PLM and Selling Data

February 10, 2012

Manufacturing companies aggregating a lot of data these days. Data is coming from many places. For many years, product development, manufacturing and supply chain was major sources of data in companies. Nowadays, data is coming from outside of a company. Internet, social network and communication created new source of information. The intersection of data from inside of a company and outside data is a very interesting place. I’ve been reading Forester blog – Mo’ data mo’ problems few days ago written by Clarence Villanueva. The publication discusses a potential value of data created during marketing campaigns. Here is a quote:

…a client was looking to have a marketing company take its point-of-sale (POS) data to prepare email campaigns. Upon closer review of the contracts, data ownership was ambiguously defined and nested in three separate areas: the Master Services Agreement (MSA), SOW, and an addendum. When you trace the definition through the various documents, the only thing made clear on data ownership was that the campaigns resulting from the ETL (extract, transform, load) process were owned by the client. What about the POS data that was sent over to the marketing services company?

This example made me think about multiple cases when manufacturing companies as well as outside companies such as suppliers, service providers and many other entities can create an interesting value from the combination of the data owned by them – product information, sales information, contracts, customer data, etc. Imagine PLM software will be able to combine these pieces of data into valuable assets.

What is my conclusion? I think PLM has an opportunity to convert data into valuable assets. I can see more companies adopting PLM these days. Cloud PLM will provide an additional opportunity to connect data coming from multiple sources – supply chain, subcontractors and customers. Sounds like an important topic and cool opportunity. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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GrabCAD, New Openness and Future Business Models

February 1, 2012

The world is changing fast. What was near to impossible 10 years ago tomorrow, becomes a reality today. It related to the field of engineers as well as to the software that used by people and manufacturing companies. One of the factors impacting everything around us is the internet. It brings unknown before opportunities and new problems. An example of creating a different way to work is a community website for mechanical engineers GrabCAD. Earlier, this week, I was following an interesting discussion on various aspects of GrabCAD development on Matt Lombard’s Dezignsuff blog. Take few minutes to follow the discussion and opinions on Matt’s blog. This discussion made me think about the internet, new openness and future of business models.

Non-systematic definition of GrabCAD

I had a chance to look over what GrabCAD is doing and posted about them on my blog before – The Future of Engineering Communities and Manufacturing Crowdsourcing and Cloud PLM opportunities. Take few minutes to read and make your opinion. Deelip Menezes was describing what his opinion about the future of GrabCAD. He was consulting GrabCAD back in 2010. Here is an interesting passage from Deelip’s blog:

To put it simply, GrabCAD is a free online CAD library, not very different from other online CAD libraries. But the CAD library is only a first step. Pretty soon, GrabCAD will evolve into an online Engineering marketplace where members will be able to post Engineering projects and other members will be able to bid on them…GrabCAD will have an eBay style rating system where a member can start building his “reputation” by fulfilling projects, uploading his personal models for others to download and use, etc.

Hardi Meybaum explains GrabCAD using words “Crowdsourcing and Open-Engineering”. Navigate to the following presentation to learn more. In my view, it confirms plans of GrabCAD to develop future online applications in the field of engineering and manufacturing. You can think about Facebook apps applied to CAD domain. It obviously brings lots of questions related to IP – copyright, reuse and many others that needs to be handled on time.

DMCA and Engineering IP

I can see Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is one of the fundamentals of online business when it comes to Copyright protection. History already created few examples when companies protected their work using DMCA. Among them, there is a famous Google-Viacom and some other cases. At the same time, I never heard about application of DMCA to the field of CAD models, engineering IP and some cases discussed in Dezignstuff blog.

Respect Engineering Community

From my experience, engineers are special kind of people. In the past, SolidWorks developed a very successful community that respects engineers and their work. That’s why we had a chance to see so many SolidWorks works online – blogs and shared online materials. You cannot see such amount of online work related to other CAD systems. GrabCAD is actually proven in GrabCAD’s infographic:

To respect engineers is one of the fundamental thing that can create a successful engineering and manufacturing community. Last changes in GrabCAD that allows you toreport this model and upload notification shows that GrabCAD is listening. At the same time, in my view, it happened very reactively.

What is my conclusion? Future engineering environment will be different from what we see now. It will be driven by new technologies and business opportunities. It will take time to develop them as well as to adjust existing legal definitions. Clearly, GrabCAD is trying to innovate in this space. Future development of GrabCAD depends on many factors and events. It looks like a fast drive on a narrow path between IP of engineers and manufacturing companies, legal rules and business interests. As we know from the history of the internet, driving fast can bring you a speed ticket :) . Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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

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What if… “PLM on the cloud” succeeds?

May 24, 2011

Push aside our fear about security and PLM on the cloud. I was reading Washington Post’s “Video Viewing on Netflix Accounts for Up to 30 Percent of Online Traffic“. The following link leads us picture comparing web traffic coming from various providers. Video is king on the web.

CAD files, visualizations and other heavy weighted stuff. It is not lightweight Twitter 140 chars status updates or Facebook low resolution picture sharing. Cloud service providers from Amazon to Google and Rackspace are building data centers to accommodate the future of cloud applications. It made me think “What if PLM on the cloud succeeds?”, what will be the cost of this solution? CAD and PLM companies are starting to offer solutions to share data on the cloud for better collaboration and data exchange. I wrote about such a type of the solutions before.

The following quote from Wash. Post article is interesting:

Last week, Cable One introduced metered prices for U.S. customers that include 50 to 100 gigabytes per month. According to its Web site, the company (owned by The Washington Post Co.) will charge customers 50 cents for each gigabyte beyond the caps, but it will continue to offer a flat-rate monthly plan also.

Beginning this month, AT&T began limiting data usage to 150 gigabytes for DSL subscribers and 250 gigabytes for its UVerse broadband customers. Users will be charged an extra $10 a month if they exceed the cap. Comcast also has a 250-gigabyte cap for its broadband users.

What is my conclusion? The PLM on the cloud conversations is always about the security and never about the price and cloud usage. I don’t know if my drawings will be stolen faster on cloud. The question what if the transfer of my drawings, models, animations and rest of the stuff on the web will be costly. It might be significantly more costly than today’s software licenses. What is your take?

Best, Oleg

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Free CAD File Conversion In The Cloud?

July 9, 2010

The problem of CAD file conversion in old and has never been easy. Engineers are working in multiple CAD systems and conversion is a real problem. Quite many companies are in business of CAD conversion. The policy and practice of CAD vendors with regards to their ability to open/save competitor’s files are different. The person who needs to solve this problem is either engineer in a small company or CAD manager or IT in a bigger one. What if… we can find a solution for this problem by leveraging internet scale and cloud availability?

I found an interesting web site http://www.online-convert.com/. The idea behind is pretty simple – you have your file to convert, and you can use services. I found it quite useful for myself.


I tried to Google “CAD File Conversion service online” and wasn’t able to find any similar online service for CAD data. I know, many companies have different solutions and services that either provide you with conversion service or selling a translation software. Is it a time to think how to convert it into an online service? I can think about several monetizing strategies of this service. It sounds simple and viable. What do you think about that? Do you know somebody who tried to accomplish it in the past?

Best, Oleg

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How to Manage ECO without paying $1’500 per seat?

June 17, 2010

I had chance to read Buzz message thread about ECO management, initiated by Josh Mings. I found it worth reading. One of the questions stick in my memory, and I decided to put it in the title of my blog post today. How to manage ECO without paying $1’500 per seat? I think the point was made in a very clear way. Changes is a real life of engineering and manufacturing company. However, cost/value seems to be problematic for solutions we have available today.

Microshare
Please, take a look on Microshare definition in Wikipedia.

To microshare is to offer access to a select piece or set of digital content by a specific group of invited or otherwise privileged guests in a controlled and secure manner. In contrast to public sharing of content, microsharing enables a more private or intimate level of making content accessible by others. Microsharing access can be secured via uniquely encoded urls or by password protection.

Let me take an example from Josh’s stream and translate it in microshare-like ECO-message-burst.

–>ECR#123 is submitted from customer services @servicecounter;
–>@servicecounter Looking on this ECR#123… Seems like a problem. Hold shipments;
–>Moved ECR#123 to engineering @engineeringhero;
–>@engineeringhero ECR#123 requires analyzes by #allengineeringgeeks;
–>@topgeek solution for ECR#123 is to disable radio switch off function;
–>@servicecounter hold shipments until ECR#123 fixed by @engineeringhero;

I hope you should get my hint now. In the end, I see collaboration as a message sharing in the organization. In before-computers-era, papers functioned as a message transferring mechanism. Then we invented databases, PDM, PLM…

PLM View on ECO Management
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When all you have is a database and SQL, you just need to translate all your problems in database and SQL forms. This is the way we have been working for the last 15-20 years. If we got a problem, we need to create a model, keep data in a database, retrieve it, save it, manipulate and, in the end, yikes! – we have a solution. What is the problem here? This is a long way that creates lots of complexities – manage a database, agree about model, implement, agree about how maintain changes, create a user interface, teach everybody how to use it and, finally also to fix bugs. This is a way we are doing PDM/PLM today.

Should Be A Simpler Way?
What if? What if we invented enough technologies that can help us to the same job in a much simpler way? If all we are interesting is related to a particular ECO#123, I can keep reference to these messages without inventing SQL Table Grandiose? I can just record it and want to be alerted, when something happens to this particular ECO. If you are doing something related to this ECO, you can put a message into microshare storage about that. Somebody, who is responsible for shipment need to see if there are any of messages or info that prevents shipment. You can subscribe to messages via something like RSS and get a single channel of messages coming to your mobile device. I know it sounds crazy to any straightforward database and/or IT guy. But, in my view it may work and simplify the life of many engineers in the organization. The infrastructure for microshare and RSS is much cheaper, compared to the development of data models, tables, UIs etc.

What is my conclusion? I think, we came to the point where everybody in the organization is looking how to work differently. It is not only about how much to spend on the particular software package. It is about how to organize work better and simpler. I’m taking “microshare” as an option. Yesterday, on Enterprise 2.0 conference, one of the presenters asked a question – How many user guides did you read in the last year? The answer was ZERO. This is a time to think about a simpler way. I want to credit Evan Yares blog for the picture, I put in this blog post. I think it is very valid these days.

Just my thoughts…
Best, Oleg

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Five Online Technologies for PLM in 2010

January 22, 2010

The world of computing is very unpredictable these days. However, I’d like to bet and put some of my thinking towards something called “online” or “connected” technologies in 2010. As usual, I’d be watching these technologies in the prism of PLM with some flavor of going beyond PLM acronyms trying to understand how it can impact product design, development and manufacturing.

Cloud Computing. I think, since last year, we can hear word “cloud” more and more often. However, this is also time to think what practical benefit we can take out of this in 2010.  When most of the customers trying to cross the “cloud” with “SaaS” and imagine how all Intellectual Property they are developing is going to Google-like space, in my view, 2010 benefits will be coming differently. Existing vendors and new companies will be discovering new ways to use cloud computing power to do calculation, rendering, analytic. Another possible alternative will be to use cloud space for collaboration, but here some security questions can be raised. We need to think about effective models to secure collaboration online for engineering. This is an open call, in my view.

Business Intelligence. More specific, in comparison to cloud computing, but very frustrating, for the moment. BI is complex and expensive. Multi-core machines, double digit GB RAMs, multi-display configurations. This is still a reality in BI world, but I think this state of mind will not fit engineering and manufacturing world. Operational BI trend is interesting, and I’d expect some development happens in this space too.

Enterprise Mashups. I’m a little optimistic with regards to mashup story this year, in comparison to the previous one. I hope you had chance to read my post “Is PLM too Complex to Mashup“, but I think demand for mashup is growing and some delivery will be possible. In my view, the opportunity will come from inside of companies as much as companies will go to private clouds and advanced web architectures. This will be the important exam for all PLM vendors, since they will be requested to share information using open API, SOA and other available infrastructure.

Social Software and Networking. This is a continuation of Enterprise 2.0 trend and an opportunity to capitalize on Facebook and Twitter maturity inside of the organization. I think, we’ll see lots of Facebook-clones for enterprise PLM and community collaborative experience will be replicated many times inside of organization. However, not all of them will be successful. The biggest problem is the question: “How many social platforms we need for enterprise?“. And, unfortunately, this question will keep enterprises busy without moving forward.

Unified Communication (UC). Mail, Phone, Laptop, iPhone, Messenger, Facebook, Twitter… Too many devices, in my view. How we can navigate between all these devices in the optimal way. I think UC, finally, will become mature and corporation will try to move forward in optimizing communication. While call designers over the wall using the phone, when you can chat in the 3DLive or similar collaborative application?

So, I will be interested to discuss with you my thoughts and have your feedback. Does it fit your organizational plans or development roadmaps? Do you see similar requests coming out of your communication with customers and partners?

Best, Oleg

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Internet Kills. PLM better move to become real PLM 2.0…

September 10, 2009

I’ve been enjoying reading UK Telegraph’s “50 Things that are being killed by the Internet“. So, good news - PLM is not on the list yet. But, point was made very clear - Internet can change our life and Internet can change our business. I think, Enterprise 2.0 is the real beginning of change to more productive tools toward open information exchange. This wave is slowly coming to enterprise, but will hit PLM space too. Take a look on a good comparison between Enterprise 1.0 and Enterprise 2.0.

enterprise 20 vs enterprise 10
So, what I‘m thinking about it? I think,Internet intervention is coming to enterprise space and Enterprise 2.0 is the first sign. But, looking on Enterprise 2.0, I‘m thinking how much PLM need to accomplish in order not to be killed and transformed. The top issues for me are flexibility, bottom-up, transparency, global. I think we still have long way to go.

Best, Oleg

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PLM and Internet of Things

July 24, 2009

internet-of-thingsIn my view, Internet is going to change much more things in our life than we can imagine. One of the interesting trends related to Internet and PLM, I want to discuss is called Internet of Things. This term was born first time in MIT back to 1999 in Auto-ID labs and was related to identification of physical objects. You can browse Auto-labs publication (open and available!) and see old papers related to indentification work they did.

I started to track Internet of Things in 2009 because, I think, our life becomes much connected and virtual. Many real life objects potentially can be connected to internet. With latest development of systems like Twitter, think about ability to connect multiple devices and objects of a physical world to allow them to twitt! This is almost situation when house appliance will be able to twitt to a supermarket and make online orders.

So, you can ask me “where is PLM in this story?”. Here is my take. All physical objects surrounding us designed and manufacturing with a certain level of PLM system involvement. Different manufacturing companies have various levels of PLM deployment, but most of them have CAD to create digital models, they track data about what they were engineering and manufacturing. Since we take more and more environmental responsibilities, we need to track what we designed in real life. This is where I see “internet of things” are finally connecting. I think RFID technologies is only begining in whole story of connected virtual and physical devices.

Not for today, but for the future I see blurring borders between virtual and physical life of objects… I’d recommend Shaping Things book by Bruce Sterling as good weekend reading for all CAD/CAE/CAM/PDM/PLM folks. Relax from TLAs and think about how to make life connected and reasonable with technologies we have in our hands.

I’m sure will come to discuss it more in the future and therefore, looking forward to your comments and ideas.

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PLM in 21st Century: Fewer Giants, Folksonomies and Infinite Opportunity

July 21, 2009

future-trendsIn the early beginning of the Internet in the late 80s of 20th Century, MIT professor Tom Malone started to think how Internet will re-shape industry landscape in 21st Century. In a series of papers, he predicted that huge top down corporations would soon decentralize and transform themselves into industry eco-systems. Huge companies were created in the past to minimize “transaction cost” between teams down to supply chain. Modern distributed networks and information systems will do the same outside the walls of single company. However, actually for the last 10 years we observed a huge parade of growing gigantic companies – global consolidations happened all over the places, in pharmaceutical, chemical, finance, automotive and other sectors we had chance to see unprecedented growths of big companies. And… then 2008 crashes in finance sectors happened. Big finance corporations turned out  to have been inflated by debt at the level never seen before, the big car corporations crashed head-on skyrocketing oil prices and plummeting consumer demands…

Obviously, all these changes also impacting Product Lifecycle Management industry. First PLM companies were born of big defense, aerospace and automotive companies, providing initial backup to companies first developed CAD and coming later Product Lifecycle Management brands. What will happen with these companies in the changed landscape of traditional industries?

I think, today, we are finally coming to the point where Internet will start playing a significant role in future PLM development. In the landscape of fewer gigantic corporations, Internet will play a role of infrastructure between multiple numbers of smaller players in a supply chain of existing OEMs and in the ecosystem of many of the newcomers… Opposite to well-know today hierarchical PLMs, Folksonomies (also known as collaborative tagging, social classification and social indexing) will play a bigger role in organizing of smaller systems together. Big exposure of top-down systems will create infinite set of opportunities in providing solution for smaller companies. These smaller companies will behave in absolutely different way.

So, what will be key principles for future Product Lifecycle Management Solutions? I’d like to figure out three major characteristics that will form future Internet based PLM in 21st century.

#1 – Flexible Data Organization. PLM will be transformed to live in an open Internet world. We will not be able to apply today’s principles of data governance on PLM data management. PLM systems will be requested to co-exist in the big network of small companies operating in single cloud-y space. Transparency of information will play more important role in future data organization.

#2 – Social Networking. People and Organization system will be transformed into global social networks. Boundaries between a company network and social network of suppliers, partners and customers will be blurred. Together with information transparency, social network will create a network of future business opportunities for big number of independent companies – suppliers social networks.

#3 – Crowdsourcing. Global data availability and global people network will open new opportunities for work organization. What we have today as global design and global manufacturing will become mainstream and allows to small companies to be self-organized in industry communities.

I think for 2009 is a bit futuristic view, but if we will analyze situation in many industries, we will discover that processes toward decentralization, creating of bigger number of small suppliers and network organization already started to happen… So, I’d be interested to hear your voices and to discuss it with you.

Best, Oleg.

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Can Internet Change CAD?

May 4, 2009

The future of CAD as well as many other great technological products can be impacted by major technological trends. Undoubtedly, one of the most influential technological trends of the last decade is the Internet. Web technologies have changed the behavior of the people – the way they think and work. This comes from technological companies by introducing new services and products and also comes from social spaces. This weekend, while visiting friends, I looked at how some kids aged ten to eleven were using the Internet. I was amazed to see how Google Search is natural in their Web behavior. For many of us, coming from the desktop world, find it very natural to split between desktop and web. We tend to look for information on the Web and keep it on our virtual desks for future use. This is something that is going to change – web is becoming so transparent that we don’t need to keep information on our desktops anymore.

How is this related to CAD? I’d like to discuss two main areas where CAD will be impacted – CAD Data Management Transparency and Open CAD representation format:

1. CAD Data Management Transparency: I’d like to discuss the idea of “invisible” data management. It would start from our ability to use remote/cloud storage to keep our design data. In the beginning we will be able just keep our designs files (and the word for files itself might actually get changed) there, but within time, this storage will support basic data management capabilities that will have global behavior. No more local unique identifiers – data management technology will improve and rely on new Web capabilities.

2. Open CAD representation format. CAD format plays a very significant role in our lives today. We are taking care about this “holy cow” which trails lots of very complex questions that you can discover in every CAD-related community. This issue called Interoperability. My prediction is that CAD representation formats will be immersive with CAD SOA capabilities. We will not produce <files>, but we will produce design associated with specific design (CAD) software. This (CAD) software will use embedded representation services that will allows us to “deliver” design model to the specific device, product, context or other service, and make it available for usage.

I was reading Jeff Ray’s blog post “Predicting of CAD Future” early this week and found a few of Jeff’s thoughts corresponding very much my “internet-technological” thinking. Obsolescence of data management and design anywhere-anytime is something that definitely can be enabled by the broad introduction of Internet technologies in our space.

I’d be interested to hear your voices and churns on this topic.

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Posted by olegshilovitsky

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