PLM Definition and ERP Implementation Patterns

by Oleg on October 15, 2011 · 12 comments

Product development and manufacturing is very different from company to company. Therefore, I’m not surprised anymore when I see multiple ways companies are defining what is Product Lifecycle Management. Some time ago, I started to gather these definitions in order to share with the readers of my blog. I was reading Aras’ blog and watching Nexteer presentation by David Lien and Bob Lipscomb about strategies, selection and implementation process of Aras PLM.

PLM Definition – Nexteer.

PLM is a global system that manages the complete set of product and process definition data, information, business processes, and the roles of peoples assigned with with a product through all stages from its creation to retirement.  The PLM system is the central information hub for everyone associated with a given product, streamlining product and process development and facilitating communication among those working with a product.

You can watch the following presentation to see more about PLM implementation at Nexteer, which I found very interesting

PLM and ERP Implementation Patterns

The presentation made me think about the pattern of “singularity” in PLM implementation. I call it ERP-pattern. Look on the following slide. The idea of customer to centralize all data related to product and processing isn’t very new. This is so called “single point of truth” implementation is still very popular.

At the same time, future explanation about keeping PDM implementation and synchronizing between PLM, PDM and ERP shows some weakness. To move all data to a single place is very complicated process. To make it in steps is probably a viable strategy. Keeping PDM and ERP “as is” just a confirmation of that.

What is my conclusion? Manufacturing clearly wants to optimize product development processes across the enterprise. The single point of truth is leveraging the simplicity of SQL-database experience for the last 20 years. At the same time, centralization and replication of data are complicated and expensive processes. Managing phased implementation creates a set of new problems related to the ability to maintain the data transformation and synchronization within the time. I’m interested to know your opinion. Do you see any alternatives the singularity in PLM? Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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Tagged as: Implementation, PLM, PLM definition, singularity

  • Matt

    Oleg,

    Again interesting thoughts and observations. Nexteer's case study continues to highlight many of the issues with the current PLM strategies as they push into more of the enterprise. This is not only challenging from the IT perspective, as these systems become increasingly costly to deply and maintain, and we are all aware of the challenges of a single system intelligently trying to manage data from a multiplicity of domains and vendors.

    I also wonder whether PLM is ready for the two major paradigm shifts that I see occurring, one is cloud and the other is how we collaborate. I'll leave cloud aside for the moment, but for collaboration, I think we are clearly seeing shifts in how we can efficiently collaborate for both productivity and motivational reasons. The software industry has been focused on this for some time with the Agile methodology and it's various implementations. The body of evidence seems to indicate that this is a more efficient (quality, productivity, etc.) method of collaboration than the traditional SDLC. To me it seems that this shift in collaboration method is not well supported by PLM, and maybe the opposite, where PLM tries to unify business process across many groups and homogenize how collaboration occurs.

    What would an Agile CAD methodology look like and what tools would you need to support it?

    Matt

  • Kedarr

    Nice Explanation…Really clears the doubts about application integrations.

  • beyondplm

    Matt, thanks for your comments and insight! I cannot agree more – Nexteer is a typical example of PLM enterprise implementation. Even by saying- Single point of info, it kept PDM and ERP silos separate and exposed to a high cost of integration between these silos.
    Two trends you mentioned are very important. Cloud will impact significantly all we do in coming few years. Collaboration will become flatter. There are lots of simple methods out of Web2.0 will come. Another shift, I expect to see how companies will share data inside and outside the organization. Today it is very problematic. Best, Oleg

  • beyondplm

    Kedarr, thanks for the comments!

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  • Thirupathy

    I like this overview . From the Oleg Plm expert i would like to get some additional information like functional mapping to the features availability in the different plm tools( like Teamcenter,SAP plm, winchill plm  and other plm softwares for the product selection process )

  • beyondplm

    Thanks for commenting. Speaking about multiple PLM systems (TC, SAP, Windchill), I found it very hard to compare without a specific customer case. In my view, there is no “best PLM”- there is a PLM software that fits better your organization and provides a best support to your PLM strategy. Just my thoughts. Best, Oleg

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