PLM Plus User Experience Minus Complexity On Demand

Few publications around a new company called PLM+, which left stealth mode this week, drove my attention. There is not much information about PLM+ product. You can take a look on Josh Mings post in SolidSmack and Al Dean publication in develop3D as well as research PLMplus web site. So, I did.

PLM+ hit me to think again about second-mover innovation. I had chance to discuss second-movers before in my post “PLM in an economic downturn – Is there a place for second mover innovation?”. Looking on everything, I know about PLM+ for the moment, it makes me perfect sense to innovate in the place where all PLM companies already made their trials and investments. Original born for big companies like Boeing, Toyota and others, Product Lifecycle Management aimed to resolve complex needs of these big OEM’s design and manufacturing processes. Since that time and especially during last 3-5 years, most PLM vendors claimed their SMB-oriented product lines and brands – Siemens PLM Velocity with TeamCenter Express, Dassault PLM Express and various combination of ENOVIA SmarTeam products, Windchill OnDemand from IBM and Windchill Product Point (just released earlier this year). All these products claimed simple, yet powerful product capabilities fully loaded with a set of known PLM buzzwords ready for SMB.

And, of course, I need to talk about Arena Solution (former bom.com). Reading about PLM+ and looking on old materials about PLM products, I found very interesting use case from Arena Solution back in 2002. Unfortunately, web history is pretty clean and even Google wasn’t able to track this publication 7 years backward online, but I have copy of document and would like to share a fragment of this use case below. Take a look – I think it is self-explained.

Picture 44

So, what are my thoughts about PLM+ today? I think, to innovate in the place where all competitors spent a lot of money to research and build their own products is a very interesting approach that fits today’s economy. And, it was successfully done by many other companies in the past. Without going with big examples like AMD vs. Intel, there are many others. I personally liked company called Xobni – think about what possible to invent in email these days? So they did, in my view. For me PLM+ is a very interesting try to achieve “simple” in PLM and, I agree with Josh, saying that it’s very hard to write these two words together anytime. Knowing personally Guy Alroy and Benny Shaviv, I just want to tell them good luck!

Best, Oleg

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  • Hi Oleg,

    The focus in my view is that the customer problem still exists within small & medium customers. Regardless of bold statements by all vendors, that they have SMB solutions that can work for companies of all sizes – the problem remains unsolved. Companies must have a “PLM strategy” in order to convince themselves to go through the painful process of implemeting one of the existing solutions.

    We are a small company. We never had a CRM strategy, but we do have a CRM. Wasnt a question of IF we will get it, only a question of which one. This was not the case 10 years ago, things have changed.

    Why should PLM be different? It shouldnt. Technology has matured, people’s mindset has matured, and the research into human-software ergonomics have also matured. Its time to make PLM mainstream.

    How is PLM+ different? I’ll gladly give you the tour once we publish (actually, you could do it yourself with a free trial and give me feedback). That should be better than going through 6-12 months of benchmarking, evaluating, and negotiating, no?

    p.s. – I’ll give you the personal tour even though you are working for the competition 😉

  • Benny, Thank you for your comments. I agree, technologies changed, processes and people too. I think to have open industry conversation is important even if you we are competitors. So, I’m looking forward to your presentation :). Best, Oleg

  • Congratulations to Guy and Benny and their team on the launch of PLM+. The website looks very professional and I like the promotion of a free trial – I think this will be very attractive for SMBs who are concerned about the cost and complexity of getting into PDM.
    I wonder with a web based solution how will PLM+ capture data from multiple CAD solutions? We have found that even smaller companies, through acquisitions or when working with suppliers and customers, need to manage data in multiple CAD formats. The approach of traditional PDM vendors in developing multiple CAD integrations for their software and trying to keep everything in synch sometimes seems too complex to me for SMBs – maybe their is a more elegant solution?

  • David, Thank you for your comment. However, I don’t know. Looks like we need to wait until Benny/Guy will explain it to us :).. Best, Oleg

  • hi David,

    Thanks for your comments and been years since we’ve spoken – hope all is well for you!

    Allow me not to go into the details at this point, but only to say that we will solve the critical issues for SMBs, which all the large companies (dassault, siemens, ptc, etc) have completely failed at.

    Fact of the matter is that in SMBs most PLMs run WAY over budget, WAY over time, and in many cases fail.

    Its time to make PLM mainstream.

    keep in touch with me and I’ll gladly update you when the time comes 🙂

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