Mid-market PLM: Smashed Or Transformed?

Oleg, fully agree with you and the viewpoint you add to the discussion.

BTW Can you make more of these kind of movies. They are good ….

Regards

Jos

Granular is the key. The lack of a granular approach creates a situation where the customer pays to much in consulting and in the end receives reduced value because what they try to accomplish is simply too large and complicated. When/If PLM was delivered as a set of WEB services that could be combined as needed the customer could start with things that provide value and increase what they do over time. To some extent this is what has happened with PDM. Now there are so many ways to manage files and many are very simple and some are really a WEB service. You could go as far as saying DS is even attempting to Google Doc CAD files in V6, but you cannot say the approach is simple.

Oleg it would be interesting to hear what makes something granular or not. It would also be interesting to hear how important is the cloud with respect to delivering a granular solution. For example I’ve recently seen a demo of PLM Plus (Very poor name) and I would say this is very granular. The focus of PLM Plus is BOM management without CAD file management. Certainly BOM management is a granular function that exists within the clients environment. I suppose you could say the same about file management.

I would also put Vuuch in a category of providing a granular solution. Vuuch can be applied without any other PLM tools being deployed or Vuuch can be applied in parallel or in conjunction with a PLM tool. As a granular component Vuuch provides different levels of value based on what the customer requires. For example Vuuch improves project execution, compliance, security, business intelligence and IP reuse and the customer decides which of these values to utilize.

Following on with the idea of granular solutions. You can say CAD and FEA are granular solutions and I expect you could argue this is part of what has made them successful. They address a very specific need. What other functions could be targeted with a granular approach?

Chris, Thank you for your insight! To explain what is granular for me, I’d like to put the story about how to fill a jar with stones, pebbles and sand. I’m sure you know the story. It comes very often in the context of priority management. You need to put stones first, then pebbles and only in the end – sand. I’d like to provide my translation, of how I see it in the context of PLM and granularity. You need to prioritize everything. To put fundamental things first (data management, flexibility, identification, collaboration, …). Then think about functional pieces (bill of material, change management, …). And only in the end to fill gaps with best practices of how to use it (processes…). The biggest complexity is that you don’t have a single jar :), when you build your PLM solution. Customers are not buying technologies – they are buying solutions. However, this is still not a reason to put sand before stones :). PLM solutions that were built bottom up are pretty stable even these days. Solutions that contain enough “flexibility” in their architecture can be transformed (it cost $$$, of course) to functioning on the appropriated level for customer. Just my thoughts! Best, Oleg

Oleg, I like your granularity idea. Besides that, I think Jos’ analysis ignores the fact that dozens of smaller vendors and service providers are successfully implementing PLM in hundreds and thousands of mid-market companies. Their strength and differentiator is their ability to listen to those customers. There is a long tail in this market. Most analysts just don’t look at it.

Frank hi,

I am curious to learn which vendors and service providers are really implementing PLM in thousands of mid-market companies. This would mean they have been able to work below the radar of all analysts.

In my post, I am also mentioning that I consider PLM as a business change, where both marketing/sales, engineering,manufacturing and after sales collaborate and share a single product definition with perhaps different views as eBOM, mBOM, sBOM including the integrated development and change processes.

PDM, having a single repository for product data is often labelled as PLM by vendors, but as I mentioned in my post too, there are many definitions, often vendor related.

As always I am curious to learn, can you elaborate ?

Thanks

Jos

Thanks Frank, and I agree with most of your statements. That is why I stated, PLM for the mid-market – mission impossible.

What I tried to explain in my post is that none of the vendors likes to address the PLM mid-market as a global business. Typical mid-market companies like Microsoft and Autodesk try not to talk about PLM.

If you look to the German market, they were the first to embrace PDM, due to the fact that there is a huge mid-market of small and mid-sized manufacturing companies. Products like Eigner and Compass were very complete at that time.

But after being bought by some major global vendors (Oracle / Autodesk), they became invisible, obsolete and phased out, instead of being the platform for a global mid-market offering. A lot of knowledge disappeared here.

I believe, thanks to the DIN-standards, a lot of standardization was done for the German market. Sachmerkmal-Leiste is a typical example, which is typical to the German market but unknown elsewhere around the world, although it is a common best practice.

A connection to ERP is for me not a proof point that the company is doing PLM. In many cases I have observed, it is just an automatic transfer of BOM data to the manufacturing department and there they manipulate not connected to engineering the BOM further. So replacing the manual type work by automation.

In one of my previous posts: http://virtualdutchman.com/2008/07/03/where-is-the-mbom I wrote about this.

Interesting to learn from your company is, how do you handle the dominance of SAP for sure in Germany, as they also claim to have the PLM extension, so why introducing another PLM system ?

I think, and here we come back to Oleg’s post, it is all about granularity – as PLM is not a product and it is not a standard implementation. Question for me is, will this ever exist in a global mid-market ?

Jos, Agree with you. Since lots of systems (like you mentioned) dissolved into large software vendors, this is the exact time to think and analyze the results and analyze how to deliver a solution for mid-sized companies. Thanks for your comments! Best, Oleg.

Frank, A very interesting observation about SAP and “front-end”. In my view, it is a very typical situation when the proposed straightforward solution related to SAP is to have “client” or “front-end” or “yet another user interface”. Microsoft largely promoted this approach in SAP-Duet (Office Business Apps). In this case Office is a front-end for SAP business data. However, in my view, engineering processes require some business logic too and not only “front-end”. Maybe I didn’t get right your definition of “engineering processes”? Thanks for your comments! Best, Oleg

Frank, Thanks for commenting! My take is very pessimistic any time it comes to the point that “vendors willing to cooperate”. And this is not because vendors are bad by definition. This is because, vendors are companies for profit. To handle “standards” is not profitable. Otherwise, community / industry will be interested to pay for that. In my view, “mid-market” customers are assembling their solution using tools available and mostly replies on MS technologies. MS Excel is THE KING of the mid-market… Don’t you think so? Best, Oleg