Software Vendors and PDM/PLM Evolution Steps

February 9, 2012

Earlier this week, I had a conversation with engineering IT manager of a manufacturing company. Without mentioning names, we’ve been discussing how manufacturing companies are adopting technologies in general and PDM/PLM technologies specifically. According to him, software companies largely misunderstood the way manufacturing companies perceive technology adoption. The conclusion we made, was that manufacturing companies are very slow to adopt any technologies. One of the key factors that impacts future evolution of PDM/PLM technologies will cost of implementation and changes. This conversation made me think about what will be the evolution of PDM / PLM systems for coming decades.

Cloud, Unification and Integration

I can define three things that will lead future evolution in PDM / PLM. It is unification, integration and cloud. I wrote about Unification and Integration few months ago. Navigate to the following article – From PDM to PLM: Unify or Integrate? to have a sense of this topic. The reality of manufacturing companies today are that they have lots of different software packages implemented. Siloed approach was dominant in the last two decades. The question of how to move forward to the next level is actively debated by many software vendors and customers. One of the options is to move to unified systems. When it sounds like an interesting option to cut cost of integration, the overall cost of migration stops many companies from taking this approach. On the other side, affordability of cloud-based software sounds like a good reason to move one and offer new type of solutions with a fraction of cost.

4 Steps of PDM / PLM evolution

In my view, cloud (private and public) will be playing a key role in the evolution of future PDM/PLM systems. On the diagram below, I pictured how I see the evolution of PDM /PLM systems. Four steps show how I think systems will be migrating from pure “on-premises’” solution to full cloud adoption.

PDM / PLM Evolution

 

I wanted to bring 3 factors that will become critical to define vendor’s success in this evolution – cloud/on-premises balance, system integration and file content migration to the cloud. Let me talk separately about each of these factors.

Cloud / On-Premises balance

The adoption of new technologies and products is very slow. Because of that, manufacturing companies will have to balance long time between existing and new solutions. The ability of vendor to bring systems gradually to solve real business needs in an affordable way, will be a key to success. Nobody will be able to replace all systems in a single shot.

System integration

I’ve been stated it many times already, but again, the ability to integrate cloud and on-premises solution will be another key capability. Today, the integration is very messy. It is costly and, in most cases, causes data duplication with a lot of inefficiency. The ability to build linked data grid of integrated solutions will create a competitive advantage for software vendors to introduce new PDM / PLM solutions and minimize implementation cost.

File Content migration

The absolute majority of product information such as CAD data is located on premises today. With the introduction of new solutions, this content will have to migrate to cloud in order to become available also for people (globally) as well as to be re-used by different cloud and on-premises solutions. The effectiveness of this migration is another key factor to success.

What is my conclusion? I see next 10 years of PDM / PLM evolution as a very interesting time. Old technologies and software packages will retire and new will be coming. What will be the future of PLM platforms is an interesting question. This question needs to be answered by well established PLM vendors like Dassault, Siemens, PTC and by newcomers such as Autodesk. Smaller companies will innovate to provide PLM solutions and technologies that potentially can disrupt and, at the same time, provide a competitive advantage to future evolution of PDM / PLM platforms. What is your take? Speak your mind, please…

Best, Oleg

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PLM and Amazon Enterprise Cloud

February 1, 2012

An interesting addition to my yesterday post about technological options for cloud PLM. I was reading Amazon’s announcement that came earlier this month – Amazon separates servers from IP addresses. Navigate to the ZDnet UK Blog article “Amazon Separates Servers From IP Addresses to read more. Here is how this feature explained in Amazon blog:

Today we are adding additional flexibility to EC2 instances running in the Virtual Private Cloud. First, we are teasing apart the IP addresses (and important attributes associated with them) from the EC2 instances and calling the resulting entity an ENI, or Elastic Network Interface. Second, we are giving you the ability to create additional ENIs, and to attach a second ENI to an instance (again, this is within the VPC).

On the picture below you can see how Amazon explains the topology of EIN.

Cloud PLM

There are two CAD / PLM vendors officially announced their support for cloud – Autodesk and Dassault. Nexus 360 PLM is a cloud PLM coming from Autodesk later this year. Dassault ENOVIA is a flagship product sold by Dassault. Another PLM company claims their support cloud is Aras Corp. I haven’t heard any specific cloud plans from Siemens PLM and PTC. If you’re in discussion with your CAD / PLM vendor these days, you better check if product cloud configuration supports EIN.

What is my conclusion? Even the article is a bit on a technical side, I found it quite important. Cloud is moving towards having more and more “enterprise features”. This is a reaction of cloud providers on the coming demand from enterprise IT to accept cloud usage. The critical question that wasn’t answered was about the cost. Cloud attractiveness is dependent on cost structure. Cloud providers will have to charge an additional fee for enterprise features. Will it be still attractive for company IT? A big question. The architecture of cloud systems is in a very early beginning phase. You better check it carefully with your vendors and/or partner. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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Cloud PLM and IT Basic Instinct

January 27, 2012

The amount of publications about PLM and cloud is growing. This is not surprising me. There are two reasons to that. Cloud is clearly hyping. Second – major player such as Autodesk is making their move towards the cloud. Carl Bass, Autodesk CEO announced that today’s technologies allow to Autodesk to come with a reliable and affordable PLM system. Almost at the same time, during DSCC 2011, Bernard Charles is announcing that DS invested about $2B in the development of the most sophisticated online cloud platform in the word (he was talking about Enovia platform).

I was reading ECN article Seeing Past the Clouds – PLM and what’s What? by Eric Marks. The article is speaking about trends in the cloud PLM and four possible strategies: public, private, community and hybrid. I can clearly understand the difference between public and private (read one of my previous posts – PLM Cloud: dedicated, private, public). However, the concept of community cloud is a bit complicated, since it is point on how cloud services will be used, rather on if it goes to public servers and multitenant opposite to private server placement. At the same time, I found the passage about "hybrid cloud" the most interesting. Here it is:

And lastly there are “hybrid clouds” where a private cloud can extend onto a public cloud for specific activities and on an as-need basis. The benefit of a hybrid approach that incorporates a public cloud is that it provides extra performance scalability for the private cloud that would be in use.

I can clearly see how it can make a difference. I’m sure you’re familiar with Basic Instinct movie. Let me make an association with IT. The basic IT instincts are control and cost. As I’ve been told by IT people in one of the manufacturing companies in Mid West – if the cloud is be more cost-effective for effective for us, we will be moving towards the cloud. Otherwise we stay in our racks. Hybrid model allows to keep IT on premise and extend to cloud in order to have a cost effective expansion and scale. It sounds like something that can keep everybody happy and, at the same time, it is clearly Trojan horse that cloud providers will put in organizations. As soon as such solutions will be running in production, rest of the game for cloud providers will be to leverage the economy of scale and not to blow up "security" red-herring.

Another passage from ECN article practically confirms that.

According to Edward Quinn, Mevion Medical Systems IT Manager, “to do this, Mevion is leveraging a “hybrid cloud” in order to be able to scale quickly and efficiently to distributed cloud data centers at far less cost than purchasing expensive equipment or renting/building out corporate data centers. The IT department can leverage the advanced international infrastructure already in place by leading cloud computing companies and activate and pay only for the services that its business needs.”

What is my conclusion? There are many reasons why companies can decide to move towards the cloud – better collaboration, ease of install, mobile, and many others. However, the cloud fundamental is about how to drive costs down using the economy of scale. PLM won’t be an exclusion from this game. In order to move towards that, vendors need to pass "IT police" in every organization. Hybrid cloud looks like a good weapon leveraging IT basic instincts. Just my thoughts….

Best, Oleg

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Future PLM platforms and SAP / Oracle technological wars

January 26, 2012

All existing PDM / PLM technologies were created 15-20 years ago. I hope I’ve got your attention :) . So, let me speak a bit more about technologies today. Past 10 years of web development for the consumer market created a significant technological foundation that cannot be ignored. Most of the enterprise software in production these days is running on the technologies created at least a decade ago.

Let’s talk first about major 4 PLM providers – Dassault Systems, PTC, Siemens PLM and the platform they use for their flagship PLM products. Enovia from Dassault technological foundation came from MatrixOne acquisition formerMatrixOne/Adra development 15-20 years ago. PTC is using Windchill coming back in 1998 from CV acquisition. Siemens PLM platform – TeamCenter is also coming from acquired and transformed product lines of Metaphase and IMAN.

Thinking about PLM platforms, you cannot avoid and not to speak about long time pure-PLM rivals coming from ERP software – SAP and Oracle. Oracle is leading the way towards full-fledged usage of Oracle Fusion platform. Despite multiple delays and re-orgs, it seems to me the way Oracle is thinking about business application platform for enterprise. Oracle is also leveraging their in-house innovation of database technologies.

I was reading an interesting article by ArnoldIT – SAP: Lemons from Lemonade for Search vendors. The article referencing technology coming from SAP called HANA. According to SAP blog:

HANA is the foundation and the core of all that we do now and going forward for existing products, new products and entirely new frontiers. We are transforming enterprise software with HANA, and we are transforming our entire product portfolio,” Sikka said in a statement earlier this week announcing that SAP HANA is now generally available worldwide. “But HANA is more than a product,” Sikka continued. “It is a new paradigm, an entirely new way to build applications. It is the basis for our own intellectual renewal internally at SAP—where we rethink how we design, build, deploy, service and sell products—and the basis for our customers’ and partners’ intellectual renewal—where we help customers rethink existing business problems and help them solve entirely new challenges using design-thinking.” (Source: The Top 10 Reasons SAP HANA Is Disrupting Larry Ellison’s Grand Plans]

Take a look on a very interesting video about HANA evolution.

Few screenshots I captured from this video (below) clearly shows the technological problem PLM vendors are trying to solve already for many years- creating a scalable business application platform capable of handling the complexity of data needed for product development and manufacturers.

Typical problem of enterprise applications.

The complexity of platforms and solutions today.

HANA way to solve the problem.

What is my conclusion? The complexity of enterprise PLM software is skyrocketing. PLM products are running on proven, but outdated platforms. My hunch – all major PLM vendors having some future technology platform projects on their back-burner. I don’t know if it comes as Enovia V7, TeamCenter Future or Creo Enterprise. What is clear to me is that PLM companies need to come with the next technological platforms to leverage last 10 years development of web and consumer space. Otherwise, they will be dismissed by newcomers. ERP vendors such as Oracle and SAP also keep stakes in this enterprise software game and need to be watched carefully by PLM players. Just my thoughts..

Best, Oleg

Freebie. SAP didn’t pay me to write this post.

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What 2012 holds for Product Lifecycle Management?

January 3, 2012

Beginning of the year is a time for New Year resolutions and "annual predictions". Few days ago, I shared my plans forBeyond PLM activities in 2012. To predict what is going to happen during coming year is usually very thankless work. In the middle of December, I’ve made my broad prediction that 2012 is going to be a year of PLM rock stars (ready my post The Enterprise and PLM will rock in 2012). Today, I want to share what I think will be in a focus of PLM companies in coming 2012.

Autodesk Cloud PLM

With no doubt, it is going to be "the PLM event" of the year. Autodesk is going to make Nexus 360 Cloud PLM available in the end of Q1/2012 or beginning of Q2. That was my impression from AU2011. The expectations are high and the level of speculation about what Autodesk will release is going to be on the same level. It is going to be a big challenge for Autodesk. Even if the majority of their initial customers are SMB manufacturers, because of volume, Autodesk can potentially generate much bigger numbers from their PLM products. However, Autodesk needs to watch carefully the level of expectation and the delivery to keep the promise of making PLM different.

Dassault SolidWorks V6

It seems to me, we are going to see SolidWorks V6 preview later this year during SWW 2012. Over the past two years, we’ve heard lots of pre-announcements from SolidWorks about their cloud platforms, Enovia-based development and future use of CATIA kernel. I believe some deliveries need to happen in February in San-Diego (SWW 2012 home town)

PLM Maturity and Unification by mindshare vendors

Top 3 major PLM providers – Dassault, Siemens PLM and PTC will continue their competition for platform unification and big names wins. These days, all large manufacturers are using pieces of software from one of these companies. In many cases, companies are using software from multiple vendors. All 3 vendors are coming with the idea how unify PLM implementations using their proprietary platforms. It becomes very complicated for large companies to keep going with multiple platforms. The trend of "unification" on a single platform will continue in 2012. Because of a very high cost of change, top PLM companies will continue to do all possible to convince customers to commit towards migration to new platforms. We are going to see more of such wins in 2012.

Emerging Trends: Social and Mobile

Even if both "social" and "mobile" are hot outside of PLM, I don’t believe these two words will generate big news in 2012 for PLM. After all, these two trends (or technologies) are just enablers for PLM implementations. I expect to see more mobile applications coming from existing and new vendors.

Product and Technological Shopping

I also expect main CAD/PLM vendors to continue their shopping spree. Money is not an issue for them. Even if the amount of new companies in the industry is not big, four dominant CAD/PLM companies will try to gain advantages by acquiring smaller companies with proven products or interesting technologies.

What is my conclusion? Enterprise has a potential to become "cool again" in 2012. There are many interesting things going outside of enterprise in consumer software and web development. These products and technologies can put enterprise IT on fire in 2012. Large scale data management, social web and mobile – these technological enablers will be dominant in the new PLM development in 2012. Mature software vendors will continue their fight for the future market share increase among their existing (and overlapped) install base. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

Image: Vlado / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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PLM Cloud: differentiation or “anti-cloud rant”?

December 22, 2011

After my publication PLM, Autodesk and Cloud Wars Club few days ago, I received few comments from my readers trying to figure out what is PLM vendors’ position with regards to the cloud. One of them, even tried to rank PLM companies on how they committed (or not) to the future of cloud computing. The funniest comment was by Jonathan Scott of Razorleaf – "I am waiting for someone at Siemens or PTC to come out with the "anti-Cloud rant" much like Carl Bass’ "anti-PLM" rant". About a year ago, I was writing about PLM vendors and cloud strategies. You can navigate to the followinglink to read my post from the last year. I think, some movements happened since that time, so I decided to make a second check on major PLM vendors about what they do on the cloud.

I’ve been reading an interesting article earlier this week. The Cloud: Worrying about the wrong things? written by Peter Bilello of CIMData. Peter is talking about different elements of cloud strategies and PLM. It is a good read, and I recommend you to spend few minutes and have a read. My favorite passage is about security, which is considered one of the biggest concerns of cloud software. Here is the quote:

IT chiefs in both the private and public sectors and some Internet industry analysts may be overly concerned about security. Worrisome Internet security breaches, though rare, are widely reported. By law, banks, credit card companies, and other online repositories of financial and personal data must report breaches. Two big outages were front-page news in April 2011: Amazon Web Service’s Elastic Computer Cloud (EC2) was down for a couple of days. Sony’s PlayStation Network was out for five weeks…. Amazon put its EC2 data loss at 0.07—seven-hundredths—of one percent. Some perspective: information online expands exponentially while the number of digital break-ins grows far more slowly. Adding in less nefarious security lapses, system errors, and human error still does not boost these problems out of the rare category

Another interesting passage about security is coming from Rackspace:

“Security is security, in the cloud or anywhere else,” according to Web hosting company Rackspace US Inc. in San Antonio, Texas. In a 2011 white paper titled, Five Reasons Why the Cloud is Ready for the Enterprise, Rackspace points out, “The same security issues apply to an enterprise data center or on-premise application as to the cloud. Everyone must be vigilant about security, no matter where their data is stored.”

Autodesk

It is clear, Autodesk is taking the cloud story as a major differentiation. As I mentioned yesterday in my post, Autodesk sees themselves "Cloud PLM" similar to how Salesforce.com can be recognized as "Cloud CRM". Autodesk introduced multiple products on the cloud. Their latest Autodesk Nexus PLM 360 supposed to be available somewhere between Q1 and Q2 next year. Here is Buzz Kross quote from Nexus PLM announcement last month:

"Our approach to PLM is a sharp contrast to the decades old technology in the market today," said Robert "Buzz" Kross, senior vice president, Manufacturing Industry Group at Autodesk. "Autodesk 360 for PLM will enable customers of all sizes to achieve the full promise of PLM with a scalable, configurable and intuitive solution. We believe it will help our customers achieve a measurable competitive advantage through better, more accessible collaboration and business information management."

Dassault System

DS is passionate about their cloud online platform. I’ve been reviewing what DS is doing about that during Dassault customer conference (DSCC 2011) last months in Las-Vegas. Enovia V6 is a power horse behind Dassault cloud story. Read my post from DSCC 2011 by navigating on this link. Here is the quote:

Dassault is presenting ENOVIA V6 as a big deal, the only one “unique online cloud platform”. In the first day, Bernard Charles shared the information about $2B investment into R&D effort that “converge” with all technologies under a single platform available on the cloud.

Siemens PLM

Siemens is providing a very modest cloud story. As a year ago, I wasn’t able to find many references on what is Siemens PLM cloud strategy. Few announcements and press releases I found pointing on the work Siemens PLM is doing with Microsoft Azure cloud platform. Navigate to the following Siemens’ press release – Siemens PLM Software to Create Industry’s First Quality Management Solution "in the Cloud". Here is the quote. Siemens

announced a joint project with Microsoft Corporation to create the PLM industry’s first cloud computing-based quality management solution. The solution will utilize Microsoft Windows Azure™ platform cloud computing services to securely run Siemens PLM Software’s Dimensional Planning and Validation (DPV) application, showing how cloud computing can enable a world-class quality management application to be cost effectively accessed and leveraged on an as-needed basis.

PTC

From my standpoint, PTC is probably less than other PLM vendors is focusing on how the cloud reshapes PLM industry. PTC was one of the first pioneering Whidchill availability as a hosted solution via IBM. However, besides that, I haven’t seen anything about future cloud product coming from PTC. Interesting enough, I was listening for Jim Heppelmann during Creo launch event in the beginning of 2011. According to this article, here is PTC’s opinion about cloud and other PLM vendors.

While Autodesk and Dassault Systemes appear to be running headlong into developing cloud-based applications, my recent conversations with PTC representatives indicated that, as customers were not asking for it and the benefits were not clear, PTC was not heading to the cloud anytime soon. Given the error in underestimating the move to Windows, I asked Heppelmann for his view of CAD on the cloud.

Here is the passage from Jim’s quote provided in the interview to Develop3D journal:

“So, we identified these key problems and then if I say, well which of those problems does the cloud solve? It doesn’t actually solve any of those problems! It solves some other problems – perhaps ease of installation, perhaps cost of ownership, things like that. But I’m not sure those are the key problems. So we’re not pro-cloud or anti-cloud, we’re just trying to solve what we see as the biggest problems, and we don’t see solutions to these biggest problems being in any magical way enabled by cloud technology.

What is my conclusion? Here is my summary about how leading CAD/PLM companies see their cloud strategies. Autodesk is the only one that built on top of the cloud as a differentiation factor. Dassault announced Enovia V6 platform as a true cloud online platform. Despite the fact Enovia platform has deep roots in Matrix One technology developed in the end of 90s, I believe DS invested a lot of resources to re-shape MatrixOne technologies. TeamCenter shows some interesting and trying cloud water with research projects. PTC is strongly neutral the cloud. As you can see all are different. It will be interesting to see how these strategies are evolving and adopted by customers. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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PLM Highway and New Dassault Waltham Campus

December 9, 2011

I’m sure, you are familiar with highway 101 crossing Silicon Valley. However, you probably never heard about PLM Highway in Boston. After last week Autodesk PLM announcement and Dassault System move to a new campus in Waltham, I think we can officially suggest to rename Massachusetts Route 128 (also known as Yankee Division Highway) to PLM Highway. The map below prove it. PTC, Dassault, Autodesk, Siemens, SAP, Oracle. These are top six providers of PLM software with offices located along Rt 128.

As a blogger, I was invited by DS to visit their new office and to attend ribbon cut ceremony. Bernard Charles, DS President and CEO and Al Bunshaft hosted this event for media and journalists. After short briefing and visiting virtual reality presentation room, we’ve been taken to the campus tour. I’ve honored by having Jeff Ray walking together with our group and providing explanations about the building. Below you can see few pictures I made during this event.

You can find more pictures on DS Campus Tumblr page.

Best, Oleg

Freebie. Dassault didn’t pay me to post about Ribbon cut ceremony.

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Historical Perspective: From Ivan Satherland to Modern 2D/3D Sketch Apps

November 27, 2011

The announcement made by Dassault System last week, made me think about a huge distance CAD industry passed for the almost 50 years, since Ivan Sutherland first time demonstrated “Sketchpad, A Man-Machine Graphical Communication System”.

In order to prevent a discussion between Autodesk Alias and CATIA Sketch folks, I just decided to put these two videos. I think, in terms of contrasts, they are both valid comparison to what was done 50 years ago.

What is my conclusion? There are no conclusions on Sunday :) . I’m prepping for AU2011 and even more to speak at AU Innovation Forum on Tuesday. For those who are on the way to Las Vegas, hope to catch up and see you there.

Best, Oleg

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Microsoft Socl and Social PLM Thoughts

November 21, 2011

Do you know what is Microsoft Socl? I didn’t know until yesterday. However, now I know. It is a new research project by Microsoft, which supposed to become a next social network. Mashable just wrote about it four days ago here. Who is behind this project? This is what Mashable article says:

First published by The Verge on Wednesday, Microsoft tells Mashable that, “Microsoft’s FUSE Labs is an internal research group working on a number of forward-looking projects related to future possibilities around social search. Socl is one of the projects that we are exploring. We’ll let you know as soon as we have more to share.

However, watch the video:

You may ask me- how it is related? We already got MySpace, Facebook, Google+… now what? – Socl. Here is the point. As you probably know, I’m less interested in social networks, but more interested in PLM management.

Will PLM lose social competition to CRM?

The PLM vendors recently speaking a lot of “social” and how it is going to change their product offering. I had a chance to write about it multiple times. However, I want to point out to one specific blog I wrote 2 years ago (24-Nov): How many social platforms we need for enterprise? I wanted to get back to the same question again when I was watching socl video by Microsoft. At the same time, PLM vendors are developing social platforms – PTC, Dassault, Autodesk… Everybody is trying to play this social card.

I can see a very significant problem for all PLM social solutions – they are disconnected from people. Don’t take me wrong – obviously people are using PLM solutions in enterprise companies. However, the majority of people are not. Remember, time ago, PLM competed with ERP about “who” owns the item definition. ERP won, PLM lost the competition. Why do you think it happened? In my view, here is the reason – you have to to touch “Item Master” to manufacture the product. So, you will use ERP and it manage Item masters. You are not necessarily needed to touch “item” to run PLM. You can do it, of course. However, it happens much rarely. The same happens with social and CRM. If you are contacting your customers – you must be social. Therefore, everybody will touch Salesforce.com Chatter or similar social platform from CRM provider. However, PLM social platform will be downgraded to people that touch PLM platform only.

What is my conclusion? Social platforms cannot change the position of a system in the organization. You need to have people around the social platform to make it work and progress. It happens to CRM, but it probably won’t happen to PLM. So, maybe PLM vendors need to focus on something 100% of the users need? Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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PLM: Controversy About Process vs. Data Management

November 16, 2011

Process vs. Data. I think, this topic not requires a special introduction. In my view, every PLM implementation is facing this discussion and requires to take a decision about how to proceed. Few conversations with customers during DSCC 2011 last week and some articles I read on the long flight from Boston to Europe during the weekend made me think again about this process vs. data controversy, and I wanted to share my thoughts with you.

I was reading Capgemini blog post Business process management and mastering data in enterprise by Nicholas Kitson. Nicholas is talking about interesting aspects in failure of Business Process Management (BPM) implementations he experienced with customers. In the beginning of the artcicle, Nicholas quoting Gartner analyst Michael Blechar: “A failure to address service-oriented data redesign at the same time as process redesign is a recipe for disaster.”

I found this notion of “recipe for disaster” as something very important. In people’s mind, PLM system was a recipe for disaster. Even today, after the value of PLM was confirmed by many organizations and implementations, lots of people are still questioning about how to approach PLM in a right way. To continue with Capgemini article, I found the following passage very interesting:

While BPM tools have the infrastructure to do hold a data model and integrate to multiple core systems, the process of mastering the data can become complex and, as the program expands across ever more systems, the challenges can become unmanageable. In my view, BPMS solutions with a few exceptions are not the right place to be managing core data[i]. At the enterprise level MDM solutions are for more elegant solutions designed specifically for this purpose.

I found an interesting connection between this statement, and the presentation made by Bell Helicopter during Dassault Customer Conference last week in Las Vegas. Bell Helicopter embarked on the journey to implement Dassault newest V6 platform, and I was impressed by the presentation they made. You can see the following slide introduced one of the biggest problems in Bell’s organization back in 2005 was a significant need to modernize processes in the organization. They found that processes are too fragmented, and 467 legacy systems create a significant data and enterprise complexity.

The critical strategic decision made by Bell was to make PLM implementation first. Part of this strategy was so-called “get the core [product] data right first”.

PLM – Focus on Process

Since the industry focus move from PDM to PLM over the past 5-10 years, the question about what is the focus of PLM implementation emerged as something important. Until that time, most of the companies understood the value of PDM. Even despite PDM implementation complexity, the value of having the ability to vault CAD data and manage changes was mostly not disputable.

At the same time, I cannot say the same about management of product development processes. Let’s take Item / BOM and Change Management. Many PLM systems were “pushed” to manage BOM and Changes. However, in practice, it creates many problems. Bill of Material data (especially if you think not only about BOM from your CAD drawing) normally spread out multiple systems- PDM/PLM, ERP, Supply Chain Management. ECO is a process which clearly crossing multiple departments and data islands in an organization.

So, PLM system was pushed to be “focusing on processes”, and this push was very problematic. Sales and marketing were focused on promoting of the values of PLM to the companies. In practice, many organizations faced significant level of complexities to have, for example, change management process implementation across the entire organization. Why so?

PLM: How to streamline the data access

In my view, every manufacturing organization experiences a complexity of data. Data is overwhelmed. According to some industry researches, the amount of data volumes in organizations will be growing x44 times for the next 10 years. The question of managing data is long time in the spot of all PLM implementations. Very often, this question presented as “who owns part, BOM, etc.?”. The same question, but asked in a more intelligent way can sound like “who is mastering Part, BOM, etc. information”. The hidden question, I hear is the need to streamline data access related to these processes. This is a vital part of every PLM implementation.

The latest trend in this space is “unification”. PLM vendors are trying to push everybody to so-called “unified PLM platform” that will consolidate all data in a single place. For PLM vendors like Dassault, PTC, Siemens, it was “all except ERP”. For ERP-based PLM providers it gives even stronger voice of why PLM-ERP bundle may have an advantage.

The question, “how to streamline access to data” in the organization before you embark to the journey of process improvements is the key question that needs to be asked by all manufacturing companies. Without that, most of the “process improvements” and implementation will stack forever or will turn to a nightmare.

PLM and the promise of cloud applications

Cloud is hyping these days. It is not unusual to hear that cloud will solve the problem of complexity related to existing software in the enterprise. Here are few examples:

Dassault is talking about their V6 platform as a unique cloud platform (last week Bernard Charles, DS CEO mentioned $2B investment made into re-architecture of Dassault platform).

Another large company in engineering domain – Autodesk is just a week before making a significant announcement (see more details here). I found this quote interesting: Autodesk will forever improve the way you manage your business processes and workflows when we unveil a modern, zero deployment solution that makes collaboration, data, and lifecycle management accessible to anyone, anytime, anywhere.

Another new comer in this market – Kenesto (according to COFES 2012 registration, Mike Payne is CEO of Kenesto) promising to “revolutionize process automation“.

What is my conclusion? I think the failure to design data access in organizations, was a recipe for disaster for many PLM implementations. PLM programs were focused on “how to improve processes” and forgot about how to put a solid data foundation to support cross-departmental process implementations. So, I’d like to put a quote from Bell Helicopter’s presentation during DSCC 2011 as something PLM vendors and customers need to remember – “to get the core data right first”. Just my opinion, of course. YMMV.

Best, Oleg

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Posted by olegshilovitsky

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