Salesforce Site.com and why PLM vendors need to be concerned?

March 18, 2012

If you following cloud news and especially what Salesforce.com is up to, you probably noticed this announcement – Saleforce.com is launching a new service called site.com. You can read more about this announcementhere. What was my immediate reaction? There are few software packages Salesforce.com dreams to make obsolete. SharePoint and WordPress among them. I can recommend you the following RWW article – Next, Salesforce Aims to Obsolete the CMS with Site.com Launch. To me the following passage was a key:

"We are extending the social enterprise out to all of your customers, all of your partners, and all of your prospects," says Andrew Leigh, director of product management for the Force.com platform, in an interview with ReadWriteWeb, "by allowing you through a single cloud-based platform to be able to basically publish any data or any content out to an external audience."

Take a look on the following videos about site.com (sorry, they have some marketing flavor).

With the price tag of $1,500 per month, Site.com in my view, won’t be very competitive to your small business WordPress hosted website. However, thinking about larger companies, it can be a good idea. The amount of money IT spends on organizing of websites, content integration is significant.

Now, let me move towards my PLM-related to thoughts. Why do I think PLM vendors need to be concerned? Here is my take. Manufacturing is going towards decentralization. More suppliers and partners. More services online. More information need to be provided outside of your company to make your business production. Think about engineering services, component suppliers and many others. PLM companies so far failed to provide something that can serve these needs. Salesforce site.com platform connected to the data in your company and integrated with all social services can be an interesting option.

What is my conclusion? Site.com is not going to compete with PLM products tomorrow. Calm down. However, the idea data platform integrating internal company data and external website behaviors and appearance is something that can be interesting to many manufacturing companies and supply chain. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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PLM, Supply Chain and Cloud Adoption

April 22, 2011

Cloud is one of the most discussable topics in the industry. In the consumer web, cloud seems to be a proven option. I think, people are feeling very comfortable in the cloud these days. Days when people afraid to put their credit cards on the website for e-commerce gone forever. Earlier with Google and lately with Facebook, cloud becomes an obvious thing. However, when people talk about cloud adoption in the enterprise and manufacturing industry, things are not always as simple as Facebook climb towards 700 million users. I readDriving Automotive Industry to the cloud article by Ronald Teijken of IBM/Sterling Commerce. Ronald is speaking about the cloud opportunity in the Automotive supply chains. Here is my favorite passage:

Many manufacturers are wary of moving particular processes to the cloud, due to questions around trust and visibility. However, as manufacturers increasingly rely on IT to ensure the smooth running of their supply chains, the question of whether or not to move to the cloud is unavoidable. It provides some much needed elasticity both in terms of cost and more importantly the agility needed in the supply chain to support future growth.

This article made me think about some aspects of cloud implementation that can make the supply chain a low hanging fruit for cloud adoption.

Collaboration Space

When it comes to the communication between suppliers, the ultimate need is to have a space where both sides can collaborate easily and exchange information. In most of the industries (automotive is not exclusion), companies are not allowing a complete transparency between their internal data spaces. Therefore, to have a separate cloud-based environment can be a solution to improve communication between OEM and various suppliers.

Security

This is another big question on the "cloud roadmap". It is always presented as a case why manufacturing companies won’t be interested to go alongside with the cloud. Put aside companies internal stories. To communicate with suppliers, data needs to go out anyway. This is a chance to public or near-private cloud to show up and establish a trustful position. Cost, reliability and availability can be factors to lead manufacturing to adopt it.

What is my conclusion?

Cloud is an interesting space these days. Leverage huge consumer market adoption, it will inspire people in the enterprise to adopt some of the best cloud examples. Will automotive manufacturing supply change be a "low hanging fruit"? I can see it possible… Just my thoughts, of course.

Best, Oleg

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PLM and Supply Chain in Web 2.0 Era

March 29, 2010

I was thinking about supply chain issues during this weekend. When life of manufacturers becomes even more complicated than before, issues related to the supply chain or more, specifically to an ability to control and protect your brand from various supply chain issues raising their priorities. Supplier-related issues can significantly impact the whole product lifecycle starting from time-line and ending by serious quality and regulation issues.

I came across Cristian Verstraetet blog post – Protect Your Brand Through Controlling Your Supply Chain. He is mentioning some interesting ideas that from his standpoint can put a surge protector between supply chain and brands. As such, he mentioned growing need to monitor social activity around your brand in order to identify the possible problems earlier, establishing code of business conduct and dialog between OEMs and suppliers.

I think web and online monitoring are the essentials of the business these days. It is absolutely true for personal brands and for large international companies. When thinking about Web 2.0 trends, I definitely Supply Chain Management 2.0 capabilities to use the information on World Wide Web that can help to organize a more effective supply chain. However, last two issues made me think about some problems where I believe a solution can come from Product Lifecycle Management systems and implementations. I’d like to figure out two important issues related to supplier management: Product Data Integration and Supply Attention Economy.

Product Data Integration
In my view, the issue of data integration between OEMs and Suppliers will come to the emergent level of the attention very soon. The ugly truths of this issue is that nobody these days can provide a consistent product data landscape from OEM (or Tier 1) side on what is going on in the supply chains. The complexity of the system is so high that companies are mostly focused on procedures of data transfer between OEMs and Suppliers. However, the data quality will start alarming very soon. It stats from various regulation topics and need to provide up-to-date information related to product bill of materials and ends from the ability to optimize product behavior.

Attention Economy and Cost Control
This one is a bit more complicated. Nevertheless, I see it as an emergent trend in a couple of years. The supplier relationships G-forces are moving from centrally controlled OEM-Supplier model to somewhat I’d call Supplier-Focused. It means that we’ll see a growing number of suppliers and much more complicated supply chain network. Internet, online business, globalization will play an additional role in helping to create a more granular supply chain. However, how possible to optimize this network. Here what is called “Economy of Attention” will come. In simple words the relationships between OEM and Suppliers are going to change. It won’t be completely controlled by upper supplier level anymore. The suppliers will be pro-actively looking how to optimize their business by offering their business online. It will come in design, supply, manufacturing. However, it will also change upper OEM/Supplier level. Their systems will need to come to the higher level of optimization. Such structural changes will allow to optimize cost and improve the quality of products and services.

Image by www.brandingstrategyinsider.com

The PLM domain is the best candidate to think about such a type of system development. The obvious advantage of PLM is an ability to handle Product related data. However, PLM will need to learn a lot in order to move into this interesting journey.

Just my thoughts…
Best, Oleg

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How to improve collaborative processes for the global supply chain?

March 17, 2009

In today’s world, more and more companies need to collaborate globally. In the supply chain, this is a result of companies wanting to optimize their operations and having more suppliers involved in all processes of their activities. There are many solutions that companies are using for the global supply chain. With the current development of online tools, internet, and services, most of these tools have established online spaces where you can share and exchange information and transmit messages.

 But something makes me feel unhappy about these tools and spaces. What I dislike is that most of them create their own eco-system. I think there will be a significant improvement if we are able to connect these solutions to organizational processes. But this is not always possible because companies today do not share their processes. In most of the cases, they use different tools to implement business process management in their organization. 

global-collab

 

How can you make this collaboration possible?  In my opinion, development of process interoperability can provide a new dimension in how company processes work together. The ultimate requirement is to keep processes separate,  but, at the same time, allow them to work together. The main problem of such integration, as I mentioned above, is that because business processes are separate, data-base schemas are different. Each company process uses its own data schema to represent information which is tightly bound to a specific process implementation.

 Today, I can observe two major ways process integration occurs: (1) mapping based approach; (2) query based approach.

 For the mapping based approach, the integration creates a map between two local schemas. By doing this, a new “federated schema” is created. In some cases, companies are trying to use one of the schemas as a federated one. This is not always possible as sub-sets of schemas are used. But whatever the final schema is, this process is complicated and requires multiple mapping operations to happen. This way is also expensive, in my view, for long term support and changes. You can see some examples of this approach here: http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/rd/485/zhu.html

 Another approach is query based. In this approach, a special interoperable query system needs to be developed. This “query” is able to establish a connection with both (or multiple systems) and extract/load information. With the latest development of SOA and Web Services, this way has become very popular. You can see example of this approach here: http://www.oracle.com/applications/pip-for-oracle-product-hub-data-sheet.pdf

 I’m thinking about different way – integrated ontology development. This ontology would place a super-set on top of both business process models. Ontology, in simple words, is a data model. So, we need technology and/or a tool that wold allow us to develop an intermediate data model. There are such technologies in today’s world developed as part of Semantic Web W3C initiative – technology based on RDF (Resource Description framework) and OWL (Web Ontology Language). 

These technologies have been developed for the past 7-10 years and, in my view, have become more and more popular. They allow you to establish a global model for content and message transfer, thereby simplifying communication. The main advantage of this collaboration is that a new level of data models will be created. These data models, represented by RDF/OWL, will allow companies to establish a connected data environment that can be used by multiple systems.

 And, to make some fun, take a look on this video. Even if content is not related to supply chain yet, the core idea of integration is the same. 

 

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Posted by olegshilovitsky

Will PLM 2.0 on the cloud resolve the supply chain challenge?

March 4, 2009

According to the latest supply research done by IBM,, one of the challenges of the supply chain having to manage fragmented data. This is the main outcome of the importance of visibility as part of a successful supply chain. Data is fragmented between OEM and Suppliers as a result of decisions being based on a specific subset of data. Even if the IBM report wasn’t specifically about manufacturing and product development, I still regard product data as being very distributed. OEM designs and distributes data to the suppliers who work on their designs. Sometimes, the same design is used for manufacturing by multiple providers/suppliers…, and there are many other scenarios.

 I see one of the biggest promises of PLM 2.0  is being able to have data management platforms used behind CAD/design and product development platforms. This is a good step for rationalizing data management as opposed to the case where data is located in multiple CAD files. To be able to manage data globally, across the supply chain, collaboration among suppliers may decrease data fragmentation.

 Another piece of technology that can work together with PLM 2.0 is cloud data services. The latest development in this area can be seen in the plans of Amazon, Microsoft and other companies to build data centers – this is a big promise, in my view. Usage of cloud data services will eliminate the need for companies to establish shared IT infrastructure. For the larger companies, it will provide the required level of security. For smaller suppliers today, this is the biggest showstopper, since the most expensive infrastructure they can afford these days is email only.

 Of course, this is not simple and has a long way to go. OEMs and suppliers act as separate organizations and not always can share data between them. But these technologies, in my view, provide a solid technological foundation to provide a better supply chain solution for tomorrow.  

 I would be interested to hear about your challenges and to discuss if you are starting to evaluate these technologies in the near future. 

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Posted by olegshilovitsky

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