PLM, Innovation and Getting Things Done

March 30, 2012

This week was extremely busy. I was traveling to attend Autodesk Media Summit in San-Francisco. You can read about it in my previous post. However, I wanted to talk about Innovation before this weekend. Have you heard about this buzz? It became so popular to talk about how software helps you to innovate these days. PLM vendors are joining this buzz as well. Well, everybody wants to be innovative. Easy answer. Obviously, I want to be innovative. Because it is so easy applies, PLM marketers took into the portfolio of PLM sales machine. The connection between PLM and Innovation became stronger for the last couple of years. You can see it on many websites of PLM-related companies and marketing materials. Almost two years ago, I posted – What are the metrics for PLM innovation? The idea was to discuss how you can measure innovation in the organization in order to prevent dilution of the term. Nevertheless, I believe the problem is still here.

I was reading Virtualdutchman blog of Jos Voskuil earlier this week about PLM and Innovation. Jos is taking the topic of Innovation in a very systematic way. Jos drives his conclusion about what are key company processes PLM can help you to innovate in. Read Jos’ conclusion below:

PLM does not kill innovation and although the PLM Vendor marketing is not very explicit, there are three areas where PLM supports Innovation. In a (subjective) order of priority I would say: 1/ New Product Introduction – bringing the highest revenue advantages for a selected invention; 2/ Invention discovery – by providing R&D a 360 view of their customers and market landscape enable inventions to happen in your company; 3/ Portfolio Management – to assist in selecting the right opportunities to focus.

I’m actually in agreement with Jos. PLM can help people to innovate. However, the story of innovation reminded me the story sales people were telling about the differences between vitamins and pain-killers. Vitamins are making your life better. Pain-killers are helping to remove your pain. It is very important to be able to innovate, take a right decision in NPD (new-product development) or discover for better ideas. However, in my view, it is all vitamins. Opposite to that, to have an ability to manage change processes, get access to the correct version of BOM or calculate product cost to be manufactured according to the specific order is something organization need to do every day.

It made me think about what is in people mind on a daily basis, so if PLM does it – people will use it immediately. Not innovation. I want to get a job done. Every day. People are absolutely dependent on tools that help them to manage everyday life activities – release drawings, run BOM changes, ordering components and product shipments. The following funny video of Kanban2go is not related to PLM, but it is so true.

What is my conclusion? People want to get a job done and go fo skydiving or skiing. I like the idea. However, the manufacturing planning process is frustrating. I cannot find my last drawings, or I need to re-build a product prototype from a baseline nobody can memorize or retrieve. There are many other frustrating tasks. In my view, to help people to get a job done will be the next big thing in PLM. Not to plan about 10-year future innovation (although it is important), but get rid of tasks standing between people and the weekend. I think PLM vendors need to take a note. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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PLM and COFES Israel: People Just Want to Drink a Beer!

December 18, 2010

Last three days I spent my time with COFES Israel. Navigate your browser to the following link to see agenda and people attended the event. The main topic of the event was about Software for Engineering and Innovation. Videos and presentations from the event will be available later. Two days before early COFES attendees from outside of Israel had a chance to visit Israeli companies and office of some foreign companies located in Israel such as Microsoft Israeli R&D Center in Herzlia,IBM Israel Lab in Haifa.

I visited Israeli company OptiTex providing CAD and manufacturing solutions for textile and fashion industry. Spend some time on their website with such a great set of examples of their technological innovation. I specially liked the red dancing dress by OptiTex.

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Andreas Vlahinos of Advanced Engineering Solutions presented some interesting statistics and visualization showing income per person comparison and growth between Israel and USA for the last seventy years.

Fielder Hiss of Dassault SolidWorks spoke about platform shifts, predictive computing and sustainability. The following slide definitely shows you the inside preparation of SolidWorks to run their product on any device.

I gave my top rank to the slide from the presentation of Brian Shepher of PTC. The complexity is one of the biggest problems of PLM. However, like Brian said – people just want to drink a beer. In my translation – people just want to get a job done.

PTC has some ideas about how to change the status quo. Their new Creo products supposed to solve this problem in the future. Navigate to the following link to read my thoughts about PTC Creo.

I’m going to give some additional thoughts later today about PLM innovation inspiring talks I had during this week in Israel. Best, Oleg

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How To Reset PLM Collaboration?

October 28, 2010

Almost 2 weeks ago, I wrote about De-confusing of PLM Collaboration. Today, I want to suggest a different angle and talk about how we can re-think PLM collaboration concept. Why I think it can be interesting? In my view, the enterprise software industry is coming through the process of consumerization. It means that lot of technologies well-established in the consumer space will be coming to the enterprise. PLM will not be excluded from this process. Collaboration could be a good starting point for such type of re-thinking. To put some lights I created the following diagram.

I think about 3 fundamental activities: Communication, Collaboration and Process Management. I’d like to discuss them separately.

Communication

This is the most straightforward part. In my view, it represents fundamental activities in an organization today. I heard from people that organization is practically “driven by emails”. New technologies and the web are bringing alternative ways to communicate (i.e. IM, Blogs, Forums…). However, email is very strong and all ambitious plans about how to replace emails became a failure.

Collaboration

I used “collaboration” word to identify tools helping people to share data. I can see “synchronous” and “asynchronous” tools that can be used by people to collaborate. In the past, enterprise product developed the whole world of various “workspaces”, “whiteboards” and other solutions to share information between users. New web tools (i.e. Wiki) are coming to this space from the internet. In my view, it represents interesting perspectives on how to share data.

Process Management

Fundamentally organization is driven by processes. Various business processes can drive and formalize people’s activities, define goals and measurement system. The important aspect of process management is “people’s adoption”. Very often, company is spending a significant amount of resources to formalize and establish a process management system. However, next day, the system abused by people running emails and by doing so, voting against complicated process management procedures.

Moving from Spaces to Channels

In my view, enterprises are moving from a database world to networks. I touched this point earlier in my post PLM Network Effect and Single Point of Truth few days ago. Slowly, companies are starting to understand that database-centralizing has the limit and will not scale up. The Internet experience shows clearly that “network organization” can be much more powerful. Thinking about this abstraction, I came to the conclusion about significant movement from the concept of “spaces” that was dominant in PLM collaboration for the last 10-15 years to the concept of “Channels”. The way to organize channels can present an innovation in streamlining communication and processes in enterprise organizations. I can see existing and new companies are innovating in this space. Just to bring few examples – Cisco Quad, Salesforce.com Chatter, Yammer, Vuuch. This is my short list of innovators in this domain.

What is my conclusion? Customer demand to re-think collaboration in enterprise will provide a significant impact on how PLM collaboration will be developed in this the next 3-5 years. Intersection of Process management, communication and old-fashion collaborative tools is a good starting point to reset everything we knew about PLM collaboration. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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PLM Downstream – Sent from my iPad?

August 6, 2010
I had a chance to read “Sent from my iPad”  on VEKTORRM last week. Dave Angelotti discussed an option to use iPad as a field device. It seems interesting. It made me think about lots of un-realized options for PLM innovation in downstream. Last year, I wrote – PLM content downstream usage, Googlenomic and Futuristic Search. Looking now on this post it seems to me much less futuristic. iPad experience helps… I decided to put few “downstream scenarios” and hope to get more ideas from you.

PLM Downstream Scenarios

(1) Sales. I can see many scenarios where sales-people will be able to have an access to configured catalog of products to facilitate sales. This is a dumb simple scenario. However, the complexity of the scenario is to have it well integrated with other systems.

(2) Manufacturing Shopfloor. In my view, there is an opportunity to use it to replace printed documents on the shopfloor. Do you think it may work? I talked to few people about this option last week. They told that iPad screen size is probably too small. Or maybe we need to wait for iBoard (you can take a look on the following joke about iPhone-iPad-iBoard-iMat)?

(3) Maintenance Operation. This is another similar to manufacturing shopfloor situation. The accessibility of the device may play a key role in getting an access to the right information during maintenance procedures.

The Missing Part of Puzzle?

Do you think device is important? My bet is yes. Sometime, innovative ideas have a very long path to people. To make them possible the unique combination of events needs to happen. It might be cost of components, environment or just device or available technology. The ultimate goal is to get rid of paper from downstream. This is a real innovative goal, in my view. It makes a lot of sense from various standpoints – information access, ecology, etc. Don’t you think iPad is the missing part of Puzzle to make it happen?

What is my conclusion? From my experience, the following three iPad characteristics ultimately help to iPad proliferation in downstream – (1) Lightweight; (2) Connectivity; (3) Power consumption. I think iPad creates a significant option for PLM (and BIM) innovation in the downstream applications- sales, manufacturing facilities, field operations, etc. What I like in iPad is an ability to create a platform for lots of powerful and focused applications. Not a big PLM show, focus matters!

Best, Oleg

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What Are The Metrics For PLM Innovation?

April 14, 2010

A couple of weeks ago I had healthy debates about PLM and Innovation with Jim Brown of TechClarity. If you haven’t had chance to be part of this discussion you can check out the following post – PLM vs. ERP: Don’t Manage Innovation. During the last couple of days, I had chance to have an additional discussion on the “innovation” topic with some of my readers off line and online, and I came to the conclusion that I need to refresh this topic. I want to take the notion of “management” and “innovation” as starting points. The combination of them together made me think about the fact I need to bring some metrics in this “innovation management” process. Since, if you don’t know how to measure it, you hardly be able to “manage it”.

PLM and Product Innovation
I think, that PLM-minded people think about the innovation in the context of product development. Since, the  goal of CAD/CAE/PDM/PLM and other system related to engineering is about how to create products, this is the only innovation that counted for product development. Obviously, other areas of business such as manufacturing planning, supply chain, business accounting also may contain innovative aspects, but they are not in the scope of PLM vision. So, I came to the conclusion that development of new, innovative products is the ultimate goal of PLM innovation.

Innovation and Golden Eggs
When I think about an innovation process, the best association I can bring is the idea of golden eggs. Each new idea or product can be actually considered as the potential golden egg. However, the biggest problem with golden eggs is that they can crack. To decrease the risk of having cracked egg, I can potentially think about having more than one egg in my innovation bag. So, when I think about innovation management, I’d like to think about how to turn my innovation process to goose that will lay down golden eggs. As soon as I can do that, I can manage this process to produce as many eggs as I can and choose the appropriated ones applying specific metrics.

PLM Innovation Metrics
When I think about potential measures of product innovation, I can come with set of criteria related to the different aspects of organization and product performance performances. I’d like to put below some of the ideas about possible metrics.

Organization Performance
- Revenues from new product
- Customer satisfactions from new product
- ROI from new product

Product Characteristics
- Cost
- Performance
- Usability
- Novelty

Innovation Process
- Number of new ideas in the pipeline
- Number of new ideas comes from outside of the organization
- Time from the idea to the realization
- % of the ideas materialized as a new product or new development.

I’m sure this is an incomplete list and may be different for the specific organization. However, I hope gives an idea about what can be considered as a metrics for PLM (product) innovation.

Just my thoughts… I’m very interested to know your opinion and get your feedback.
Best, Oleg

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PLM and Product Innovation

March 2, 2010

Few weeks ago, I promised to blog about PLM and Innovation. It started by the following post – “PLM vs. ERP: Don’t manage innovation“. Thank you all for great discussion since then! Now, this is a time for me to summarize and share my thoughts.

My short conclusion about Product Lifecycle Management in the context of innovation is as following. PLM is one of the ultimate systems that can enable innovation in the organization. However, I don’t see how PLM can literally manage innovation. I think about innovation as a process in the organization. The core idea behind this process is how to manage risks related to overall innovation activities. I’ll explain this using something I call “Goose Innovation Strategy”.

Goose Innovation Strategy or How To Convert Innovation to Math? Let think about innovation as a controlled multi-dimensional activity. Our interest is to get a particular outcome, which in case of product development can be considered as next product, versions or the next product features and/or improvements. Nevertheless, developing of something new is a very risky task. What we need to do when we want to  reduce a risk? We want to distribute risk into separate activities. If we develop a single golden egg, it can crack. However, if we will be investing into Goose that laying down golden eggs, our situation can be much  better. You are able to predict results. So, think about hedge fund. Distribute risks, allow to multiple people to product multiple ideas related to the product. In this case, your future might be much more secured. Some of your golden eggs will crack, nevertheless, statistically you should be ok. The bottom line – don’t invest into golden eggs, since they can crack. You better invest into Goose in your organization that laid golden eggs. Your innovation process is how to deliver a decent percent of those eggs. And this is pure math.

PLM Role in Goose Innovation Strategy
So, how PLM can help you to apply Goose Innovation Strategy? I figured out top three factors or components of that. They are belongs to Product Lifecycle Management and needs to be supported for efficient product innovation.

1- Product Data

In my view, you need data to innovate. Period. In context of PLM, this just to say – make your product data available. If you have access to the product data (people like to call it “a single point of truth”), you’ll be able to use it as one source of innovative ideas. It is always good to have a reliable source of information about how a product designed, manufactured and built – this is an endless source of innovation.

2- Product Ideas.

Product Ideas are everywhere. In your organization,  ideas are in the heads of people that bring these ideas. No ideas – no innovation. Remember ideas, capture them, analyze them. Therefore, the next effort needs to be focused on how to capture and access all ideas available in the organization. In my view, all “social” initiatives in PLM should be focused on this too.

3- Product People

People are the source of ideas. You need to have “product people” to think about how to innovate. In order to do so, they need to exchange ideas, communicate, talk, etc. 10 years ago, the only way to do so was a separate room in the building. These days multiple communication and collaboration facilities can help you. Ideas can come to you at any time. You need to keep your “recording device” and “communication device” open. PLM can keep live links between individuals in the organization and stream of product innovative ideas.

What is my conclusion today? Innovation is a controlled activity and need to be organized and managed in the organization. I don’t see PLM as a primary responsible. However, I do see PLM as one of the enablers for such innovation activity by supporting relations between product data, people and ideas.

Best, Oleg

PS. I’d like to recommend few related books. They are essential, in my view, if you want to dive into innovation.

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PLM, Chocolate and Innovation

January 14, 2010

I’d like to share some thoughts today following yesterday’s Mass Innovation Night in IBM Center in Waltham, MA. This is my first time on this event. Initially, I was interested to see Vuuch presentation as well as some other companies. If you are local in Massachusetts and want to take a look on new companies and technologies, I’d strongly recommend to keep this event on your list. You can find more information about future events, contact information and links to presenting companies on the following link.

I liked presentation and how the event was organized. However, I’d like to share with you my thought about the company that impressed me the most on the yesterday’s show. As a person that doing most of my time with technologies and everything around that, I found company Taste of Chocolate very fascinating. The biggest lesson here is related to values and passion. We often tend to forget about this when talking a lot about technological innovation. Think about this first when you will start writing your next program :) …

Just my thoughts,
Best, Oleg

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PLM Plus User Experience Minus Complexity On Demand

November 11, 2009

Few publications around a new company called PLM+, which left stealth mode this week, drove my attention. There is not much information about PLM+ product. You can take a look on Josh Mings post in SolidSmack and Al Dean publication in develop3D as well as research PLMplus web site. So, I did.

PLM+ hit me to think again about second-mover innovation. I had chance to discuss second-movers before in my post “PLM in an economic downturn – Is there a place for second mover innovation?”. Looking on everything, I know about PLM+ for the moment, it makes me perfect sense to innovate in the place where all PLM companies already made their trials and investments. Original born for big companies like Boeing, Toyota and others, Product Lifecycle Management aimed to resolve complex needs of these big OEM’s design and manufacturing processes. Since that time and especially during last 3-5 years, most PLM vendors claimed their SMB-oriented product lines and brands – Siemens PLM Velocity with TeamCenter Express, Dassault PLM Express and various combination of ENOVIA SmarTeam products, Windchill OnDemand from IBM and Windchill Product Point (just released earlier this year). All these products claimed simple, yet powerful product capabilities fully loaded with a set of known PLM buzzwords ready for SMB.

And, of course, I need to talk about Arena Solution (former bom.com). Reading about PLM+ and looking on old materials about PLM products, I found very interesting use case from Arena Solution back in 2002. Unfortunately, web history is pretty clean and even Google wasn’t able to track this publication 7 years backward online, but I have copy of document and would like to share a fragment of this use case below. Take a look – I think it is self-explained.

Picture 44

So, what are my thoughts about PLM+ today? I think, to innovate in the place where all competitors spent a lot of money to research and build their own products is a very interesting approach that fits today’s economy. And, it was successfully done by many other companies in the past. Without going with big examples like AMD vs. Intel, there are many others. I personally liked company called Xobni – think about what possible to invent in email these days? So they did, in my view. For me PLM+ is a very interesting try to achieve “simple” in PLM and, I agree with Josh, saying that it’s very hard to write these two words together anytime. Knowing personally Guy Alroy and Benny Shaviv, I just want to tell them good luck!

Best, Oleg

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Accidental Collaboration using PLM

September 29, 2009

Picture 6I’d like to think about how to improve collaboration… So, why I’d like to talk about “collaboration” again? We got enough collaboration for the past years in PLM. Our primary focus was on how to enable collaboration by seamless access to design, models, visuals, processes in the end. Even so, this is exactly my point – we enable collaboration when people actually ready to collaborate on something. If you are sending request to you colleagues with a specific 3D fragment, problem, issue etc. All these situations can be grouped as “intentional type of collaboration”. Your intent is to collaborate, so it makes things easy.

Now, let me come with a different type of collaboration – accidental. For me, the main distinguished situation in this case, that this type collaboration happens not according to the initial intent. So, you are not allowing people to collaboration with you, but use information created by somebody else to collaborate on the specific topic. I will give you few examples of accidental collaboration: 1/ your discover a specific design problem happened to machine you design in the past; 2/ you are analyzing support case and discover how to improve machine or process; 3/ you are looking on revenues from your products and discover something specific comes out of machines or products you are working on.

Now, what is similar in all these situations (and maybe you can come with something in addition). You have no specific intent to collaborate. A collaboration happens by accident when you work in the context of a specific set of data. This specific set of data is not created for this collaborative purpose, but was created by somebody else, or even a result of combination and/or manipulation on data. Sounds like simple, right? However, in my view, this is terrible missed point in today’s collaborative systems. Most of the tools to support accidental collaboration, today developed by implementation services and target a specific customer need. There is very little generic support for such tools.

So, what should be done, in my view to improve PLM ability for accidental collaboration? Below are few proposals how we can better facilitate accidental collaboration:

1.     Usability of product data representation. As much more we will be human oriented, more information will be available for users

2.     Use “contextual patterns” of user experience. Facilitate presentation of information in the context of particular topic – user, product, operation, requirements, customers.

3.     Improve annotation capabilities. Improve an ability of the system to annotate information. It will allow to create additional data, contextually connected.

4.     Improve data portability. We need to have an ability to transfer data between systems in enterprise. It will allow transparency and connection of information.

5.     Improve Business Intelligence. To have additional BI capabilities will allow to mine and extract data, previously hidden from users.

I’m sure this is a not exhaustive list of needs. However, following these needs will allow to streamline collaboration significantly. How do you see it? Do you have similar cases in your organization? Does it make sense to you?

Best, Oleg

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PLM Way to Enterprise 2.0

July 10, 2009

e2confLast week BlueKiwi and Dassault Systems announced their strategic alliance to delivery Social Innovation for PLM. I was very excited to read about it. BlueKiwi is interesting software that enables communities. Some of them are very useful, and I had a chance to use them by myself. I believe BlueKiwi product can be compared to the other social enabling technologies like blogs, social networks etc.  The best place to read about those technologies is to browse through materials of Enterprise 2.0 conference (actually E 2.0 event took place last week in Boston, Mass).

I had some thoughts while reading the following article on the same topic. Enterprise 2.0 is looking for the way to be adopted by Enterprises. This is interesting perspective. The author mentioned that one of the ways for Enterprise 2.0 tools to be adopted by Enterprise is to be linked to Business Process tools. The whole idea, if I understood it correctly, is that Business Process in organization will be fed up by social networking tools. For example, an innovation process needs to get more ideas and these ideas can be captured by tools like BlueKiwi…

In my view, the fundamental idea is interesting. I can imagine many people in organizations struggling to find the email with their idea how make product better or something they worked on last week, month, year…

Where I see a problem? Every business process is structured by its nature. Opposite to a business process, an innovation process is very unstructured. To connect structured and unstructured communications is not a simple task. One possible way to resolve this conflict is to make business processes in an organization more flexible.

This is my opinion. What do you think about it?

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