PLM 2.0 Advantages for Communities of Manufacturers

“What if the business model behind CAD and PLM is killing the innovation they could bring to their customer”

In the last 2 years most of my time have been spent to try to work around the constant incompatibility introduce by software vendors every singular release they are outputting I will just pick a simple example :
In this company we have been using the following softwares :
* CAD is CATIA V5 , UG, Ideas its depends of our customers.
* PLM is Teamcenter Entreprise

Of course none of the previous software vendor provide a gateway between CATIA V5 and Teamcenter Entreprise so we are buying it from a third vendor. As you can imagine the integration is not optimal and it is very sensitive to release on both sides CAD and PLM.

One hand we are paying a huge amount of money in order to use all the softwares that we need to develop our Products from idea to grave (DATA) and on the other hand the software vendors are having a deliberate strategy to lock me in their solution. By doing this they deny me the right to empower the data I have generated with their softwares. In addition of this the barrier to get access to “my data” stored in their applications is too high, there is no RSS feeds that I can subscribe nor a simple restful API. I am force to do everything with they poor UI, by poor I mean that PLM application are generaly based on the concept that UI should fit all the roles. In my coupany every modification is approved by the : Engineers, sales, Buyers, Program Manager, Process Engineer , Finance
The challenge there is to provide the right level of information to all these roles, they have different interest and they are in charge to document one side of the modifications (Product definition, Cost, Sourcing, Margin, impact on the assembly process, …) . At the end of the change process the program team is able to take the décision to implement or not the modification.

The webinar below might give you an idea of what I am talking about it is based on “Alfresco”, yes I understand that there is a difference between ECM and PLM but I strongly believe that what is presented is also applicable to our domain. It is important to note that web 2.0 does not have to be exposed on internet and it access can be restricted to the intranet.

Web 2.0 from an ECM Perspective
Choosing Open Source ECM – Shimano & Acquity Group’s implementation of Alfresco

I would be glad to read from you on this topic.

Karthick, read some of my blogs from the last year. It will give you some perspective where industry is going. This one is VERY old – (2008).