PLM Reset 2011

January 6, 2011

Winter break is a time to make a traditional "lesson learned" or "next year" blog posts. I wanted to come with some thoughts about what I see happens in the industry and where the biggest shift is going to happen. The name "PLM Reset" comes to my mind as the most appropriate. For the past couple of years, I’ve been listening to quite many stories about how PLM was implemented in many companies. These stories made me think about a strong need to clean up the table of PLM implementations. Something that can improve PLM value proposition and make implementation more efficient.

Enterprise Trends
I can see few important enterprise trends happen now: cloud solutions, mobile enterprise, social and polygamous. All these trends will have a major influence on the future development of engineering and manufacturing systems as well as opportunities in this space.

Cloud Solutions will be one of the enterprise trends in 2011. IDC forecast IT spending will hit 1.6 trillion this year with 13% growth coming from software and services. The biggest growth will be in public cloud services. Cloud is not peripheral solution anymore. In 2010 Google proved that Google’s solutions are secured enough to serve GSA. Additional announcements came from Microsoft and other vendors involved into providing of cloud solutions. In my view, cloud can become a classic disruption story for the enterprise industry and software for engineering and manufacturing (including PLM) can take a significant benefits from that.

Mobile is a definite trend. I can see a tremendous success of iPad, iPhone and other devices. It leads to a lot of additional opportunities and changes in the enterprise landscape. All these devices are not completely ready for enterprise. However, the future development in cloud computing will make them connected to the enterprise cloud grid in a seamless way.

Social is another interesting story. I’ve been writing about social trends many times during the past year. In my view, "social" will be proliferating in organizations and will create a new connection system that will help to communicate in an organization. I can see a significant value of social component to improve PLM collaboration.

End of Microsoft’s dominance is another trend. Until now, most of the software used by enterprise were developed either in Redmond of Redwood Shores. Not anymore. We can see a significant growth in Apple adoption. Businesses are less interested in maintaining existing applications and looking how how to try something new that can help them to solve a problem in a different way. We will see also a massive adoption of software coming from employees.

Building a Simple PLM
In addition to the enterprise trends mentioned above, I can see a strong strive of enterprise organization to simplification. For many years, the complexity took a king role in the business of enterprise organization. In PLM, the complexity was a factor to justify high cost , services and implementations. The traditional PLM mind share in the enterprise – we need to have a complex solution to solve complex problems. Wrong! This is something that will be changed very soon. A very long time ago, Mark Twain wrote – “If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.” The simplicity is very thought. However, there is no other option these days. It needs to be understood by vendors and customers.

What is my conclusion? In my view, PLM is definitely in the position to re-born. All trends I mentioned above plus a demand for a simpler solution will lead customers to hit "reset" button. "Business as usual" is not an option anymore. The disruption of cloud and influence of other trends will impact PLM and make a future move towards introduction of new solutions in 2011. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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PLM and Cloud – Hold the Promise?

December 18, 2010

Cloud is trending. This is not a first time I’m touching the topic of cloud. During the past days, I had lots of healthy debates about different topics around PLM, Technologies and Innovation. Surprisingly, the topic of SaaS and Cloud didn’t come much into this discussion. Israel wasn’t cloudy during the day of COFES Israel event. Maybe it was a reason. Who knows? Autodesk R&D Israel and Dassault Solidworks presentations mentioned the influence of cloud, but only from the standpoint of mobility and device diversification. Originally, I wanted to spend some time speaking with PLM+ in Israel – a startup company working on a new on-demand solution for PLM. Unfortunately, a startup business and events are not always going together. I decided to spend some time and out my thoughts about PLM, Cloud, On-Demand and market demands.

PLM and Enterprise Software

What happens with enterprise software these days. Think about 2000s. The corporate life in 2010 is not much different from how it was in 2000. Multiple applications, interoperability problem, tons of Excel files and people who need to get a job done. Back in 2001, companies accepted long roadmaps. It is a different story now. Two factors become the most critical in Enterprise Software – the cost of implementation and cost of change. Another thing is a demand for simplicity. Simple is always winning. The last ten years of consumer software revolution created a huge demand for a change in enterprise software. PLM is strongly associated with two words – complex and expensive. Mindshare PLM leaders as well as smaller PLM vendors are reacting. You can see PTC Creo, Aras Open Source and some other initiatives are trying to break a perception of complex and expensive PLM software. It is also interesting to see how Autodesk is making an effort to solve PLM problems without calling themselves PLM.

PLM and Cloud Promise

People have different understanding of what cloud means. I can probably break it into three main category. 1- Software available from the cloud (i.e. Salesforce). 2- Access to data anywhere (i.e. Dropbox). 3- Elastic computational power (i.e. AWS). I can see companies are trying to embrace cloud technologies. They do it differently. Software access for the cloud is a place where companies are hold the promise (i.e. Dassault cloud offering planned in 2011) or experimenting with tools (i.e. Autodesk Lab projects, including acquisition of Israeli Visual Tao and creating AutoCAD WS). The security conversation is dominant when you are talking about data on the cloud. The advantages of data access are obvious. However, regulation and company concerns, even if it looks like a red-herring, are still dominant in these discussions.

Cloud and Cost

Will cloud solution be cheaper? This is an answer press, analysts and users are trying to get from vendors. However, there is no straightforward answer on the side of vendors. I think, one of the main reasons is a very unclear situation related to the marginal cost of cloud services. Big cloud players, such as IBM, Amazon, HP, Google and IBM are playing with buzzwords- cloud servers, private cloud, data centers. Software vendors are experimenting with all of them. I don’t see much clarity in this space.

PLM and SaaS

If you think, about PLM and SaaS (or OnDemand), you need to put your hands on the experience of Arena Solution. Re-branded bom.com, started during the late 1990s, Arena is providing PLM on demand solution for the last decade. One of their struggles was to provide an appropriate connection to design systems. As a result they focus on industries less dependent on heavy CAD experience. PTC and IBM also made some experiments in this space. I found interesting to learn about Autodesk BuzzSaw experience (even if this not presented as PLM solution, the SaaS experience is interesting). To analyze the advantages of PLM on Demand, I’d suggest to think about the potential benefits of SaaS and try to apply it into PLM space.

Anywhere access - this is an obvious benefit. Gmail is a good analogy. Is it possible to have an access to a corporate application using VPN tunnels and other channels? I think, yes. So, it will not play as a significant differentiation factor, especially for big companies.

No capital investment and cost - this is a big thing. The usage of a subscription model is a significant financial benefit. However, only if it comes to a comparable cost to a solution to be implemented on a premise. Companies will be easy to make their own calculations and decision about buy vs. rent.

Monthly payment obligation – this benefit is only true if you make a monthly contract. Many SaaS/OnDemand solutions, in fact, are signing yearly contracts. In this case, the benefit of payment is diminished within the time. In addition, data is another element that can decrease an effect of “pay-as-you-go” solution. If you decide to move, you need to keep an existing system at least until you transfer all your data between systems. SaaS/OnDeman model is also a potential data locker with a more complicated way to access the data for export/import purposes.

Faster implementation – most of SaaS solutions are very simple. Therefore, fast implementation speed is obvious. However, it is complicated in PLM. Nobody is running their manufacturing shop in the same way. The ability to provide a match to customer needs is a key. The balance of flexibility and OOTB solution is an easy, but a very complicated answer. OOTB decreases a potential list of customers. Flexibility can also increase an overal solution cost.

Scale-Up and Efficiency - this is an obvious benefit for companies that have no abilities to invest in data centers and hosted servers. The ability to raise a number of users can be a nice feature. However, the question of cost will be probably a key one to decide if it is worthwhile.

What is my conclusion? Cloud is an interesting these days. It provides a multi-dimensional opportunity for customers and business to optimize the solution. Can it solve main problems of manufacturing companies looking how to get the job done? Probably yes. However, not in a straightforward way. I can see a cloud as a very dynamic place. To be able to provide a solution fast, react on customer feedback is probably one of the key factors to success in this space. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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Social Intranet and PLM Apps

November 1, 2010

One of the very interesting trends in the modern IT, I’m observing these days is adopting consumer technologies in the enterprise. In general, I can see Information technologies are in the crossroad of decisions about how to adopt fast growing technologies coming from consumer space. Two of them which have the biggest influence is social intranet and mobility. I had a chance to read Dion Hinchcliffe’s Making Enterprise Application Social article. You can have a read and make your opinion. In my view, Dion is coming very close to the point of how multiple enterprise platforms will be adopting social capabilities.

Walled Garden of Enterprise Apps

These days, large product suites are dominant in the enterprise. For the last 10 years, big enterprise software providers made a big number of acquisitions. It was a very natural way. Customers demand vertical integration and was interested to work with fewer numbers of suppliers. Service organizations got their preferences in work with multiple platform and enterprise application providers. The integration between enterprise application was complicated and was covered for service organizations. Horizontal application suites such as Business Process Management were focused on how to get vertical applications delivered to customers.

Intranet, Social Identity and Apps Stores

The following pic from Dion’s blog presented an interesting view on the direction, enterprise application landscape will be moving. The key role in this landscape change belongs to changes in Intranet organization.

In my view, the key word here is "disintegration". Opposite to a very strong trend of vertical integration, disintegration will introduce social identity and related to these standards like OpenSocial as a mechanism to break enterprise product suites into Enterprise App Stores. I think, we are in the early beginning of this process. However, enterprise company are starting to get this point. For most of them today, is just an understanding of the fact Large Monolithic PLM Implementations are A Thing of the Past.

PLM App Store Crossroads

What all this mean for PLM products? For the last few years, PLM vendors made a significant effort in integration of application portfolios. It was positive from the standpoint of their optimization. It resulted in large portfolios of applications focused on product development processes. I think, PLM vendors started to understand the importance of granular approach to application suites. I can see the intro of PTC Creo AnyRole as a first sign in the overall Applification movement. I can see other PLM vendors are standing in the crossroad to decide what will be the future portfolio and product organization. In my view, understanding of vendors like Jive and Jive Market, can provide additional ideas.

What is my conclusion? Social intranet can become a mechanism to break walled garden of massive enterprise platforms. We are still far from this point. However, I’d expect to see some fast mover in this space. Openness to the social intranet is a key to survive in the future world of enterprise application. The standard like Open Social, can be a first natural way to connect pieces of enterprise applications, including PLM, in future Enterprise App Stores. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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PLM Usability and Social News Aggregators

September 11, 2010

Yesterday discussion about PLM usability made me think more about how to come with ideas to improve usability of PLM systems. I wanted to come to something different than just claiming "yet another system that provides a different level of usability". Such a type of messages is often failing when a customer actually started to work with a system. Polished user interface looks great. However, when a user drill down to nuts and bolts, appears as another lipstick on a pig.

Thinking about usability I found a very interesting trend in news reading applications. Do you remember old teletext systems? Ha… their time is over. News is a special space. We are all reading news. They are coming from multiple places. Few years ago, we had a single source of news – emails. Subscription on emails was a simple space to be informed. Google alert service didn’t change much in this mechanism, since alerts still can be delivered as emails. However, social media revolution changed a lot in the news industry. These days, a significant portion of news is coming from alternative sources – social networks, microblogging, video, etc. I found few interesting applications that representing a new class of news aggregators.

Flipboard

This iPad application aggregate news coming from multiple channels as well as you twitter and Facebook accounts. What I specially like in this application is the ability to visualize hidden resources such as video and pictures links. Normally, social net stream on twitter and other social networks is very boring. You need to follow links to get to a picture or video. Flipboard changed this behavior. Now you can see it. Now, imagine you Bill of Material discover becomes as simple and natural as reading social news streams in Flipboard.

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Pulse News

Another news aggregator – Pulse provide multi-dimensional stream scrolling. What I like in this app is the ability to visualzie structured streams of information. This can be an interesting experience for reviewing of information normally presented in PDM and PLM systems as boring streams.

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What is my conclusion? The bad old days of enterprise software are over. Consumer apps are bringing a new and different way to consume information. Gen-Y is coming to enterprise organization and have these new behaviors in their mind. Do we still want to see boring Bill of Materials’ sheets and endless structured trees? Nope. It seems to me time for change is coming. Bill of Material in PLM systems looks like old teletext. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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PLM and Bottom Up Option

August 20, 2010

The following publication in VEKTORRUM got me to review again a book “3D Manufacturing Innovation” by Dr. Hiroshi Toriya. I had a chance to read this book last year and it contains some very impressive examples every PLM software company need to learn. The book is pricey. As alternative, navigate your browser on Google Book link and you will have about 30% of this book for free. This book and Randal’s post – “3D Manufacturing Innovation- Explains the Japanese Quest for an Alternative to PLM” made me think about PLM strategies that were developed over the last decade and their potential improvements.

3D Master Top-Down
This is a dominant concept used today for Product Lifecycle Management. It supported by mindshare PLM leaders (Dassault, PTC, and Siemens PLM). Their strategies as well as portfolios are aligned straight from the CAD / 3D products, and they built infrastructure to manage and proliferate in 3D information downstream. Dassault is the dominant in their vision of 3D for all, PTC and Siemens PLM, in my view, provide more balanced between CAD/3D and Process orientation. As a consequence of competition with major ERP vendors, PLM mindshare companies are shifting towards better modeling of downstream data, engineering and manufacturing options as well as industry businesses.

Process is King
This model supported by PLM companies that have roots in ERP domain. 3D is definitely not the strongest side of their portfolio. So, building their product with “a process in mind” makes a lot of sense to them. These companies can be leverage a very strong enterprise architecture and infrastructure. By doing so, they can provide a support for development and manufacturing process. The advantage and disadvantage of this approach is a very weak connection to design and 3D data. Therefore, we had a chance to see investments of ERP companies in acquisition of 3D viewing technologies.

Bottom Up Approach
Both approaches – “3D Master” and “Process is King” are very focused on top down methodologies. This is, in my view, a significant weak point. What if we need to move from top down approach to bottom up? Dr. Hiroshi Toria mentioned in his something that can be considered as an alternative bottom up when 3D data will be accumulated by company in a central database and access by everybody. Here is a quote from his book:

What is my conclusion? PLM is one of the strategies that introduced by software companies to improve design and manufacturers. It was adopted by manufacturing companies. However, it faces a significant criticism. There are two main criticisms – (1) need to make a reform in a company in one day and (2) complex implementation following this decision. I can see multiple alternatives on the table. One of them is a top down approach and decline in a massive 3D CAD top down dominance in PLM implementation. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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PLM Trends in Pull Economy

March 4, 2010

It will be an understatement to say that economy trends certainly can influence everything in our life. One of the major trends that I’m observing is to move from “push” economy to the “pull” economy. Push economy is geared up to be mass-production. In the push economy, there is more demand than supply. The life of manufacturers was different. In the “pull”  economy, the supply is much bigger than demand. With the introduction of new country economies the situation moved to the “pull” state. This is the situation when a “customer” is the king on the road.

In my view, “pull economy” has a significant influence on Product Lifecycle Management and role PLM for manufacturers. If I’m looking back in the “push” past, mass production was the most important element of manufacturing. Combined with “segmentation”, mass production was the way for manufacturing to achieve efficiency. From product development, life was much easy- you define a product, push it to the manufacture, optimize it for mass production and… done deal. That time manufacturers were a little to do with a product. As opposite, it was a huge deal of mass production organization, and it was reflected in development of MRP and later ERP products.

Market Fragmentation
When the economy moves from push to pull, you cannot just segment market. Something different comes to the place – fragmentation. Your role as a manufacturer to identify this fragmentation and adjust. It means, your product development needs to have an ability to be adjusted to the fragmented customer niches.

Smaller Customer Groups
Due to fragmentation, there are much more different customers and as result similarity happens in smaller groups of customers. So, your manufactures cannot be geared towards mass production, but need to be more adjustable and agile.

Tailored Products
Another interesting trend is towards product customization. It was always a case in premium brands and product lines. However, nowadays it becomes acceptable on the much broad range of product and customer segments. To have an ability to tailor your product design and manufacturing is not a simple task.

Shorter Production Runs
Another interesting effect is the high speed of change. Known before only in seasoned products like fashion, it comes today everywhere. To get market competitiveness, manufacturers push new products, features, models to the market. It resulted in the high speed of change in product development and manufacturing. An ability to product fast and replace old products with new ones becomes imperative.

With such important changes in the economical situation, what should be the answer of PLM software and services providers? Ultimate, to support product development in this environment becomes very complex tasks. I’d like to figure out three major aspects related to PLM software development that in my view can support manufacturer’s competitiveness

1. Flexible Data Management
High level customization resulted in various needs to create and support different information models. Multiple new elements of data need to come into play to reflect all changes. To support it, PLM needs to take the next step in data management agility. The needs of customers will become so unique, that will make impossible to support it as a predefined configurable set. Various adaptive data management schema requirements come to my mind. I can imagine the next level of intelligence in product modeling and data surrounded it.

2. Low Adaptation Cost
Fast changes. These are very simple requirements. However, this is one of the most problematic aspects of PLM software (and enterprise software in general). And we need to find a way to resolve. Cost of change in PLM systems is too high today. Most of the companies cannot afford it. How to make it happen? The same adaptive data modeling needs to come into play.

3. Efficient Communication
Information streams. We live in the internet age. The speed of communication in the Internet is much faster than in enterprise manufacturing companies. Communication is the ultimate way to react in changing world. PLM needs to adopt new ways to communication – social, mobile, online. All these keywords need to come into play and improve today’s situation.

I believe, there are multiple ways to support manufacturers in the “pull” economical situation. The change comes not only in PLM, but in other different aspects related to product development and manufacturing. I’d be interested to discuss it with you.

Just my thoughts…
Best, Oleg

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Pragmatic Architectures for PLM Future

September 30, 2009

Picture 9I think, we’ve faced many changes during past few years related to how enterprise software is going to be implemented. Shifts in business models, new social and cloud technologies, demand for free software and many others. Thinking about all these challenges and changes, I want to discuss what is potential outcome and impact on Product Lifecycle Management architecture and implementations.

In my view, we came to the point when PLM is adopted as a business methodology and business strategy. However, I think we still have a huge gap between understanding of business practice and technologies and implementations we have in the field. So, proposed principles are my ideas about to define a pragmatic PLM architecture for the next 5-7 years. I’m taking this time span, as something that allows us to change fundamental architectures of the systems and not only make cosmetics tweaks.

1. Individuals Interaction and Process Tools. What should be an approach to design process tools? It looks to me, the key capabilities should be in the way a specific user (individual if you will) can impact overall process design and process management in the organization. Process tools need to move from space where people are divided into “process planners” and “process execution”. No more “build vs. run”. The individuals in an organization will need to define right processes and be able to improve as business change in the organization.

2. Customers Collaboration. I think, we move to the space where a customer will decide how to assemble PLM system from a flexible set of PLM services. Those services will be developed and providers by PLM suppliers. However final system configuration will be defined by customer and answer to the specific needs of business and organization.

3. Permanent Change as a key factor to improve software. Changes become a key factor in PLM architecture adoption. Today’s systems are very expensive in case you want to make a change in their configuration, data model, implementation practices. This is something we need to work on the future. Cost of change will be key driver to successful PLM implementation. Change is on going procedure. Together with future SaaS models it will finally remove the need in planning precise PLM implementation phases from year to year.

4. Working Software over Methodologies and Documentation. This is last, but very important. No more documentation. Architectures need to allow people to learn how PLM system works, systems will become self explained and self documented. In the same way, you can discover software code, you will be able to discover PLM implementations. This will be a future role of PLM architects in the organization.

This is, of course, not a recipe how to build new PLM system. However, I do so sense in these principles to think how to change enterprise PLM software in the future.

Just my thoughts. As usual, your comments are welcome!

Best, Oleg

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How PLM can use power of BPM rising stars?

August 20, 2009

The following article “The State of BPM: Poised to Take Off” drove my attention few days ago and took me to think about BPM and PLM intersection. Recession can spur business growth. In the Business Process Management (BPM) space, current recession presented major marketing opportunity to come to customers and IT that looking to cut cost. BPM can be easy double their numbers in the next coming years. BPM community shows signs of growth and development. Examples: pure BPM player Global 360, significantly upgrade their offering in July-2009, IBM significantly upgraded their WebSphere product line. In addition, Software AG, major German BPM player announced acquisition of BPM IT consulting firm IDS Scheer for almost $700M. Some BPM background. There are three main groups of Business Process Management vendors: 1/Integration centric; 2/Human Centric; 3/Document Centric. The BPM market, initially dominated by few pure BPM players, have changed. At the same time, pure BPM business is much smaller in comparison to an overall PLM market. However, if we will compare Process Oriented PLM offering (excluding parts of PLM such as CAD, CAE etc.) we can see very compatible numbers.

Do you think BPM may have positive impact on Product Lifecycle Management business? Yes, I can see this opportunity. Here my top 3 “why” PLM can use power of BPM providers to improve PLM position in organization in current turbulent time.

1. Re-use well-developed BPM technologies

BPM vendors today grew up to demonstrate tools and technological infrastructure on a very matured level that everybody can use. BPM platforms became part of general IT infrastructure, especially by big IT vendors (IBM and Oracle) entered this market.

2. Optimization of IT infrastructure

How many process technologies do you need in your organization? If today’s economies, people cannot keep two systems to manage business processes, therefore PLM and BPM have an opportunity to present IT cost saving by unification of process infrastructure.

3. Jump to the cloud based space.

There is a good chance for BPM to become part of private cloud infrastructure for organizations. Tight re-use of BPM technologies in BPM can help to PLM companies to make their cloud shift.

So, what is my conclusion? The BPM boom, in my view, is only matter of time. Everyone wants to streamline and optimize processes. So, BPM is not luxury anymore. PLM could be potential interested in re-use of BPM technologies to increase adoption and span product oriented processes across organization. I see very sensitive situation in today’s PLM process oriented offerings by trying to re-develop or ignore BPM suites and technologies. The potential shift can come from customer’s side by trying to implement and integrate BPM and PLM products together.

Just my thoughts.
Best, Oleg

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