Last week we discussed a lot MS Excel capabilities for PLM.
Why Do I Like My PLM Excel Spreadsheet?
PLM Excel Spreadsheets: From Odes to Woes
I see Excel’s competitor in this space – Google Squared.
So, try it
PLM Prompt: Google Squared is new PLM Excel?
June 5, 2009
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Google, Microsoft, PLM Prompt | Tagged: BOM, Excel, Google Squared, PLM | 
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Posted by olegshilovitsky
PLM Prompt: PLM Excel Gemini advantage?
June 2, 2009Watching multiple demos and analyzes of Microsoft Gemini Project.
Since a huge amount of corporate and product related data is still located in Excel and multiple local/legacy MS Access databases, this can be interesting and promising option for BI and PLM.
What is your opinion?
Gemini is essentially an add-in to Excel that allows very large sets of data to be manipulated. Why Excel? Simply because it’s a familiar environment for most people and the place where they expect to perform analysis.
But there’s more. Not only can Gemini handle very large sets of data, but it can also allow data from disparate sources to be cross analyzed. So, for instance, you might pull in some data from your data warehouse and cross-correlate it with data from the Internet or with data you already hold in Excel.
Let’s face it — Excel doesn’t have a great track record of being able to handle big sets of data. So Microsoft has added a new in-memory column store to handle the data. Can Gemini? Well, the demo I watched was run on a desktop with 8 GB RAM and a quad processor, and costs just less than $1,000. It was handling 100 million rows of data effectively instantaneously. So, I’d take that as a yes.
(Copyright searchdatamanagement.techtarget.com)
Leave a Comment » | Business Intelligence, PLM Prompt | Tagged: Business Intellignece, Excel, Microsoft Gemini, PLM | Permalink
Posted by olegshilovitsky
PLM Excel Spreadsheets: From Odes to Woes
May 26, 2009Although, I love my PLM Spreadsheets, it is a sort-of “Love and Hate” relationship. Since it’s so easy to start with Excel, we always do…, but what is the price of this easy move? So, I decided to follow-up my love letter to Excel with some “hate” statements.
1. It becomes complex within time. You always start with something simple to do. A few columns; simple formulas. But life adds additional parameters, and data to manage…. and then you can hardly manage it at all. You don’t remember all your excel dependencies. The Copy/Paste you loved in the beginning is no longer an easy task…
2. You cannot change it easily. At the beginning of your Excel story, it seems so easy to change. You can send it to any person, add information, delete, manage reports, etc. But as time goes by, nobody remembers the really good relationships you built in Excel. To touch data in Excel becomes so complex! I’ve seen many organizations who have an “Excel Manager” duty. These people are called “mission critical Excels”.
3. Data is not only in Excel. Your PLM life is not in Excel only. A lot of information exists in CAD, Designs, ERP, or in additional legacy applications. In my view, Excel is a very bad integration tool. You cannot easily point to information residing in other systems. But to manage these relationships, it’s really important to have the right data in your hands when you need it.
4. Where is my latest Excel? I’m sure you have asked this question many times. Is it the one connected to your mail? Is it the one on your laptop, or is it the one in SharePoint? When you have multiple Excels, and especially if you have multiple versions of these Excels, you will really be lost…
5. Hidden cost of dependencies. In the beginning of the Excel journey, it so easy to send an Excel file to your colleagues. You just attach it to your mail and you it’s delivered. But as soon as your Excel becomes complex such as being connected to other data sources or linked to other Excels, you cannot encapsulate it so easy. So, sometimes sending it via email isn’t so trivial.
What should I do next? I still really like my PLM Excel, but before building my PLM system on Excel grounds, I would like to try to find ways to avoid these hidden Excel problems. How should I do this? Keeping it simple is a good recommendation in theory, but not always easy an easy task to put into practice. I will think about a few recommendations and possible solutions, and will come back to you in future posts. I’ll record the recommendations in an Excel sheet before posting them here. Or maybe not….Stay tuned…
22 Comments | Daily PLM Think Tank, Microsoft | Tagged: Excel, PLM, PLM Spreadsheet | Permalink
Posted by olegshilovitsky
Why Do I Like My PLM Excel Spreadsheet?
May 25, 2009I think I will not surprise you with the statement: “the biggest market share in PDM/PLM belongs to Microsoft Excel”. If you disagree, please let me know. So, I wanted to share some thoughts about why I think that Excel is beneficial for PLM…
Below are the top five reasons why I prefer working in Excel to manage my product data and product lifecycle:
- Simple. Simple means simple. The idea is simple – one big table. You don’t need training. You can start right now. You realize that “simple is not as simple as you think” as your spreadsheet grows – but until you get there, you are a happy user
. - Flexible. To plan how to manage product data and lifecycle in your organization, you need to spend time and effort. But if your tools are on a white board and flexible to the level of “one size fit all”, you can start right now. The flexibility of Excel allows you to grow as you go. You don’t need to have models – just put your data and search it afterwards.
- Absorb any type of data. Often I’d like to be able to introduce a new type of data. MS Excel is there to help you with this. You can easily create a new workbook, worksheet, add columns, delete columns, etc. The beauty of a spreadsheet is that it is all-inclusive J… when you think about vendor-related stuff…
- I physically own it. This is true. If you have xls(x) files, you don’t need to be concerned with how to save, copy, and transfer your data. The feeling of ownership of your work is very important and people appreciate it.
- Transferable. This is comes with files. I can send them to anybody. I can control how the files are saved and maintained. So, I can transfer them inside and outside of the organization to facilitate collaboration.
…and one more -
- SharePoint friendly. My story nowadays is not complete without saying a few words about working together with Office files and SharePoint. SharePoint provides a new way to manage Office (Excel) files – Excel services and almost transparent conversion between SharePoint lists and Excels. Office Excel files and data are well organized and the content is easy to find.
The bottom line is that Excel spreadsheets have a lot of value in context of what we are doing in PDM/PLM. I’d love to discuss this with you.
21 Comments | Daily PLM Think Tank, Microsoft | Tagged: Excel, MS Excel, PLM, Simple PLM | Permalink
Posted by olegshilovitsky
How PLM can beat Excel? Or Blue Ocean’s ideas on how to improve usability…
March 2, 2009It looks like PDM is constantly running after Microsoft Excel. Lately PLM has also joined the chase.… While looking at the history of Excel applications, I’ve noticed a number of features in PDM/PLM systems that have been repeated systematically after similar features were introduced in MS Excel. In release after release, you can see sort, filter, groups, nested trees, etc.
Actually, PLM vendors are pretty aware about such competition. You can see multiple blogs and white papers comparing Excel capabilities and explaining why particular work can be done better in PLM compared to Excel. On the other hand, Excel provides people with a very flexible and open environment in which people can feel very secure about the way they manipulate data. In my opinion, this is a key reason for the continuing popularity of Excel. The PLM environment delivers specific functionality (i.e. for Bill of Material management) but put constraints on data manipulation. Therefore, in the end, it loses potentially attractive features.
Each new release of PLM software creates new features that simulate Excel capabilities on top of data models and constraints that Product Data Management established. So, how do you break this cyclic development and make customers happier?
In my view, the adoption of MS Excel services is a viable option to steer away from this feature competition. Excel services is one way to improve the PLM/Excel relationship, improve user adoption and get more functionality for the PLM environment.
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PLM systems need to map the data models and PLM services to an Excel service model. It will allow you to render data and use more functionality inside of Excel So, useful data manipulation such as sorting, filtering and others will be easy available for the product development environment. In addition Excel services will not require data to be copied/imported/exported. Actually, Excel service-based implementation will be more SOA compliant and improve data consistency inside the organization.
I’d like to know if you have any experience with Excel services in your organization or have tried to implement it as part of your software.
12 Comments | Daily PLM Think Tank, PLM User Experience | Tagged: Excel, PLM, SOA | Permalink
Posted by olegshilovitsky
What PLM can do with MS Excel and SaaS/Cloud Services?
December 10, 2008
Microsoft Excel is extremely popular. In many cases people are very comfortable working with product data in Excel files. But Excel files need to be managed and this is unpleasant side of Excel story. What we can do with this? – We can take all intelligence of product data and inject Excel to behave in similar way. This is sounds like something we are almost doing today. But by using this we create multiple dozens/hundreds Excel files spread out in your organization. How possible to unify excel story?
One of the possible option I see is to introduce Excel Services combined with Web Access. It will allow to provide users with familiar with Excel user experience to continue with their excel experience. On the other side data will not be part of Excel file anymore and can be located in your PLM system or other Enterprise systems and vaults in organization. You can also combine data from PLM system (such as Bill of Material) with information coming from external databases (i.e. compliance data or any other). By moving data on cloud or consuming SaaS application services you can discover additional options to transfer Excel into composite application with user experience adopted by many users in your organization.
Any comments on such approach? Do you see it possible in your organization?
5 Comments | Daily PLM Think Tank, PLM User Experience, Technology | Tagged: Cloud Data Services, Excel, Product Data | Permalink
Posted by olegshilovitsky
