PI Congress: Product development as we have known it, is dying…

by Oleg on February 22, 2013 · 8 comments

I spent the beginning of this week in Berlin attending PI (Product Innovation) congress. Navigate to the following link to learn more. The event is a successor of PLM Innovation conference happened in the past in London, Munich and Atlanta. The even was organized by Market Key in partnership with CIMdata. This year event was expanded to cover product design in addition to PLM related topics. The event is vendor neutral. With about 300 guests and representation of many CAD and PLM vendors, it provided a good place to discuss and get updated about what happens in product development world (PLM included). The primary focus of the event was clearly about customer presentations. Even so, PI congress was blessed by several well-known keynote speakers – Steve Wozniak, Prof. Martin Eigner and few others. In addition to that, exhibition provided a good opportunity to see demos and speak to vendors. Below some of my thoughts as an outcome of two event days.

PLM – changes are coming

I must credit Peter Bilello of CIMdata for a truly provoking title of this blog post. I took it from his presentation: The future of PLM – enabling radical collaboration. We are facing changes driven by two major factors – new social-savy workforce and “maker” movements. I specially liked the following slide from Peter’s presentation – Radically connected… Kids.

We have new reality and new people. These people will influence future priorities of manufacturing companies and will drive industry changes as individuals. We can debate timing of when it will happen, but this is more tactical. Strategically, new social workforce will drive future changes in the industry.

Another interesting aspect of product development changes is related to new technologies. They are going to impact product design as it is today. Key factors here are connectivity, social networking and big data. All together they are changing the way product designed and manufactured. The transformation comes from the connection these technologies are establishing between development processes and business goals.

Large successful mono-PLM projects

A significant part of PI Congress was dedicated to customer presentations. This is one of the sweet spots of this conference. To listen to customers and how they implement existing product and technologies is the main reason to come. This year, PI Congress introduced few remarkable presentations from The Boeing Company, GETRAG, Dana Holding, Andritz, Kennametal, Autoliv and few others. I found these presentations very interesting and educational. It shows that value of PLM is recognizable by companies and organizations are strategically focused on driving more PLM implementations to improve their development processes.

The downside experience of these implementations (I call them “mono-PLM”) is related to effort and cost. Most of them are multi-year and focusing on how to replace a zillion of legacy application with a single PLM platform like it was presented on a picture above. All these implementations are good and provide value to companies. However, some of these companies are not comfortable even to speak about the cost of these implementations. In my view, this is an indication of potential cost/value ratio problem.

Interdisciplinary integrated PLM

The complexity of PLM implementation is growing. Integration theme was dominant in most of the presentations done by customers, analysts and industry experts. Here are few examples showing the importance of information assets integration during PLM implementation.

 

 

Speaking more, Peter Bilello of CIMdata discussed the convergence of Configuration Management, PLM and System Engineering as the only way to solve the problem of complexity.

What is my conclusion?  I want to get back to my conclusion about PLM perfect storm 2012 one year ago. In my view, we will see more changes and disruption in coming years. Three main driving factors – cost of implementations, complexity of product development and consumerization of IT. All together, they will provide a perfect eco-system to innovate. My recommendation to customers these days is not to make 5 years commitments. To vendors – don’t trust status quo. Your potential competitors are not reading emails and still working from a garage space. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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Tagged as: Berlin, Business, CIMData, Innovation, Market, PI Congress, PLM

  • http://www.facebook.com/david.levin.338 David Levin

    Oleg, what is your opinion: why all (if I understood correctly) successful projects presented at this PI were mono-PLM? Do there already exist pragmatically efficient tools for alternative approach? PLM360? If they do exist, can they be applied for big projects, say, in Boeing? What could be cost of porting a big mono-system to an innovative system, if any? …

  • Michael Reitman

    Oleg, interesting discussion, indeed. Maybe PLM software is entering period of transformation but the statement about product development dying sounds like exaggeration.

    Is word editor, as we know it, dying with the new generation of users to come? Not likely, as long as it addressed essential human activity (as long as written documents are essential means for capturing knowledge). Same with Product development and PLM software.

    Let’s make this mental experiment and put all Boeing employees in one huge room. This would allow ultimate level of “radical collaboration” – anybody could talk to anybody and draw on whiteboard without need for any software. Would this huge team be able to design new airplane? My guess is that first thing they do is split to groups, go offline (to different rooms) and introduce strict process for collaboration :-) , workflow, change management. Etc. Otherwise, the project is doomed. Then comes the need to manage structured interrelated data (again, no “radical collaboration” can change this) – both during development and way beyond it.

    What I am trying to say that it is better to look not at the technology of collaboration but at the essence of human activity (involving this collaboration) that software tries to address. Not *how* the customer implementations were executed but *what* they actually tried to achieve.

    Agree that, with the new technology and new generation of users, we can see notable changes in look-and-feel, in “messaging infrastructure”. But core PLM/ALM will not only remain but will be further emphasized.

  • Joy Garon

    Oleg – great observations. How many SMB’s present at these conferences? Being at a start-up SMB, the challange is to implement process without impeding the ‘pace’ of innovation.

  • http://twitter.com/DevonSowell DevonSowell

    Interesting information, thanks for sharing.

  • beyondplm

    Devon, you are welcome!

  • beyondplm

    Joy, thanks for your comment! Depends what you call SMB :) . I can see quite many companies that probably can be qualified closed to “M” in the SMB definition. I agree with you -to implement process and to keep environment flexible and innovative is not a simple task. Best, Oleg

  • beyondplm

    Michael, thanks for your insight! I think, new social tools are actually doing exactly what you said about placing all Boeing employees in a single room. We can see more open and flexible collaboration tools are coming together with people that less familiar with emails and more familiar with facebook and twitter. It certainly will take time, but I can see a shift in a way people are thinking. Best, Oleg

  • beyondplm

    David, I don’t think it is valid to say “mono-PLM” is not innovative. I think, alternatives are just less expensive and more flexible. They also focus on how to solve pain points opposite to making huge business transformation. Here are some of my thoughts about that – http://beyondplm.com/2013/03/08/plm-business-transformation-vs-business-pain-solving/ .
    Best, Oleg

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