Who wants to manage Product Data?

June 23, 2009

One of the ambitious goals PLM puts in front of strategists, implementors and developers is to manage a product lifecycle from early on (requirements, initial product designs) and until the end of product lifecycle towards manufacturing, supply chain and disposal processes. At first glance, it sounds like a great idea, as it looks like PLM is on a fundamentally unique track of providing this solution to a customer…. but, here is the problem. I think that PLM is not really unique when it comes to the company’s landscape, and there are many different systems in organization claim to manage product data.

So, I decided to cluster a few tools from different areas to outline who are these “PLM” competitors to data in an organization. So far, I found five fundamental product domains.

  1. Content Management. This is company document storage. Most of the companies in this area are working primarily on documents, the ability to put them on the shelf, manage their access and lifecycles.  Since most of product lifecycle information in the end becomes a “document”  I’d put this companies on ‘Red Alert J…
  2. ERP /MRP. This is a traditional neighbor and competitor. PLM and ERP/MRP have been “competing” against each other for many years. I discussed this issue many times on blog. I don’t predict a “system expansion”. Many ERP vendors have a solution with a specific PLM flavor. We can see them and what they offer on the market.  These systems can evolve and claim to manage even more product data in the future.
  3. Business Process Management. This is a newly emerged trend. In my view, the BPM market is relatively small in manufacturing, and therefore BPM tools will feel they need to work out their potential in  PLM cases as well.
  4. MDM – Master Data Management has a relatively good adoption rate by big enterprise customers. In my view, as MDM cannot scale down, I’d provide limited importance to being able to compete with PLM. Indeed, we need to pay specific attention when we plan for enterprise PLM.
  5. Collaboration Tools and Applications. Hot topic. People are looking how to collaborate better. Various collaboration tools are looking at how to improve data management solutions too. With the introduction of Google Wave and the expanded future offering of MS SharePoint 2010, collaboration tools definitely can expand their offering to a more specific PLM space. There is a potential danger from the low end.

So, how will PLM be able to compete with these systems successfully?  This is a big question – which is why I’m asking for your advice and feedback here, as well as find out what else you have in mind.

11 Comments | Daily PLM Think Tank, Future Trends, PLM and organization | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by olegshilovitsky

PLM Content Downstream Usage, Googlenomic and Futuristic Search…

April 3, 2009

I’m getting back again to the topic of PLM content. I think this is one of the most exciting topics we can talk about. This is actually “Product” – PLM. This is all the knowledge we create about products from different aspects – starting from “why we need it?” (Requirements), continuing through “how will we use it?” (Function) and ending up with “how can I dispose it” (regulations, etc.). PLM pretends to manage all or this product information or, how I prefer to call it, PLM content.

Content is King. Therefore, PLM, having this goldmine, needs to think about how to use this product data downstream. If you take Google Maps as an example, I see how Maps (actually GIS content) was connected to provide valuable information for us. In this case, a simple Map was used to provide contextual information for application behaviors around Google Map.

So, in the case of PLM, having information about product models, usages, and lifecycles, we can try to release this information for people downstream and allow them to access it using various scenarios–

Buying experience: I want to have information about the product I’m buying.

Social experience: I want to have information about who is using this product.

Lifecycle experience: I want to have information about this product in the past.

There are many other scenarios as well.  I’m sure we can find the ways to use product content in downstream applications – asset management, support, maintenance. Let me know if you see any other examples that excite you…

Now, how is it possible to use it? In this context, I want to bring a few examples of futuristic search  solutions from Behance Network Projects. Yes, this is not available today. But look on how we can use product content in different ways. I think that many of the examples below will exist in the near future.

behance-project-1

behance-project-2

behance-project-31

5 Comments | Daily PLM Think Tank, PLM and Social Environment, PLM User Experience | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by olegshilovitsky

New Social Bill Of Material Tool is the Way to Simplify PLM Deployment in Organizations

February 2, 2009

During the weekend, I was reading Mid-Market PLM Deployment Challenges by Tom Gill from CPDA. He wrote about multiple issues customers face during the implementation of PLM systems. Tom mentioned multiple issues such as economical barriers of implementing something beyond of AutoCAD managed by Excel; the need to implement more simple industry-oriented, process-based applications, the lower price point for customers of smaller sized-companies. One of his recommendations was to decrease the complexity of deployment and the need to make simpler systems. All these recommendations were based on analyses of challenges make a lot of sense. 

I’d like to come with an idea of a fundamental, initial step that would simplify the way of smaller customers to PLM. I think that the key for a company is “PLM content”. Today, “PLM content” is not under control in most of mid-size companies. PLM content is spread over multiple sources of activity: (1) PDM systems manage CAD drawings; (2) Multiple Excel files (imported/exports into Bill of Materials; (3) Word documents outlines customer requirements; (3) Homegrown ERP systems manages Items Master information and others.

 What can we propose for a company that literally cannot invest significant resources in the establishment of a PLM system? The company needs to start gradually, building its PLM content from the Bill of Materials and Item (or Part Numbers) information. This needs to be the key information so that the company can start to manage their information centrally. Later, this content will become the core of the PLM system. This system needs to include two basic components for such a management system – (1) Part Numbers /Items/ and (2) Multiple Bill of Materials. As soon as this information is established, the rest of the information such as drawing, supplied part, and manufacturing information will be linked and connected to this content.

 Even if there are multiple systems in the market, I think that these systems survive from the complexity and the intensive support required in order to implement a PLM system. Newcomers need to propose a way of managing Bill of Materials and Items differently. They need to eliminate the educational barrier and propose a simple user experience practice. (For example, native typing in a grid combined with search functionality). I’d like to refer to these as Excel-like social services. They also need to provide a user-friendly way of creating and managing Item/BOM content. This content need to be searchable for all users in the organization, utilizing multiple devices – personal computers, PDAs etc.

 More practically, I am looking for a Wiki-style application that can provide  an Excel-like user experience for content authoring. From a technological standpoint, MS Excel Server provides an easy way of rendering Excel data in IE. I think that developers of such a system can leverage this Excel services. Additional collaborative capabilities can be provided by Instant Messaging, Video Conferencing and workflow services.

2 Comments | Daily PLM Think Tank, SMB, Technology | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by olegshilovitsky

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 73 other followers