PLM360+NetSuite: Changing the integration game?

May 18, 2013

PLM and ERP integration is not a new topic. Step in the discussion about any PLM implementation and you will come to the topic of PLM+ERP integration in less than 5 minutes. Integration between two enterprise software suites is usually a complicated tasks which involves lots of planning, adjustments and hard-wiring from both sides.

Cloud software brings a new perspective to PLM / ERP integration domain. Of course, it will not dismiss planning stage. Lots of EPR and PLM planning tasks are still needs to be done. However, cloud integration is simpler. Web APIs and architecture as well as cloud deployment can make integration between cloud products easier. Early stage SaaS products exposed some difficulties in integration. Usage of REST APIs and additional cloud-based integration tools is streamlining integration tasks.

Earlier this week Autodesk and NetSuite announced partnership focused on providing seamless integration between two products – Autodesk PLM360 and NetSuite. You can find press release of the announcement by navigating to the following link. Here is an interesting passage:

The bi-directional integration of these revolutionary cloud technologies gives manufacturers a single, closed-loop solution to accelerate product design and development, reduce risk of errors and delays, streamline supply network collaboration, and gain critical real-time visibility into costing, scheduling, capacity and profitability.

Market research shows that manufacturers are increasingly turning to cloud-based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications to run product development, production, supply chain, order management, financials and other core business applications without the time and cost burden of on-premise software and servers. Gartner predicts that nearly half (47 percent) of manufacturers worldwide will be using or piloting SaaS applications by 2015, up from just 2 percent in 2010.[1]

In the following video, Gavin Davidson and Brian Roepke demonstrate the new integration between NetSuite Manufacturing and Autodesk PLM 360 software at SuiteWorld 2013:

Couple of thoughts about the scenario presented. I found natural to see not only traditional BOM transfer function during the PLM/ERP integration, but also modern social collaboration functions presented by NetSuite. Also, additional cloud-based tools such as Fusion 360 (cloud design CAD) and online cloud simulation tools naturally fit into the scenario.

What is my conclusion? Integration is tough topic. Usually it requires implementation effort and additional services. It looks like cloud software (both ERP and PLM) is about to define a new trend in the ability to establish a different level of integration. Time and customers will show how it will work. Nevertheless, it is clear that cloud vendors are trying to resolve old integration problems in a different way. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

Disclosure: I’m responsible for PLM and Data Management product development at Autodesk.

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What Cloud CAD-PDM Hybrid Means for PLM?

February 10, 2013

To predict future is tough. Not many people are trying to do so. Especially in tech. Companies are juggling with buzzwords, powerpoints and software. At the same time, analysts are trying to swim into the social information stream of provocations, facts and opinions. There are two terms in manufacturing and product development software that created most of confusion for the last decade – PDM and PLM. Navigate to the following link to find lots of publications about the topic. To my taste, the topic PDM vs. PLM became boring. I’d even suggest to add it to the list of boring PLM topics introduced by Jos Voskuil.

However, here is some news. My blogging buddy and analyst Chad Jackson is predicting PDM revolution. Navigate your browser to read about future PDM Revolution. Chad’s take on PDM revolution smells cloud and two new cloud design systems – Fusion 360 and SolidWorks Mechanical Conceptual. This is my favorite passage that summarizes Chad’s crystal ball prediction of Hands-Free PDM:

If you take a look at Fusion 360 and Solidworks Mechanical Conceptual, at least in my exposure to it, there’s no step where you explicitly save your design or model. It’s done automatically in the background. When you close your model? The latest version will be there when you return. What happens when you create variations on a design that amounts to branching? Look at the model history and you’ll see those various branches tracked for you. So if you think about it, it is essentially hands-free. It does the brunt of the work automatically and practically invisibly for you.

Sounds like revolution to you? I think yes. However, here is a deal. It impose a significant threat to the future implementations of PLM. The mess of data in your local CAD-PDM now moves to the next step of the product development. Until now, companies implementing PDM took an advantages of their PLM solutions from the same vendors to manage BOM and ECO processes integrated with CAD data. Cloud CAD systems are not there yet and probably will not be there. Integration becomes an imperative to make hands-free PDM successful.

What is my conclusion? Cloud CAD and hands-free PDM is a signal to think about BOM management. In a different way. They key words are "single" and "integrated". Without that, we will enter into the messy world of structure mapping and synchronizations. If you are vendor, you need to think about openness and web APIs. If you are a potential customer of a cloud CAD/PDM hybrid, ask vendors how flexible and granular is "save" function that turns your work into stream of information stored in database. The ugly truth is that until now, file structure was doing integration job for you. Not any more. It is gone. Forever. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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Why PLM is more complicated than Google?

November 16, 2012

Integration is a tough job. Especially when it comes to the enterprise software. The typical manufacturing company landscape is siloed it contains many systems – office application, email, content management, CAD, CAM, CAE, PDM, PLM, etc. Beyond that set of systems, every company has ERP and few additional enterprise systems. In my view, the demand of people these days is to have integrated environment. In PLM, the discussion about “integrated vs. best of breed environment” can get very hot. As an example you navigate to the following Tech4PD video debates by Jim Brown and Chad Jackson – Granularity vs. Integration: Suites vs. Best-in-class PLM.

Interesting enough, I found the web environment these days has near the same level of integration as enterprise environment. Google’s environment very often provides an appealing use case too. Think about Gmail, Calendar, Google Drive, Web and some additional Google systems. How to help people to have integrated and seamless environment? Integrated search is one of the ways to solve the problem. Google is trying to solve the problem by providing integrated Google personal search that capability to reach outside of Gmail and collect information from other Google applications. I submitted to evaluate this feature using my personal gmail account and hope to share my feedback with you later.

PLM vendors are experimenting with integrated search user experience too. You can see them in the different examples of technological and product announcements as well as acquisitions PLM companies made during past 2 years – Dassault Systemes Exalead, Autodesk Inforbix, Siemens PLM Active Workspace, Aras Enterprise search and some others.

However, integrated search is a complicated problem. Even Google – the absolute technological leader in a search domain is confirming the complexity of search beyond the web. Navigate to the following article to read more – Google Amps Up Personal Search to Combine Gmail, Calendar, Drive and More published by All Things D last month.

To me, the most notable passage in this article is related to the complexity of the integration and integrated search.

Back in August, Google noted its Gmail index is as large or larger than its Web corpus, but with much higher and more complicated privacy requirements. All of these personal search experiments are available only in English and for personal Gmail accounts.

What is my conclusion? Search and data is a difficult problem. Enterprise and PLM environment clearly provides a more complicated case compared to public web in terms of search, content processing, permission and business logic. Brutal computing force helps, but it is not an ultimate solution for integrated environment. You need to have domain knowledge and probably apply some advanced engineering to solve this problem. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

Picture credit newmediaandmarketing.com

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PLM Cloud Interest and AAA PLM Players

October 29, 2012

The interest to cloud PLM is growing these days. At the beginning of this year, I discussed future PLM business model during the PLM Innovation conference in Munich. You can navigate to my historical post here. You can see lots of conversations about cloud these days. However, until now, only one from major PLM players – Dassault, was playing cloud game. As it was mentioned by Bernard Charles during DSCC 2011 event, Dassault invested 2B into building of the unique online cloud platform. This is not true any more. Earlier last week, Siemens PLM announced the availability of TeamCenter on the cloud. Navigate here to read Siemens PLM announcement. According to Siemens PLM:

Teamcenter on the cloud enables companies to move some, or all, of their computing infrastructure to a third-party cloud service provider versus investing in their own hardware. This gives customers cost effective access to enterprise grade IT infrastructure and resources without the need for capital expenditure. Siemens now supports Teamcenter on three of the leading cloud services, Microsoft Windows Azure, IBM SmartCloud™ Enterprise+ and Amazon Web Services. The company has completed a certification and enablement program for Teamcenter delivered on each of these service provider’s IaaS offerings.

I found an interesting writeup about TeamCenter on the cloud made by PJ of TEC. Navigate to this link to read -Siemens Teamcenter Going to the PLM Cloud. PJ is analyzing what is behind TeamCenter cloud announcement. This is an important passage, in my view, which explains that:

While the benefits such as faster time to value, dynamic scalability, and lower TCO are indisputable, this is just the typical first cloud-enabling step of moving the infrastructure to the cloud. Certainly, there is also the benefit from accessing the PLM system from the Internet, and at the analyst event, we also saw a demo of a mobile user interface (UI) in the cloud. But our understanding was that Siemens is not yet going to provide a subscription model or a multitenant cloud.

At the same time, PJ concludes that despite cloud announcement, TeamCenter is not adopting ‘cloud PLM’ business by moving towards subscription model. I didn’t find any mentioning of subscription prices as well as information about future announcement. Siemens PLM press release mentioned only “business flexibility”, as was mentioned by TeamCenter cheif Eric Sterling. Here is the quote:

“The key benefit of Teamcenter on the cloud is the business flexibility it provides,” said Eric Sterling, Senior Vice President, Lifecycle Collaboration Software, Siemens PLM Software. “In today’s ever changing global landscape, the flexibility to dynamically manage infrastructure on the cloud gives customers the ability to scale up computing resources with demand and more importantly, scale down costs if demand decreases. This enables organizations to effectively manage IT budgets as an operating expense versus capital expense which can improve profitability.

AAA PLM?

I learned an interesting term in PJ’s article – “Triple A” PLM players. As I mentioned in my earlier article, Open Source and subscription-based model used by cloud PLM apps are two major PLM business disruption forces. PJ summarized it by calling three vendors – Aras, Arena Solutions and Autodesk PLM (AAA):

Siemens acknowledged that its main interest is still the perpetual license play. The vendor admitted that the so-called Triple A PLM players—Arena Solutions, Aras Corp., and Autodesk 360 PLM— are disruptive forces in terms of PLM deployment and licensing. Siemens pledged to be responsive to the market—i.e., it is constantly reviewing its practices—but everything needs to be good for both the vendor and its customers. Term-based licenses and Siemens Finance Services were suggested as possible options in the meantime.

PLM cloud awareness

I usually do my “reality check” on Google trends. You can see that now “PLM cloud” is now a visible trend. At least, you can see it on Google’s trends, which confirms the growing cloud interest from players and customers in engineering and manufacturing space. Even it is not saying much to prove the adoption and customer experience with cloud PLM, it is a confirmation of the trend and strategic direction.

plm-cloud-google-trend.png

What about PTC / Windchill?

After TeamCenter cloud announcement, PTC Windchill is the only product (vendor) that didn’t refresh their interest in a cloud PLM play. Windchill has long time an agreement with IBM about hosting of Windchill on IBM servers. You can see this offering is available here, but I PTC didn’t provide any recent updates about that offering as well as a preview about future availability of Windchill on the cloud. You can only see IBM application on demand delivery model here.

What is my conclusion? In my view, customers are starting to recognize the value of the cloud technologies for PLM. It comes in multiple aspects – IT infrastructure optimization, business models allowing to pay for services as you need them, global access and many others. It would be interesting to see how cloud technologies and product offering will be developed by PLM vendors in coming years.

Best, Oleg

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AU.RU 2012 and PLM / BIM perspective from Russia

October 5, 2012

During the last two days I attended Autodesk University Russia in Moscow (AU.RU). This year event got a status of AU. Before that it was Autodesk Forum. The number of attendees (~3000) was impressive. It was two intensive days packed with the 16-day agenda. It includes many presentations by customers, training sessions and exhibition program. I’ve made two presentations about PLM and Inforbix technologies acquired by Autodesk. In addition to that I was running a roundtable discussion about cloud technologies.

Autodesk Russia team presented results of the research asking Autodesk customers about PLM and BIM. I found these numbers interesting. You can see charts presenting the results of this research below. Usage of PLM in Russia. 20% of customers are using PLM, 55% of customers heard about PLM, but not using. 25% of customers never heard about PLM, which bump the total number of people generally aware and usePLM to impressive 75%. Frankly, I like the number. The numbers related to usage of BIM in Russia is quite similar (26% – use, 49% – heard, but not using; 29% – never heard).

PLM research results:

BIM research results:

My presentations are are available on slideshare.com – PLM upside down and backward and How to select the right cloud? I enjoyed presenting at AU.RU as well to have many live discussions with Autodesk employees, customers, competitors, industry analysts and bloggers. I put few pictures below to show you the atmosphere of the event.

Press conference:

During one of my sessions:

Main stage:

Autodesk 30 years cake:

What is my conclusion? Autodesk community is interesting and important. I found interesting to discover a similarity in Autodesk community between AU.RU and big AU in Las Vegas. Certainly, Autodesk is trying to share the same event atmosphere between these events. At the same time, you cannot change people and the way they speak and discuss what they do. 3000 people at AU.RU are representing a great community with a significant potential to influence and to grow in the future. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

Photo from my session is courtesy of David Levin (DL blog) – isicad.ru.

Picture Autodesk 30 years is a winner of AU.RU 2012 Sketch competition.

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Autodesk acquires Inforbix and message to my readers.

August 29, 2012

Dear friends! I’m glad to share the news with you – Autodesk Continues Strategic Investment in Product Lifecycle Management with Acquisition of Inforbix. You probably remember my first blog about Inforibx back in 2010 – Introducing Inforbix Product Data Apps. I’m excited for Inforbix, the team and looking forward to new challenges and opportunity at Autodesk. Autodesk confirmed the strategic course to develop and expand PLM 360 and other products on the cloud. Inforbix brings technology to aggregate, fuse, search and visualize data. If you haven’t had a chance to discover it until now, you can catch up on inforbix website, which is still alive as well as Inforbix social media channels – YouTube, Twitter, Google+, Facebook. The following video fragment can give you a glimpse of what Inforbix technologies can do for PLM 360.

Autodesk and Beyond PLM

I want to say few words about my blogging activity. For the last almost five years, Beyond PLM and PLM Think Tank is sharing my opinion about engineering and manufacturing software, CAD, PDM, PLM, industry and technological trends. This activity was absolutely independent of my employment in the past and will continue to be independent now. I’m looking forward to continuing sharing new information, thoughts and opinion here. I’m sure will have an opportunity to speak more about Autodesk PLM/PDM, but it will come from Autodesk blogs.

Best, Oleg

Picture courtesy of SolidSmack blog.

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How to reinvent mobile PLM spreadsheet?

August 21, 2012

As you probably know, Excel (or spreadsheets) is one of my favorite topics. Despite the multiple efforts of software vendors in PDM, PLM and other enterprise domains, Excel remains very sustainable. Back in 2009, I put my top reasons Why do I like my PLM Excel Spreadsheets? I can confirm, Excel is still the most popular and wide accepted PLM technology in the world.

I can see many changes since that time. Web and online is the next battle space for spreadsheets. Google improved their Spreadsheet application, and it is quite awesome, in my view. Microsoft responded to online competion by providing Office 365. I don’t see PLM vendors reacted much on this.

Another place where spreadsheets are moving fast is mobile applications. The importance of mobile apps is increasing every day. My impression from mobile development in PLM – most of the vendors put a check box. You can see mobile apps announcements done by almost everybody. However, two things were missed – the purpose and the experience. In my view, vendors are missing the point of mobile apps by trying to convert “PLM” to “Mobile”, which is wrong effort. I explained it here – Mobile PLM gold rush. Did vendors miss the point? The main point – mobile applications are context/task oriented. People won’t migrate to iPad and displace their desktop/laptop app. They will use both devices in the right context.

Getting back to mobile and spreadsheets, the following Tech Crunch publication few days YC-Backed Grid Reinvents The Spreadsheet For The Tablet Age. I found it is interesting actually not from the side of business application, but specifically in the context of user experience. Watch the following video for mobile spreadsheet user experience proposed by GRID.

Maestro by Binary Thumb from Josh Leong on Vimeo.

Mobile user experience becomes an important factor behind the adoption of business applications. “Checkbox” strategy won’t work here. The standards for mobile apps are set by companies making consumer software. Take a look on my previous blog for more ideas – What CAD and PLM vendors need to learn about mobile touch interface? I found some interesting examples of mobile apps in SAP mobility center and Autodesk mobile apps. If you can bring more examples, please do so. I’m looking for them.

What is my conclusion? User experience and task orientation. These are two main factors that can make a mobile effort successful. I need to have an app to get my job done. If this is an app to make engineering calculation like ForceEffect by Autodesk or application to make travel expenses approval by SAP, the key factor will be how it does help me to get my tasks done. I can see it as a change in the mind-share. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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From Design Collaboration to CAD Social Tools

August 15, 2012

Social is a magic word many people use nowadays. After social networks “grand-success”, many people in PLM industry are thinking how to apply the power of “social” to improve existing PDM and PLM. The topic that asked by most of the people is how to improve collaboration by applying some of know best practice developed by social networking.

AutoCAD Design Feed

I’ve been reading announcement made by Autodesk about AutoCAD WS Design Feed. Navigate to the following blog post to learn more. I found it quite interesting. Discussion feed became very popular tool in social collaboration. We can see examples of discussion threads in tools like Facebook and Twitter. Similar tools (but in the context of enterprise and business) are available in tools like Yammer and Salesforce.com, etc.

The idea of Design Feed is exactly that. Here is how it explained in AutoCAD WS Blog: Using the Design Feed you can attach a post to a specific point or area in your drawing to draw attention to a feature of your design and encourage discussion.

What I especially like in this tool is the idea of “context”. You can select a point of interest in the drawing such as entity or space area. Context makes the conversation powerful.

Design Collaboration Origins

“Collaboration” word is a tricky in PDM / PLM business. Companies really overused the purpose and meaning of what collaboration does. To me, collaboration was always the ability of people to work together. One of the earlier examples of design collaboration was presented by Dassault Systems in 3DLive back in 2006. Watch the following video for more details.

Pay attention how different people can collaborate on the context of 3D model. You can find a lot of similarities with “social discussion” tools.

“Design discussion” Origins

Another interesting example from the earlier days of social tools for CAD designers related to Vuuch. One of the early ideas of Vuuch is so-called design discussions or Facebook for files allowed to engineers and other people to create a “discussion” in the context of a specific CAD file. View Vuuch video that was made couple of years ago presenting this feature.

What is my conclusion? The value of marketing flyers and buzzwords is decreasing these days. It less matter to people how you call the tool. How to get a job done? Engineers and other people in a company are trying to answer to this question. I can see how social paradigm plays in collaborative and social tools. To provide context driven simple user experience seems to me a key. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

Image: FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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PLM Think Tank – July Top 5

July 29, 2012

Usually, we expect some relaxation during summer time. Even we are still in end of July, this summer already provided lots of events, news and surprises. Last week was dominated by news about financial activities of Dassault Systems and PTC. Week before was marked by Autodesk acquiring SocialCam for 60 million dollars. I can see lots of activity and innovation happen in engineering and manufacturing software. One of these innovations is introduction of modern browser techniques to the space of CAD and Viewer collaborations. Companies like Sunglass.io and GrabCADannounced their viewing capabilities available. I will continue to monitor the industry from "beyond PLM" viewpoint and share this news with you. Now, let me move to the traditional top 5 stories.

What is the future of PLM databases?

Database technology is a fundamental part of everything in enterprise software. However, after 25 years I can see some changes demanded. The complexity of product lifecycle problems brings the need of new concepts in data modeling and data management. One of the main questions – how to break the boundary of a single database? This is a key question, in my view. It will solve the problem of logical scalability and provide a platform for future information discovery.

Why Engineers don’t like company private social networks?

In my view, Facebook IPO put some cold water on some ‘social heads’. I think, PLM companies are missing some points in the space of social networking for enterprise. Here is my list of suspects – complicated user experience created by social PLM pioneers, anti-social engineering nature, engineer’s focus on “cool stuff” and ignorance of corporate oriented tools.
Co-browsing and future of CAD design collaboration

Collaboration in design is endless topic for innovation. I think the idea of collaborative browsing can “hold the water”. How many times you worked with shared screen on your computer? I did it many times. To have multiple engineers working on the same design can be an interesting option in your future CAD application in the browser.

"Alte-Zachen" PLM and new business models

In my previous life, ‘Alte Zachen’ person was taking old stuff away. I never knew what happens to this stuff after. The same about “second hand” PLM software. What will be the value of re-selling and buying existing licenses? I can some interesting work for lawyers to be done in this space. The main personage of “Pretty Woman” movie was buying companies having financial troubles and sell them apart for a significant profit. Will future PLM innovators buy existing PLM alte zachen for their future profit? A good question to ask… Just my thoughts.

PLM Dress Code Factoids

The dress code of PLM events is different from CAD and consumer events. Few people in PLM industry are still dreaming about how to follow ERP success. PLM companies and event organizers are dreaming about how to bring more executives to their events. They are key players in PLM strategic decision making. Dress code is part of the agenda to make PLM event comfortable for execs. I guess CIOs and other corporate execs feel wrong sitting next to engineers in blue jeans. I also believe some country and location specifics can be considered too. I rarely see suits and ties during events in Israel and California. At the same time, it looks quite appropriate in Germany and some other places in Europe.

Best, Oleg

Image: FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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PLM, Mobile Devices and Capturing Input

July 25, 2012

Any mobile device these days is an extremely powerful capturing tool. With the latest development of front and back end cameras, the ability of the mobile device to perform as a scanner, image and video recorder becomes second to none. The ability to capture photo and video open lots of opportunities to innovate. One example – look on the statistics of camera usage on Flickr:

Another example. Just think about latest acquisition made by Autodesk – SocialCam, company focused on social video sharing. One of the fundamental capabilities on SocialCam app was to capture video by a mobile device (like iPhone or Android).

I can potentially imagine many other (fewer socially fancy scenarios) where using a camera can significantly change and even disrupt existing processing many manufacturing companies have in place these days. Think about maintenance, support, operation, manufacturing problem reports, field construction reports and many others. It also can be applied in analyses and other CAE tools. The most interesting "capturing capability" I’ve seen was in Autodesk ForceEffect application.

Another example of content capturing and merge is 3DVIA mobile app:

I think about two capabilities PLM/PDM systems lack today – ability to capture input from mobile devices and the ability to manage a significant amount of media content. Let me speak about them a bit more.

Capturing Media Input (Photo, Video)

It sounds like a simple task, but in fact, it lacks almost in all PLM tools (even those that claim they are HTML5 mobile browser compatible). Welcome to engineering reality. You can see applications running in the mobile browser, but it lack of proper support for camera and other capturing capabilities.

Content Management and Storage

Once captured, image and/or video needs to be handled and managed well. It starts from the initial storage and transmission. Then it goes to the ability of PDM/PLM system to manage this content, which can be significant in size, requires the ability to be sorted, search, applying meta-data, relating to other information sources and many others. You hardly can find these capabilities in most of the available PDM/PLM systems. They are not adjusted for such a type of content.

What is my conclusion? Most of CAD, PDM and PLM vendors today are claiming mobility and support for modern devices. However, in many cases, it is about taking "existing system" and saying – it is available on a mobile platform. I wrote about it in my post – PLM mobile gold rush. Did vendors miss the point? At the same time, not to miss small details becomes so important. This is something PLM vendors need to learn from mobile app developers in consumer space and web. Extra-click and bad user experience can destroy the future of your app. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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