A blog by Oleg Shilovitsky
Information & Comments about Engineering and Manufacturing Software

Should PLM Disconnect Data from Process?

Should PLM Disconnect Data from Process?
olegshilovitsky
olegshilovitsky
27 August, 2010 | 2 min for reading

I had a chance to read an article byebizQ related to Cordys BPM. For those who is not aware – Cordys is a relatively new outfit in the enterprise software market. The wizard name behind this company is Jan Baan. If you are a long-time citizen in the enterprise software domain, you need his first ERP company – BAAN. These days Jan Baan is very active and Cordys is one of his new babies. In his interview, Jan is discussing his long project related to decoupling of processes. The following quote seems to me interesting:

… ending the data-process dependency is easier said than done. Suppliers attempted it using extremely fat clients at one extreme and sophisticated distributed data with replication at the other.

Process Decoupling

For a very long period of time the concept of “a process needs data” were dominant. Multiple BPM vendors claimed that the only way to make BPM successful is to bring meta-data (and other data) into BPM product suites. I can agree, this strategy seems to be successful if you plan is to create integrated enterprise software suites. However, thinking more about Internet technologies and lean architectures it makes much more sense to make a disconnection of data and process.

PLM: Process vs. Data

In my view, PLM Software vendors are definitely moving towards better vertical integration. Users are asking PLM companies for a better integration between products, and PLM (and not only PLM) companies are starting to couple products and solutions together to ensure customers will spend fewer resources tailoring these solutions.

What is my conclusion? I think, enterprise software vendors can miss the dangerous point of data and process connection and interplay. When most of the enterprise companies use data to lock-in customers in their product suites, the addition of processes seems to them as a natural continuation of this strategy. The real danger of these strategies is a large complicated software products and extremely high cost of changes. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

Recent Posts

Also on BeyondPLM

4 6
4 June, 2020

My attention was caught by Jim Brown’s article – Product Data Management Buyer’s Guide (buyer’s guide). The article speaks about...

23 December, 2008

“I’LL TXT U”… You are probably familiar with this modern slang. If not – this is time to ask your...

15 August, 2025

PDM businesses were built on the back of file-based CAD systems. Managing those files was a challenge, but after the...

28 May, 2023

The last two weeks were very busy for me and I’m still digesting what I learned last week at PTC...

3 August, 2018

Cloud PLM strategies is an interesting place these days. When you think about how to move from one shining mobile...

20 March, 2014

Almost two years ago I posted my Mobile PLM gold rush – did vendors miss the point? post. Mobile usage is skyrocketing....

7 August, 2014

Packages, bundles, product suites, integrated environments. I’m sure you are familiar with these names. The debates about best of breed...

26 July, 2010

When I’m thinking about any PLM project, I can clearly see the step when data available in the organization need...

21 August, 2021

The world is much more connected than you think. Our connections go much beyond your everyday social network posts, text...

Blogroll

To the top