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

PDM vs. PLM: An Integration Perspective

PDM vs. PLM: An Integration Perspective
olegshilovitsky
olegshilovitsky
30 August, 2010 | 3 min for reading

I’m continuing discussions about PDM vs. PLM differences. I’d encourage you to take a look on my previous two posts related to this topic: PDM vs. PLM: A Data Perspective and PDM vs. PLM: A Process Perspective. My next PDM vs. PLM comparison perspective is related to integration of PDM or PLM systems with other systems and processes in the organization.

Data Integration

For PDM, data integration is the ability to facilitate an exchange between product data records, other enterprise systems and extended value chain. The most important and very important is PDM – ERP integration. This integration provides an ability to exchange design, engineering and manufacturing data. For PLM data integration becomes more complex and needs to include an expanded set of application and data sources. Some of advanced data integration PDM projects are including federation of data between multiple systems.

Process Integration

When it comes to business and product development processes, both PDM and PLM systems can provide a significant influence on how these processes can be integrated. However, PDM system process scope is normally very limited and stay focused on engineering documents and data lifecycle. PLM process integration is focused on the ability of PLM system to have a tight connection with other processes. Most of them are ERP-based. These days it becomes more and more important to have a good support for integrated product development processes.

Social Integration

This is a relatively new aspect of integration and related to the ability of PLM system to be integration with social tools. Tools like Yammer and others represent a new class of tools helping people to collaborate in the organization. Both PDM and PLM systems provide a context for social tools. It can come as data about product, documents, changes processes and everything that helps to identify social relations. For example, by analyzing your product data, you can find a knowledge expert in a particular filed in the organization, etc.

What is my conclusion? Both PDM and PLM systems have very strong dependencies on their ability to be integrated within an organization. PDM integrations are oriented on data access, transfer and interoperability between a PDM and other systems in the enterprise. Data is the main focus of PDM integrations. It may include a different type of data integrations – manual, automatic, one or bi-directional data integrations. However, when it comes to Product Lifecycle Management, the scope of integration can be increased dramatically. It may include integration of processes, people and social context. The ability of PDM and PLM system to integrate what other systems and people in the organization are critical for successful implementations. This of the reasons why PDM and PLM implementations often fail in the organization.

Update: When I finished this post, I found a new post coming from Kurt Chen of Technology Evaluation Center. Kurt posted PDM vs. PLM A Matrix View. What I liked in Kurt’s post is the focus on the PDM/PLM need to be integrated with people and system in the manufacturing organization. This is a key in my view.

Best, Oleg

Recent Posts

Also on BeyondPLM

4 6
23 October, 2019

The new came online just a few hours ago about PTC is entering the agreement to acquire Onshape. The PTC...

28 September, 2009

Interesting post few days ago. What is very annoying is the number of buzzwords growing in the enterprise system world....

3 May, 2018

Message on twitter from Jos Voskuil caught me by surprise earlier today.  Jos commented on my OpenBOM blog about Onshape, OpenBOM...

25 March, 2014

If you are not familiar with the term “Shadow IT”, you better do. The term is not completely new. Wikipedia...

22 December, 2024

It is that time of the year again. As we are approaching the end of the year, I like to...

27 June, 2012

Communities are booming these days. Social networks and Web 2.0 unlocked the potential of interaction online and the idea of...

2 September, 2010

Summer is finally over. This is a good reason to stop talking about fancy social software and cool Apple’s features....

5 April, 2025

I’m kicking off a short series of articles reflecting on my experience at ACE 2025, the Aras Community Event that...

20 June, 2017

Cloud is a big buzzword, but as we know, there are so many flavors and colors of cloud technologies. The...

Blogroll

To the top