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

PLM adoption and CAD management valley of death

PLM adoption and CAD management valley of death
Oleg
Oleg
5 March, 2013 | 2 min for reading

The issue of PLM adoption remains critical, in my view. Even if we can see more examples of PLM implementations, companies usually consider “PLM project” as something that needs to be taken with care, significant amount of planning and justification. So, I wanted to ask “why it happens”? The traditional answer mostly coming from PLM vendors and PLM consulting is leading to the complexity of business processes, the need of people to change and technological challenges related to implementation and customization of systems. Usually, vendors and consulting are working with CAD/IT managers that lead “engineering part” of the implementation. In parallel, PLM consulting often dream to work with C-level people in a company to define better alignment of PLM strategy.

I want to raise a question of balance between engineering IT / CAD managers and more strategic PLM business planning. Here is the thing – even if companies are succeeding in making strategic planning for future business and product planning development changes, CAD management is still can create too many complication on the way. CAD management is complicated, requires lengthy implementations, data import and… more important – change the way engineers and designers are working by introducing “data management”. The last one is hated by everybody hates because of complexity.

In addition to complexity, CAD data management introduces an issue of compatibility between different CAD systems and PDM components. New trend to solve this problem is to use PDM system of the same CAD vendor. It simplifies CAD/PDM integration, but introduces the problem of multiple PDM/PLM system integration.  CAD management (PDM) projects often positioned as an introductory step in PLM implementations often end up as a long and painful journey.

What is my conclusion? In my view, CAD management is a valley of death for many PLM implementations. Many PLM consulting and even some PLM vendors are trying to avoid and position PLM implementations “beyond CAD/PDM”. It certainly gives some advantages, but (in my view) just hides the real problem of bad engineering data management. Engineering data from CAD is an important element of change management and many other PLM-related processes. As we move to more agile and efficient product development process management, to solve the problem of CAD data management and PDM becomes very important. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

Recent Posts

Also on BeyondPLM

4 6
13 February, 2022

In today’s competitive manufacturing environment, data is more important than ever. By collecting and analyzing data, manufacturers can improve quality...

19 September, 2017

I was invited to give a keynote at IpX Symposium. For those of your who was involved into Configuration Management...

29 September, 2012

Even if PLM (as a buzzword, business strategy and software) has a relatively short history, we can talk about some...

6 July, 2010

Product-related data is one of the most important aspects of any PLM implementation. When you talk about PLM implementation, the...

5 April, 2016

Hardware is growing these days. There are many new companies developing innovative products  It was enabled for new manufacturing technologies...

8 August, 2011

I’m still off on vacation until Wednesday. However, as my PLM blogging buddy Jim Brown mentioned on the Facebook – “Blogging...

16 September, 2016

I’ve been attending Autodesk Accelerate 2016 event in Boston earlier this week. Originally focused on PLM, the event was expanded...

14 February, 2014

Product Data Management (PDM) is not a new buzz. Lots of things where written and spoken about how to manage...

15 September, 2017

One of the hottest buzzwords in the lexicon of IT and PLM vendors today is digital transformation. It is everywhere...

Blogroll

To the top