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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3 Steps To Improve PLM Collaboration

June 28, 2010

In the landscape of PLM, collaboration is overused word. You can hear “collaborative” a lot, and you’d be thinking all problems of collaboration are already solved. However, I think, we are only in the beginning of starting to have a real collaborative solution. The most important thing for a collaborative solution is a context. To have a right context is important, otherwise you cannot efficiently collaborate. Think about emails or files. You cannot be sure your co-worker or manager is looking on the same piece of information.

I had chance to read Google Enterprise blog about New Sharing Options in Google Docs. Take a look on the following video.

It made me think about some fundamental things we are missing when creating PLM collaborative solutions.

Unique names for resources
PLM manages different pieces of product data, documents and many other resources. Depending on what is the scope of PLM implementation, the amount of data can vary. What need to be done to collaborate efficiently is to have an ability to provide a unique name for data (or resources) we want to collaborate on. By doing that, we will be able to have a constant context to use for collaboration. The unique resource name can remind you web (URI) – everything on the web has their own unique naming. We can use the same to identify your product data in the organization.

Security
An obvious, but very important addition to unique naming/identification. If there are resources, we need to apply security rules to ensure you have appropriated rights to collaborate on the specific data set. Security functions can be global for the organization or local to facilitate a collaboration need for a specific person who may be outside of the organization.

Share Options
The third component of a successful collaboration strategy. You need to be able to invite a person and to provide a particular piece of data as a context. If you use unique naming and appropriated security model, you cannot go wrong. Your context will be always well identified and access by multiple people at the same time. You can use various nice options for share such as an ability to transfer, share, ability to redline, edit or just view. You need also to provide information to users who is sharing this context, for the moment.

What is my conclusion? I think, PLM is using word collaboration very intensively. However, there is one thing, many of the collaborative PLM software is missing – unique name of the resources to collaborate on. Unique resource names can solve lots of problems PLM has today. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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PLM Collaboration and Technological Splashes

May 18, 2010

Technology and products are not always going together. What is the most fascinating to me is to see how technological splashes create future in products. Last year I had chance to discuss Google Wave. It was a completely technological vision with some fuzzy product examples. In my post, last year, I outlined 6 reasons why Google Wave will change PLM collaboration . For me, it was a completely technological opportunity.

In the end of 2009, I found a very interesting development made by SAP. The project code name 12sprints was presented as a SAP’s Web 2.0 future. The focus of this product is interesting. It stated to provide a collaborative decision making tool. “It’s not just a place where things get discussed. It’s where things get done. Invite the right people. Bring in the pertinent data. And choose the most informed course of action with the help of pre-defined, interactive decision-making tools. It’s all built in. Everything you need to get everyone on the same page — finally under one roof.”

SAP transformed 12sprints product into the tool called SAP StreamWork (TM). I found the web site of this product interesting and containing some videos you can consider as worth looking. You can find videos on the following link. In addition, you can see SAP StreamWork is trying to integrate with Google Wave to improve collaborative capabilities. Another interesting aspect is to see who are the StreamWork’s partners – EverNote, Scribd and Box.net, which, in my view, shows very modern technological connections.

The SAP StreamWork story made me think about technological splashes and PLM again. The nature of PLM is very collaborative. Engineers and designers need to collaborate all the time and to bring new technologies into this process is a very important. I wound like to outline few options and capabilities PLM tools can consider to improve their collaborative capabilities.

Online Documents
To be able to share documents is very important for collaboration. There are few separate products in this space coming from different engineering and manufacturing software vendors. Most of them are focusing on CAD and Drawing viewing. Just to name few of them – Autodesk Freewheel, 3DVIA composer, Actify. I’d think about the potential to expand it to additional product in the space of online engineering content in the future.

Tasks Management
Very often, people don’t need to manage complex processes. However, they need to be able to share some collaborative action management environment. The ability to easy create, share and follow up tasks can be a powerful addition to a set of decision making tools

Contextual Decision Tools
I liked some tools introduced by StreamWork, such as Pro/Con table and others. I call them simple decision tools. In my view, this work was inspired by Google Wave Gadgets. I think, we will see more such tools in the future.

What is my conclusion? I think, we will see more and more an enterprise related product splashes following technological invention and vision of products outside of enterprise space. What I liked in the following video is a powerful connection between consumer oriented decision and business association. Consumer and Internet software will continue to disrupt enterprise software and people will be interested how to bring new product waves and ideas to this space. Watch it!

Just my thoughts…
Best, Oleg

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Do We Need Chief Excel Officer To Manage BOM?

February 23, 2010

I had chance to read yesterday Arena’s whitepaper “Whose BOM is it Anyway?”. You can find the link this whitepaper for free download here.The white paper is written as a Disaster Story from a manufacturing going trough the hassle of BOM management using Microsoft Excel.

In the end of white paper, there are 3 tips how to take control of your BOM.

#1 Provide Multiple Views into a Single Consolidated BOM. Every department needs different information from the BOM, so you need to present your BOM in a format that allows each department to access and incorporate the information that is vital to them, without having to fork off a new version for their own use. Consider using a tool designed for this purpose instead of something like Excel, and keep all departmental information related to the BOM in one centralized location that is accessible by all.

#2 improve Visibility of Changes through redlines and notifications. The ability to redline a BOM is critical. A single change in a BOM of 20 columns and 500 lines is very easy and too costly to miss. Redlines enable someone who isn’t intimately familiar with the BOM to pick it up and know instantly what needs attention.

#3 Establish a review and Approval Process that Everyone Agrees to and Stick to it. By consistently following your process, you can make sure that all your changes are reviewed by the right people across multiple departments. This will help you prevent costly errors that result in scrap and rework and ultimately delay your product getting to market.

In addition to these three tips, there is a very nice picture shows Bill of Material shows how Your Product Data is managed by Arena Solution.


This white paper stroke me to think again about my post related to an idea of single Bill Of Material – Seven Rules Towards Single Bill of Material. The main point of my post was about how we can eliminate multiple Bill of Materials in the enterprise and replace it with single one, that contains all we need from design to manufacturing.

As I can read tip 1 – “Provide Multiple Views into a Single Consolidated BOM” with option to have a multiple set of views into this BOM. This is really good news. However, I found the picture presenting bi-directional data exchange with CAD/PDM and ECAD/Component Library. So data need to be synchronized in two directions. In addition ERP/MRP is presented as Item Master Ref (which I believe a reference) to product data in single BOM and probably mean data never going to be synchronized from ERP back to PLM/PDM. This is something that rarely happen if PLM consider as a Single Consolidated BOM.

At this point, of time, I came with strange feelings, similar to what Carlos had from the same white paper. BOMs are starting to fly all over!  However, now, Bills are flying between Product Data storage and all other systems. All systems mentioned on this picture, need to be somehow synchronized. So, you can see flying gizmos inventing magic vacuum cleaners to suck Bill of Material data from the central place where Product Data is stored and moving it between and around with CAD/PDM, ECAD, ERP/MRP. How we can organize this data exchange? Oh, I’m sure there are magic XML (or maybe Excel) files that can go back and forth and do this work. My hunch is that this work is very complicated and the cost of such integration is not cheap.

Unfortunately, this is a reality of every engineering and manufacturing company. Flying Excels with Bill of Materials, or any other representations of the BOMs in any format, is the ultimate way to do real Bill of Material job in the organization. And, this is very expensive work. There are two alternatives I had chance to see in the organization:

(1) to invest big $$$ to make a comprehensive integration (I’ve seen such companies and they are doing very well);
(2) to hire Chief Excel Officer to take care of all BOM/Excels in the company (this is the mainstream situation).

So, what is my conclusion today? The white paper touched the real problem. There are no magic gizmo that can solve integration problem related to Bill of Materials. To create a single point of product data in the organization is not simple. Period.

Just my thoughts…
Best, Oleg

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Microsoft Futuristic PLM Commercials and Google’s reality

December 8, 2009

Some thoughts about how Microsoft’s futuristic commercials can be connected to Google’ reality. Yesterday announcement of Visual Search or how Google called it Google Googles, drove me to think and connect some of my previous posts and videos I had chance to see before.

According to the information provided, ““Google is working on Google Visual Search, a mobile application that lets users take a picture of a location from their Android-powered smartphone and trigger a Google search that pulls up information associated with the image”. You can see some product video and if you have G1 phone you can try this product from Google Labs.

What was interesting to discover is relation to one of my previous posts. Time ago, I wrote about PLM content downstream usage. I put few pictures from futuristic search solutions done by Behance Network Projects. I think you will agree- this is very much similar to what we can see on Visual Search by Google.

Another interesting event, about a year ago I had chance to see very futuristic commercial video about the future of Manufacturing done by Microsoft. Some of the presented features are very close to the reality presented by Google in their visual search. Take a look on pictures and video below.

This is an original Microsoft video:

I’ll not make my conclusion today. I will leave you to think and made your own.

These are only my thoughts. YMMV.

Best, Oleg

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3D Perspectives: Future in Reverse with 3D

November 2, 2009

My new blog post on 3D PERSPECTIVES.

future-in-reverse-in-3d

I hope you’ll enjoy the historical perspective on 3D software usage from Dassault Systemes, SolidWorks and Parallel Graphics.

Best, Oleg

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How is PLM Collaboration Different From Social Networking?

June 15, 2009

I’ve been observing a lot of discussion related to the topic of social networking. During the last few months, I had the chance to discuss this topic with many people – customers, vendors, analysts. We have seen many product announcements in this space from many vendors – general IT software providers (Microsoft, Oracle, and IBM), PLM providers (PTC), and some others.

In my opinion, there is a significant blur around social networking and how “everything social” influences and impacts Product Lifecycle Management in general, and collaboration more specifically. I strongly believe that as social networking is terms emerged from the consumer space, it needs to be carefully transformed for handling by enterprises in general and manufacturing organizations specifically.

As my first exercise, I will compare the differences and similarities between social networking and PLM collaboration according to five questions – Who?, What?, Why?, Where?, How?

socialnetvs-plmcollaboration

So, to conclude my take on differences between social networking and PLM collaboration, I have to say that they have a lot in common. Although goals, objectives and audience are different, they both will have similar communication and user experience. Regarding business logic, it needs to be different. Especially for enterprises and manufacturing organizations, being able to support the right business processes and corporate activities is very important.

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Why do I Need to Change My “Out-of-the-Box PLM”?

June 4, 2009

I’d like to discuss a topic which is probably the most “non technological” topic I have ever discussed in this blog. This is what we refer to as ‘best practices’. This exists in PLM, ERP, and many other business and enterprise systems. But I’d like to discuss what is behind this topic, particularly the business and technological drivers that will change the “out-of-the-box” PLM system.

So, what are benefits to have a plain, vanilla, out-of-the-box PLM implementation?

1. No need to have expensive implementation services; you just need to install it

2. You don’t need to define processes; you just need to map your organization roles to those that already exist in the system

3. You future PLM version will be easily implemented on top of the existing one

I’m sure, in the beginning, your first impulse is to opt for “out of the box”. But I suggest that you look at the factors that prevent you from doing so realistically:

1. You need to integrate data with existing systems. As a result, you need to enhance your data model

2. You are running a system inside of an organization with all the related business systems – so you need to adapt to the existing business processes (ERP, CRM etc.)

3. You are working for OEM/Suppliers, so you need to justify your processes with suppliers

Therefore, how can you handle system deployment in order to prevent future hassles? Here’s how:

1. Data Models: reuse what you have with out-of-the-box and add what you need. Try to avoid changes in existing models.

2. Business Processes: use as much as possible in a declarative way to define processes. For any additional implementation separate as much as possible between process definition and addition customization you will make using programming language.

3. Integrations: Set up an integration between systems as part of the business process. Try to avoid batch data transfers. Keep logic separate.

In short, here’s my conclusion: – (1) You cannot implement totally out-of-the box; (2) You need to minimize amount of customization you will do; (3) You need to apply tools and technology that will minimize the cost and time for future migration.

I’d like to figure out what tools and technologies would be helpful to optimize the cost of your implementation:

1. Use declarative tools as much as possible as well as tools provided by your vendor (for customization, development scripting etc.)

2. Use standard-based customization if possible (i.e. BPMN for process management and workflow)

3. Use low cost customization and development tools for easy implementation. Your services will cost less and in the future it will be easy to find suppliers for next customization.

To sum up, these are basic, if not obvious principles. I’d like to hear whether or not you think that they are applicable, and in which instances.

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PLM Prompt: Google Wave is ringing bell for PLM collaboration

May 29, 2009

Watch this presentation. Do you see it as future PLM collaboration paradigm? Stay tuned for my future posts about how to use it for PLM. 

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PLM Prompt: Cordys brings BPM on cloud

May 18, 2009

Short news alert – Cordys enables business process automation for Google Apps. Jan Baan, founder and CEO of Cordys said that, this solution fundamentally changes the way software will be developed and deployed. How BPM on cloud may change way Product Lifecycle Management apps will be delivered tomorrow? 

 

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