PLM Think Tank – April Top 5

April 29, 2011

What do you think is the most hard thing in everything we do? This month for me was overloaded by conferences. It started from COFES 2011 in sunny Scottsdale, AZ and ended in rainy Detroit, MI. However, the one thing was common between these two events – an extremely energetic community discussing various topics related to engineering, manufacturing and Product Lifecycle Management. My blog posts this month were influenced significantly by everything I was listening and discussing with people. Nevertheless, I’d like to mention one statement – "redesign is not so much having a new idea as stopping having an old idea". When I’m thinking about what will be the next 10 years of engineering and manufacturing software, I give my vote to people and companies that thinking differently. This is the most complicated thing. Just my opinion, of course. Now, let’s move to my traditional PLM think tank "top 5".

Post COFES, Dropbox and PLM Made Simple

This post started from a very simple tweet – "Drop box is a model for PLM in the future…". Yes, people are looking for simple tools. This is what made DropBox successful. PLM is complex. PLM companies have similar functionality in their hands today. However, the simplicity wins. Security is another question. This is a matter of trust. Do you trust Google? DropBox? Dassault? PTC? Use the cloud you trust…

PDM. Pre-configured? Painless?

Another post about simplicity and thinking differently. Engineers normally dislike PDM functions. They are trying to avoid it as much as possible. Therefore, PDM systems are not as popular when it comes to implementations. It requires time, cost and affect CAD functionality. However, the industry perception is that you need to have PDM to control your data. CAD vendors are trying to embed PDM functions into CAD packages and improve vertical integration between CAD and PDM packages. Can it be completely pre-configured and painless? I’m not sure. I think, the best thing engineers can think about is the “invisible PDM”.

PLM and Comprehensive Search

Search is an important infrastructure. The demand for search in manufacturing is growing. After ten years, people finally got Google. So, they expect the same from enterprise software. To be competitive, software vendors in this space such as PLM, CAD and others are trying to bring new technology to solve old problems. This is a good sign, in my view. However, one of the biggest problems in PLM and enterprise software is the complexity of solutions. This is quite important. I think, effective search solution can make software simpler. What is your take?

Moving from PLM to PLMSocial?

"Social" is trending. Do you think we are moving from PLM to PLS(Social)? I think, it is important to differentiate “technology” and “technological buzz”. Social has a power. People like to watch their friends’ pictures on Facebook and thinking about new Color startup supposing to change the way how people sharing photos in small communities. Do you think, the same technology will change the way people work with CAD drawing and Bill of Materials? The adoption of social networking (and associated technologies) is defined primarily by “social interests” in photo sharing and people belonging to the social net. User experience is important. That’s why Salesforce’s Chatter very similar to Facebook UI. Technology is secondary here.

ECO Management: What Matters?

ECO is a an important, but very complicated process. It involves many people from organizational departments to work on this and following ECO related activities from inside and outside organization. To have an appropriate tool is important. When you choose a tool, take into the consideration what are specific characteristics of your organization from the standpoint of mobility, complexity, need for visual and 3D before you make a right choice. In parallel, the simplicity of a tool is another important thing. To have a simpler can be a much bigger problem for manufacturers in coming years.

Best, Oleg

Leave a Comment » | Daily PLM Think Tank | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by olegshilovitsky

noSQL Use Case for PLM

September 15, 2010

I had a chance to read SQL vs. noSQL article in Linux Journal yesterday on the plane. I found it interesting and despite a bit up-level of a technical terms, beneficial for our PLM discussion. Navigate your browser on the following link and read this paper. The noSQL story is probably one of the most dramatic in the modern history and present of data management. It considered as a heretic in the early beginning. Now noSQL comes to the point when we can talk about real advantages and disadvantages of both usage – traditional SQL and noSQL databases. So, what is the noSQL story is about?

SQL and RDBMS predictability

The story of SQL databases is very tight connected to two definitions: RDBMS and ACID. ACID means Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability. RDBMS – Relational Database Management Systems. The story about RDBMS, SQL and ACID is a story about development of transactional systems. If you develop a financial system, you want your system be predictable. You cannot take a guess about what is going on in your financial records. The same is when you schedule your manufacturing shopfloor operations. ERP leveraged RDBMS systems heabvily in their history. A vast majority of ERP systems today based on SQL /RDBMS systems.

noSQL Case

The noSQL came to us from the internet examples of the past decade such as Google, Amazon S3 and others. The fact, modern internet kids are using it added additional flavor of importance. However, what is the real case behind? Instead of using relational tables and keys, the modern noSQL databases are using simple "key-value" stores. Each piece of data going to the database is given a key and key be easy retrieved back using the same key. This portion of simplicity provides a significant value. The step beyond key-value is to have "document stores" that can access documents according to the specific key values.

PLM Use Case

Product Lifecycle Management has traditional roots in SQL databases. Started as pure data management discipline, PDM and PLM systems came to compete with other enterprise systems. It was an obvious decision back in late 1980s and beginning of 1990s that to establish a full data control you need to manage your data using RDBMS. However, this decision was taken time ago. Since then, PLM developed lots of use cases. These use cases can bring an importance of predictability down and importance of flexibility and simplicity up.

What is my conclusion? Development of PDM and PLM systems is not a simple case. The complexity of systems is high. However, some fundamental decisions and architectures of PDM/PLM were laid about twenty years ago. The urgency of reducing complexity and flexibility in PLM architectures can raise a noSQL case for PLM. Just my opinion…

Best, Oleg

Leave a Comment » | Daily PLM Think Tank | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by olegshilovitsky

PLM Usability Notes or Don’t Make Me Think

June 7, 2010

One of my favorite books about usability in designing of User Interfaces and Web Sites is “Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability” by Steve Krug. In my view, enterprises software is sick by complexity and you need to think every single moment you work with systems in the engineering and manufacturing domain. Despite the high demand from users, not much has been done to make systems simpler. There are few reasons for that – natural complexity of product development, bloody competition on features and creation of long history of training and services businesses.

I understand that enterprise software in general and specifically PLM software is different from web site design. Nevertheless, I’m getting back to this book on a regular basis.  Today I wanted to figure out few ideas, that in my view, can simplify PLM systems. This is not a recipe with step-by-step instructions how to do that, rather than a list of patterns that helps to create a simpler engineering and product data management with simplify DNA.

1. Contextual Identification
This is a very fundamental, in my view. Context is a very interesting aspect of work. Specifically, it is important when you think about what you can do. If you can clearly identify where are you, in terms of application module, data structure and step in the process, you can reduce time you spent in understanding what to do.

2. Simple Navigation
After applying contextual identification, you need to think how to move around. Navigation is set of rules that can help you to move between elements of your application. Think about navigation as about change of context. All possible ways to change your contextual states can be clearly presented. You need to understand how to move to another module and browse through data. Create helping elements in your software to help user to find where and how to move.

3. Action Driven Environment
In most of the cases, you start application to accomplish some tasks. Orientation on action needs to help you to identify what are possible actions you can accomplish in every contextually defined step. You need to limit actions and create a set of step with actions to guide users. User needs to find them in a very quick way. If you expect an “action” from users, make it clear and always allow one single step in a time.

4. Less Clicks
By a combination of context, navigation and actions you can create an easy to follow application flow. It will help to follow one more  principle – how to make fewer clicks to accomplish a task. Gather list of tasks and calculate the number of clicks you need to make them. Then try to reduce it at least by 50%. It will make your system much less complicated.

5. Less Options
You need to see only what you need to see. Think about how to eliminate everything – information you don’t need, commands that you’ll use rarely, visualization that can make user’s operation cumbersome. Many things in our UI can be easy eliminated.

What is my conclusion? Making things simple is hard. It is so easy to overwhelm users with the huge amount of features, options, complexity of forms, windows, rich content and information. However, if you will be able to clean up this mess, you can gain some respect from your users, in my view. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

Share

2 Comments | Daily PLM Think Tank, User Experience | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by olegshilovitsky

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 73 other followers