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
3 May, 2016

Engineering.com article PLM This Week: An All-Time High for Arena yesterday brings a news about another record quarter of Arena Solutions...

12 April, 2016

One of the topics, I’m following on my blog for long time is open source. Open source software (OSS) or free...

6 April, 2022

Last week, I broke my longest “no traveling” period of 25 months to attend CIMdata Industry and Market Forum that...

23 July, 2020

PLM Sales is one of the topics, I have a special passion for blogging about. Some of my previous articles...

5 February, 2020

Change management is one of the fundamental elements of product lifecycle control. In a nutshell, it is all about changes....

21 November, 2017

Blockchain topic is extremely hot these days. Earlier this morning, I had a chance to talk with one of my...

5 August, 2019

The predict the future is an ungrateful business. The articles predicting death or disruption are coming from time to time....

16 October, 2019

It has been seven years since Autodesk introduced Fusion 360. I checked my old blog – What Fusion 360 means...

25 December, 2013

Holidays is a time for gifts. I remember a sentence that stuck in my memory from my childhood – book...

Blogroll

To the top