Why you should (or not) be using Arena PDXViewer

November 27, 2011

The story of standards is always fascinating. I love these stories on my blog and spent quite a lot of time talking to people about standards. Do you know what is common between standards and toothbrushes? Here, you go -“standards and toothbrushes -everyone needs to use them, but nobody wants to use someone else’s”. So, I was reading Arena Solutions blog yesterday – Why you should be using the PDX File Standard.

For the sake of truth, I had a chance to speak to Arena PLM folks few weeks ago. Here are some of my thoughts about PDXViewer.

PDXViewer. The need is here.

The idea of sharing information using free tools isn’t new. The story, in a nutshell, is simple. Your company will keep PLM system (actually any enterprise system controlling information is good for this story) and it will control the information you need in your company. However, as Arena’s blog is stating, your problem will be to share the information with people outside of your company.

The point of purchasing a PLM or PDM system is to simplify and centralize your BOMs and other product data. But once your BOMs, Items, AMLs and associated content exist in a structured format, you are faced with a new problem—how do you share your data with vendors and internal players who aren’t plugged into your PLM or PDM system?

You can ask how do you deal with the problem now. The madness of sharing data is here. The following quote brings you the top stories about possible (and impossible) ways company use to share data.

Without PDX files, preparing a build package for delivery is a mixture of black magic, blood, sweat and data from a business system. In some companies, one person is hired or trained to access the system for the sole purpose of sending data to suppliers once or twice a year. At other companies, data is pulled manually out of the PLM system by the design engineers, who put the data into an Excel spreadsheet and send it to suppliers in binders or zip files.

Why to use PDXViewer

You may find the “PDXViewer” way quite powerful. Pull data out of your PLM system, publish or send it in PDX format. Use free tool. I think many people will find it useful. I found user experience of PDXViewer nice. What you practically do is to export subset of your data and access it with a limited set of functionality. Another benefit – the level of encapsulation file gives you – you don’t need to go in multiple places to search for the information you need.

What concern do I have

My main concern is “file”. This is my usual suspect for problems. Don’t take me wrong – files are good and mankind is using files for the last 40+ years with various computer systems. However, when I move my thoughts towards the cloud and the internet, files become actually my concern. How do you manage files? What is the right (or last) revision of your file? Another significant problem is related to the changes. In case you allow to make changes to data outside of your system you burned to support multiple data synchornization, which is very painful for all people involved into this process.

What is my conclusion? I found two absolute advantages of PDXViewer – it is free, and you can enjoy a simple user interface. It definitely solves the problem of people accessing information outside of the company firewall and serves IT concerns about non-company users accessing information inside of the company. At the same time, I have a concern about files. In other words, I think there is a “better way” to organize people’s access to the information. Sending files can be a good solution, but it can get complicated within the time. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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PLM: Standards, Openness, Open Source and more…

May 21, 2011

Yesterday, I had a chance to join a discussion panel on Eurostep Share-A-SpaceForum. The formal name of the panel was "The plan ahead -Share-A-Space". However, I used the opportunity to ask few questions to panelists – Hakan Karden, Eurostep CEO, Nigel Shaw, Managing Director Eurostep UK, Magnus Färneland, Share-A-Space Product Owner, other people in Eurostep organizations as well as forum attendees.

My interest (and I didn’t try to hide it) was to discuss everything that related to Standards and Openness. I think these topics are important and can impact significantly future of the industry. In addition, I think Open Source is another topic that can be intertwined with standards and openness. I decided to put it on the list as well. At the same time, I found that despite the obvious importance, the relationships between them are sometimes misunderstood and not clear.

Thinking specially about standards, I was lucky to have on the panel Nigel Shaw of Eurostep, who has a longest record of work related to STEP, PLCS and ISO. His work on STEP and ISO activities are going back in 1984 and his participants in ISO TC184/SC4 is going back 34 years.

Below you can find four questions I asked panelist as well as some note I took after the discussion.

Question 1: What is the future of standards in PLM?

It was interesting that everybody noted the importance and maturity of the standards available today (mostly in the context of STEP and PLCS). At the same time, future context was mostly around how standards can enable information sharing and collaboration. Specifically, with regards to PLCS standard, my note is that the standard today is a result of 25+ years of evolution and used by many companies and vendors. At the same time, usage of standards is mostly requirement of customers (if it comes) and not necessarily vendor’s interest.

Question 2. Will social tools and openness increase the demand for standards (STEP)?

My proposition behind this question was around changes in personal behavior on the internet and social networks. People have tendencies to share more. Gen Y considers many things "normal" that in the past were absolutely inappropriate. Does it make a change that will allow people to agree on common standards? In our discussion, we touched many points related to exchanging of information between people and business organizations, which have common parts, but also fundamentally different. Another topic that resonated was a communication between consumers and vendors in the context of support, buying decisions, etc.

Question 3. Can Standard-related activities become a foundation for Open Source?

Certainly, most of the participants are considering standards as "open" source today. I’m taking "source" out of equation by purpose, because most of panelists and attendees put the emphasis on the ability of people to exchange information, rather than on the ability to "open source". I can see Eurostep perspective here to protect their IP related to Share-A-Space platform and at the same time to support openness related to data exchange and sharing. This conversion led us to the next source – differences between standards and openness.

Question 4. Is there a difference between Standards and Openness?

The discovery we made during the conversation was related to different understanding of openness. This isn’t surprised for me. I found it very common. You can hardly find the company that can say – "we are not open", or "we are closed" (btw, maybe Apple is one of them?). At the same time, everybody understands openness in a different way. The agreement we came during the discussion was that standards definitely can imply openness. However, standards are not mandatory elements of openness. The elements of openness in the PLM world (but not only) are as following: supporting of non-proprietary formats, import/export functions, open APIs, etc. All these elements are not requiring special "standard" support.

So, what is my conclusion? What I learned during this conversation (and also during Eurostep 2011 forum) is how "standards" can be leveraged inside of the commercial company. I think, it changed some of my positions related to absolute rejection of "standards" as something beneficial for a company (not for customers). On the fundamental level standard IP and knowledge is something that helps to the company to decrease cost and improve the quality of products. Just my thoughts..

I’m looking forward to your comments and may be additional discussion around the questions.
Best, Oleg

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Europstep and Standard-based PLM

May 16, 2011

I’m going to attend Eurostep Share-A-Space 2011 forum later this week in Stockholm, Sweden. The history of the invitation to this conference is going back to my long time interest in the topic of standards. I’ve been researching and learning about this topic many years. I posted few blogs about what is my view on what happens with standards in engineering and manufacturing in general and how I see standard-related activities in PLM. If you had no chance to look over this particular topic, here is the partial list of my posts related to standards: Open Standards and Data Sharing, PLM and Open Standards: Money Talks? and PLM Standards: From Formats to Frameworks

As a result of my posts about standards, I had a very interesting discussion with Hakan Karden of Eurostep, and he invited me to attend Eurostep Share-A-Space 2011 forum. So, I’m heading to Stockholm this week and hope to learn more about what Eurostep is calling "Standard based PLM".

Standards: A toothbrush approach?

A common problem with standards is that every company in manufacturing has their own way of doing things, but they do it differently to how other companies do it. However, they don’t want to do things the way other people do it. I can see two main reasons – 1/ the way engineers and manufacturing people see the company value and differentiation with what they do; 2/ high level of diversity in the manufacturing sector (especially when it comes to smaller companies). Company attitude to PLM standards can be compared with how they feel about their toothbrush. Every company has one and nobody wants to use anybody else’s.

STEP

Standard for the Exchange of Product Model Data (STEP) is an ISO standard that describes how to represent and exchange digital product information. If you have never seen and heard about it before, it is a time to navigate your browser to the following Wikipedia link about ISO. In my view, this is the most comprehensive and mature standard when it comes to CAD, PDM/EDM and CAx systems. It started almost 30 years ago (1984) and was intentionally directed to become a single, complete, implementation-independent Product Information Model, which shall be the Master Record of the integrated topical and application information models.

Standard Based PLM?

Product Information model is one of the central pieces of every PLM implementation. What if we can use STEP as a standard to implement it? This is sounding a good idea. However, in my view, devil is in details. It always looks good on slides and gets very complicated when start to implement that. STEP is a mature standard and support by many applications must exchange and save data in a neutral format. From my perspective, there is a difference between how you exchange information vs. how you need to manage information. I found that standard based approach can be interesting when you’re implementing a system that helps people to collaborate. I found a reference to Implementing the Engineering Collaboration Hub project. Navigate to the following link to read more about that. This implementation reminded me some BPM (Business Process Management) examples of interaction between multiple systems. In a big company, PLM is always a system that involved into serveral interactions with other systems. The benefit of a standard data exchange framework is obvious in this case.

What is my conclusion? Life would be definitely easy if we can make it according to the standards. Standards can simplify a lot of things. Actually, they do. We can see lots of very useful standards around us that were formed during years and centuries. Is it something that helps people to run their product development? Yes, definitely. There are many well adopted standards and STEP is one of them. There are some others in CAD, CAx and related fields. In my view, there are some limits on how fast standards can proliferate. One of the factors is acceptance by industry ecosystem (in our case, we are talking about software vendors). If industry vendors will see direct benefits, the proliferation will speed up, otherwise standard can slow down and even die. I’m going to learn more during this week and, of course, will share it with you.

Best, Oleg

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Open Standards and Data Sharing

March 24, 2011

What do you think about the role of standards in CAD and PLM? Some of recent development in Open Standards made me think about CAD and PLM related standards again. I had a chance to discuss "the standards" theme several times in the past on my blog. Navigate to the following links to catch up the discussion.

PLM and Open Standards – Money Talks?
PLM Standards: From Formats to Frameworks
What is the future of CAD and PLM Standards?
Open PLM – A Climb for Losers?

Standards: Obvious and Expensive

In my view, customers are interested in standards. Their reaction on standard is normally positive. The benefits of standard-related activities for customers are obvious. In the past large manufacturing companies were involved in the successful standard development. STEP is probably one of the examples. At the same time, I cannot see vendors are signing up for open standards in the world of CAD and PLM. They are mostly reactive and keep balance of supporting standard and proprietary system development.

Data Sharing and Standards

Manufacturing is global these days. To be able to exchange information between in-shore and off-shore, OEM and suppliers, vendors and partners become extremely important. Do you think "data sharing" problem will disappear with the development of open standards? I don’t see direct dependencies. Obviously, it will be easier to exchange data using standards. However, the devil is in details. The support of particular application features and/or data elements will give us a right answer on this question.

What is my conclusion? To support open standard is expensive tax. Who will pay it? Customers? Vendors? My favorite joke: Standards like toothbrushes. Everybody needs them, but nobody wants to use somebody else one. Next month, I’m going to attend Eurostep Share-A-Space 2011 Forum. Read more about this forum on LinkedIn. I hope to learn more the potential role of Eurostep in the supporting of standards as well as about development of commercial systems based on such a standard like STEP and PLCS. I’m going to live blog from there, so stay tuned…

Best, Oleg
Freebie.

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PLM Standard: From Formats to Frameworks

February 17, 2011

I want to talk about PLM and Standards today. In my view view, the story of standards is over complicated and confusing. The number of articles about CAD files, Standards, Best Practices is endless. In many situations people put an equivalence sign between openness and standards. CAD/PLM industry has a long history of battles about standards.

The Status Quo

According to the materials presented by LongView Advisors on CIC (Collaboration and Interoperability Congress) the following picture reflects the view of major CAD platforms in the market.

According to the information from the same source, in 2010, CAD industry operates with about 52 CAD standards. The absolute leader is STEP (32% usage for CAD data exchange). Other formats used for the same purposes are – CATIA V5 (21%), SolidWorks (15%), NX (6%). Recently, I fund a very good publication about CAD File formats made by isicad.ru. Use the following link to read it in English (the original was published in Russia. Thanks, to Google Translate for automatic translation feature). If I think about PLM oriented standards, the situation is more complicated. In my view, the notable standards are STEP and PLCS. Vendors are talking about "industry best practices" that represent a common way to implement PLM system.

Formats – an old way?

Most people will think about "formats" when you talk to them about CAD/PLM standards. Usually it is a file format that used by CAD system to store and retrieve data. CAD data exchange formats are primarily focusing on the ability of a system to exchange information with other CAD or non-CAD systems. The need to exchange data wasn’t limited to CAD systems. PDM and lately PLM Systems developed multiple mechanisms to exchange data for different purposes.

Frameworks – a Different Approach?

Thinking more about PLM standards, I came to the idea of future development of standards as a framework. I see it opposite to file formats. You can ask me what is the difference? Most of the formats were invented by software vendors or affiliated parties. Formats represent the need to store and exchange data. However, I don’t see it as a primary goal of PLM standardization process. PLM is a result of company implementation and I see it very different from a single tool. PLM standard is all about communication between different people in the organization. Communication framework (stage / gates, decision points, etc.) are much more important than an ability to convert CAD file from one format to another. The focus of PLM Framework is to ensure a handoff between different departments and people in organization.

Standardization and Uniformity

I found most of the people confuse between these two terms – standardization and uniformity. The biggest mistake is to think about standard as something permanent. The interesting thing I found about standards is that successful standards are only those that evolve alongside with their usage. When presented in the organization accordingly, standards can encourage people to develop flexible and easy adaptable standardization schemas.

What is my conclusion? PLM need to move from the file formats battles to a place where the communication and process framework can be used to control data handsoff and decision making. This will become a new way in development of standards. Used by multiple companies frameworks can evolve into mechanism to realize PLM company roadmap. However, I don’t see one process template fits all companies needs. To have flexible communication and process management tools is absolutely important to make PLM framework successful. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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What Is The Future Of CAD and PLM Standards?

June 3, 2010

I had chance to read the following publication on Develop3D – A New Common Data Standard. The author is discussing how life of CAD can be impacted and potentially improved by developing of a single CAD standard. In addition, I figure out that I used word “standard” many times commenting on last posts on my blog. It made me think about standards again. Standards are rising so many questions. It always sounds as beneficial. However, standard related activities create too many political and organizational issues. I decided to make a try and figure out if standards are our future in PLM.

Standards and Users
Companies and Individuals can belong to a group that potential may have huge benefits from standards. Your systems expected to work more smoothly, you can move between applications, you can benefits data sharing, etc .. However, at the same time, standards can stand on the way of innovation. Some of them may really prevent people from innovation.

Standards and Industries
I know many examples of industry oriented standards. In general, industry standards may indicate an industry health. The more standards industry develops- the more additional businesses and solutions can be created on top of that. In general, standards can bring industry on the next level.  In most cases, standards that emerged from industries are very stable.

Standards and Vendors
Do you think vendors need standards? The right answer – it depends, in my view… If it brings economical benefits, it can be really beneficial for a specific vendor. However, it is not clear and in most of the case to support a standard vendor need to put an additional effort. So it means additional expenses. In some cases (i.e. Supply chain), vendors can be interested in standards in order of work simplification between users in a supply chain.

What is my conclusion today? Standards are fascinating. However, standard activity is a very expensive. An additional work need to be done by vendors to support standards. So, behind standards, we can see a very simple economical use case. On the other side, users can have benefits from standards. Maybe we need to think about different business models, that less impacted by lock-in customers on their data? Thinking about pros and cons, I’d like to re-phrase my question as following now- Who Will Pay for future CAD/ PLM standards?

Just my thoughts…
Best, Oleg

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Do We Need Reporting Standards in PLM?

January 27, 2010

I want to raise discussion about reporting in PLM. We don’t see it much in marketing materials about PLM. I asked myself why? Maybe in there is no need for reports? Maybe the way to present report is obsolete and people are interested to see information by using normal UI of PLM and other systems? If it is so, why so many customers are in love from their “PLM Excels” with all information presented in cells and rows? My hunch is that we have a problem here… Yesterday I had chance to read blog by Joe Barkai about PLM and Sustainability, which led me to some reporting standards initiatives. So, it was a trigger to investigate it more in deep.

Reports in PDM/PLM systems
In my view, reports in PDM and PLM systems are on the very primitive level. Technologically, they seem as an obvious and during evaluation, customers, are ending up by the conclusion that all is possible, and they can extract, re-format, modify data when they will be a real need to do so. However, in practice, reports are rarely coming to the agenda of implementers (correct me, please, if I’m wrong), since normally, they’re so much other things to do…

Hidden Loss
The problem, I see that absence of reporting capabilities is not allowing to the customers to get information about a product in a timely manner and in a readable form. When user interfaces are complicated, most of the users that might be interested to see information, actually cannot put their hands on it.

Is there a place for Reporting Standards?
I don’t see any standard activity in this place, for the moment. However, getting back to IDC blog post,  as much as we can see growing regulation activities, I’d expect increases in potential to establish reporting standards. So, requests for reports will come from regulators. In these case , regulations, will play a role of the trigger in establishing of reporting standards.

What is my conclusion? In my view, reporting capabilities are undervalued by PLM systems today. PLM vendors see reports as a commodity with low value. The reporting activities for the best are part of PLM services and/or implementers. However, looking again, I’d expect to grow an interest from customers to have the ability to provide reports based on data we have in PLM systems. What do you think? What was your “reporting” experience with PLM?

Best, Oleg

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