process is the one engineering and manufacturing software is supposed to solve these days and in the future.

In the past, main focus of CAD and PLM systems was about how to automate work of engineers, place manufacturing orders and sometimes organize supply chain. It is much more complicated these days. Customers are getting involved into design process process. Customized design and an increased amount of configurations is not an unusual thing these days. Customer feedback is getting more important. What your customers are saying about car experience, what happens with the car after it leaves manufacturing facilities. Dealership, maintenance and many other things. Supply chain is getting more complex and requires more sophisticated optimizations.

One of many lessons companies are learning these days – data matters. Having data about what you do or how to do your business better becomes a key and in some situations can be a game changer for a business. So, where it can come to automotive companies. I’ve been reading an interesting article by GigaOM – How data is changing the car game for Ford. It covers few very interesting areas of how data can provide a competitive advantage for car manufacturer. The following pasage was my favorite:

Mashing up data sources such as social and sales in order to find insights is a pretty easy sell, Cavaretta explained, but getting people to put sensors in everything and collect data every second or with every transaction can still be a bit challenging. In part, this is just a lingering effect of the constraints that legacy technologies imposed on the company. It wasn’t possible to store all this data, so people just got accustomed to the status quo of summarizing data hourly, for example.

Now, however, he’s pushing them to “dial it down” and collect data at the lowest level possible and as often as possible. In manufacturing alone, he explained, there are between 20,000 and 25,000 parts in any given vehicle, and there’s a supply chain that spans from parts suppliers all the way up to dealerships. Getting a complete view of this process could help drive serious efficiencies and, Cavaretta said, “We don’t see anything but big data technologies that can get us there.”

The question you obviously can ask – what does it mean for CAD/PLM companies and how enterprise software business can leverage that. Manufacturing companies are under significant pressure to improve processes and cut cost. This is a new nightmare for modern manufacturing. It is not enough to apply "next big single thing" like agile, kanban or something else. Customers are expecting software companies to provide a connected experience that helps manufacturing companies to focus on goals and not on design, engineering of manufacturing. To provide design tools is not enough these days.

What is my conclusion? Decision matters. Companies are looking for software that helps to make a decision. What is the right part to use? What is the right supplier to work with? What is the right price to buy? How to improve existing processes based on actual data can be an interesting opportunity. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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Multiple Facets of PLM Search

June 6, 2013

Disclosure: As a co-founder of Inforbix and responsible of PLM 360 and Autodesk Vault product development at at Autodesk, I understand that my opinion about PLM Search can be unintentionally biased. Nevertheless, I believe the topic itself is very important, so I decided to share the information and my opinion anyway.

Search is a fascinating topic. Last 10 years changed our understanding about what search can do. Google clearly made a revolution in search and made a revolution in people’s mind about what search can do. Enterprise software companies, in general, and CAD / PLM vendors specifically started to pay attention to search for the last 3-5 years. Getting back you can recall Microsoft / FAST, Oracle / Endeca, Dassault Systems / Exalead, Autodesk / Inforbix and some other events.

Couple of weeks ago, I’ve been talking about PLM Search and Findability. Product development content is complex and semantically rich. In many cases, it leads to the situations where person doesn’t even know what to search and where to search. Another very important topic connected to search is data reuse. Navigate to my previous post here to read more. In my view, search is one of the fundamental mechanisms that can simplify data re-use by allowing to find data and eliminate re-entering of data between different application silos.

I’m following different implementations of PLM search. Today I want to highlight three examples of different approaches on PLM search – Siemens PLM Active Workspace, Autodesk PLM360 search and Aras/Alcove9 search.

Active Workspace – complexity and visual experience

Siemens PLM came with Active Workspace last year. The complexity of existing PLM implementations raises the question of usability of PLM system. I’m sure you remember my post – Who will provide PLM for Boeing in 2015? Active Workspace is Siemens PLM answer to complexity of user experience.

PLM 360 search – cloud and Google-like approach

Autodesk PLM360 is taking cloud approach to search to solve problem of information connectivity and reuse. PLM 360 search allows to search in PLM environment as well as in files sources located on shared network drives and local discs. By doing that, PLM 360 search enable ease of information discovery from the cloud regardless of where this information is located.

Aras Search – open source and existing UI paradigm

Aras PLM is following their open source strategy and partnering with Alcove9 to provide open source search approach. Alcove9 leverage Lucene and Solr to provide search solution. To simplify the use of search, Aras is embedding search in existing Aras UI.

What is my conclusion? PLM vendors will continue to innovate in search. Consumerization trend creates a significant pressure on IT department to provide a better experience for information workers. To get access to the right information at the right time is a reality of every product development organization these days. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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Cloud PLM and PaaS Dilemma

June 4, 2013

IaaS, PaaS, SaaS… Most probably you are familiar with this abbreviations. These are fundamental layers in cloud computing these days. IaaS stands for Infrastructure as a service. PaaS stands for Platform as a Service and, finally, SaaS stands for Software as a Service. These concepts were around for some time. SaaS is probably one of the earliest and it became a delivery model for many software providers these days. Salesforce.com, Google Apps, Workday – this is a very short list of notable SaaS providers. On the opposite side, IaaS offers virtual computing power – virtual machines, servers, storage, networks, etc. Amazon delivered the most reliable IaaS infrastructure today – AWS. Other competitors are scratching their heads these days trying to understand how to compete with that.

Let me get back to engineering, manufacturing, PDM and PLM. IaaS and specifically AWS became a mainstream for almost everybody. It is hard to find development organization that is not using AWS for some purposes. Massive amount of cloud applications today are dependent on IaaS cloud infrastructure. Some of PLM vendors decided to to leverage the power of IaaS to turn their existing solutions into cloud ones. I covered this topic couple of months ago here – Cloud PLM and IaaS Option.

The part of SaaS is clear as well. We can see a growing number of cloud (SaaS) applications. Notable vendors in PLM are Arena Solutions, Autodesk and some others. The topic I want to discuss today is PaaS. According to PaaS wikipedia definition

Platform as a service (PaaS) is a category of cloud computing services that provides a computing platform and a solution stack as a service.[1] Along with software as a service (SaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS), it is a service model of cloud computing. In this model, the consumer creates the software using tools and/or libraries from the provider. The consumer also controls software deployment and configuration settings. The provider provides the networks, servers, storage and other services.[2] PaaS offerings facilitate the deployment of applications without the cost and complexity of buying and managing the underlying hardware and software and provisioning hosting capabilities.[3]

Here are few examples of notable PaaS providers – Heroku, Windows Azure, Google App Engine, and few others. If I think back to the idea of turning you PDM/PLM application to a platform in a conventional (pre- PaaS world), than I will think about usage of PLM as a platform to develop variety of applications and implementations. If you remember history of PDM /PLM platforms, you probably agree with me that it took a significant effort and time to leading PLM vendors to create platforms that can be easy used and evolve in the future is incredibly complicated tasks. Still existing platforms such as Enovia, TeamCenter and Windchill are complex and hard to use. It made me think more about PaaS and ability of PLM to leverage PaaS in the future.

The following article caught my attention last week – The problem with PaaS. Read this article and make your opinion. According to the article, the central paradigm of PaaS is to provide development and deployment environment to the user. I found the following passage interesting. It describes the problem very well. Take a read.

The central idea of PaaS is the CSP provides a development and deployment environment to the user. True, PaaS abstracts the underlying infrastructure, but that’s the role of the IaaS underneath the PaaS platform. The goal of PaaS is to abstract the development environment details themselves. Unfortunately, building an abstraction at this level is extraordinarily difficult, because developers typically require fine-grained, hands-on control of their development environments. Change a classpath or config file setting or environment variable or any number of other nuts and bolts that make up a coder’s day-to-day work environment, and everything the developer has built will crash and burn.

What is my conclusion? What is the future of PLM and PaaS? It is a complicate task to build a scalable, flexible and expandable PLM platform in the cloud. Some vendors are following this path now and some of PLM vendors are looking how to turn their existing systems into cloud PaaS. I can hardly see how cloud vendors will be able to leverage existing PaaS because of complexity of implementations, integrations and system conflicts. It would be very interesting to see if one of the existing cloud PLM products will turn into scalable PLM PaaS. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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Why PLM needs to shift focus from buyers to users?

June 3, 2013

Enterprise systems for long time are well-known as a place where IT plays the role of the king on the road. ERP, CRM and many other enterprise systems and implementations proved that. If you want to sell to enterprise organization, you need to focus on key IT people, preferable on CIO, Chief of Engineering, Manufacturing etc. Earlier this year, I had a healthy debate about this topic following my blog post – PLM, Viral Sales and Enterprise Old Schoolers.

The disruption in Enterprise IT is one that I see as one of the most interesting trends these days in enterprise space. The following presentation caught my attention yesterday – The challenges and opportunities of business in the disruptive tech era. I recommend you to take a look on this even the presentation is 56 slides. However, the following slide stands out and resonate with the point I wanted to make about IT.

Let’s get back to PLM domain. In the existing ecosystems, there are two major ways to sell and implement PDM/PLM projects. One can be made indirectly mostly via CAD vendors channels. The complexity of these implementations is limited and these implementations (with some small number of exclusions) are limited to catch the level of enterprise IT. Another one is a direct channel developed by PLM and ERP vendors selling PLM implementations to top level management in IT organizations. The higher level of IT people is better.

I can see multiple reasons why existing IT is not getting excited about technological disruption in PLM and other enterprise organization. The disruption means changes and changes are usually come with the lost of control and existing status. For example, cloud means no servers need to installed, implementations can be done remotely and product development has a better chances to focus on user experience and business needs rather than on how to implement and run enterprise deployments.

What is my conclusion? The future of PLM implementation will shift focus from PLM buyers to PLM users. At the end of the days, people need to get job done. PLM needs to focus on user needs, user experience and the ability of systems to help people in everyday business life. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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