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

PLM and industrial internet trend

PLM and industrial internet trend
Oleg
Oleg
10 January, 2014 | 2 min for reading

industrial-internet-plm

Management of product data was always a first and most important imperative for PLM solutions. Depends on vendor strategy and various historical reasons, vendors are focusing on different dimensions of data – CAD design, bill of materials, manufacturing data, supply chain, etc. Regardless on the priority and marketing differentiation, any PLM solution today is trying to cover all data dimensions I  mentioned above.

The ease and flexibility of  data management is what makes some PLM solutions shine better than others. At the end of the day, customers are expecting PLM solution to provide out-of-the-box yet flexible data model to support CAD, Bill of Material, Part, ECO, Simulation and sometimes other data as well. The last one (Simulation) was actually very challenging piece for PLM vendors. To manage significant amount of simulation data together with CAD and BOM data is not a simple tasks. Some vendors built simulation process management solutions  for that purpose.

However, PLM vendors might be caught by something unknown and unexpected. New tsunami of data is expected in manufacturing world. Yesterday, I was talking about IoT trend here. Earlier this morning I was drinking my coffee and skimming Manufacturing Trends to Watch in 2014 article. One of them, caught my attention – The ‘Industrial Internet’ Will Flourish. Here is the passage I specially liked:

If you think the data generated by today’s back office, MES, control, supply chain, and warehouse management systems is overwhelming, just wait. Increasingly, manufactured products from cars to airplane engines to medical devices are being outfitted with sensors and Internet connectivity that allow them to broadcast back to manufacturers information on things like how they’re being used and why they broke, and when they need to be serviced. In fact, it’s estimated that, by 2020, 40% of all data generated will come from such sensors. GE calls this trend the Industrial Internet and estimates that it will add between $10 trillion and $15 trillion to global GDP in coming years.

It made me think, PLM data architecture can be challenged by the wave of data that can be compared to Google and Facebook scale. To process, store, access and analyze this data will take time and resources. Traditional SQL databases will be probably not an ideal solution, which brings me back to my writeup about PLM and Data Management in 21st century.

What is my conclusion? The amount of data is growing exponentially. Soon we will be coming to Yottabytes of data. Industrial internet alert should be a wake-up call for many PLM vendors to think about future data architectures. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

* image credit to trainordaviesdesign.com

Recent Posts

Also on BeyondPLM

4 6
18 August, 2009

Short Prompt- what will take 3D on the cloud? I was reading interesting paper Pictures in the Cloud by Kenneth Wong....

28 September, 2009

Short prompt in the beginning of the week. I was reading post from BSW “Killer Ideas And Controlled Innovation: Why...

3 January, 2019

Holiday season is almost done and now is the time to get back and focus on business. And as we...

28 April, 2014

I’m coming back from COFES 2014. As always, COFES, is an excellent place to get in touch with industry big...

26 May, 2024

PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) has been around for a long time. It was initially developed as a a set of...

11 May, 2010

I think, mobile becomes more and more important every day. The amount of mobile devices surrounding us is growing. Today’s...

14 December, 2010

Ask people about the connection between CAD and PLM and you will discover a very interesting thing. In the past...

2 June, 2014

Don’t be surprised if your most trusted CAD/PLM service provider will be acquired tomorrow. According to Joe Barkai’s post- PLM...

27 April, 2011

I’m attending Aras Community Event 2011 these days in The Henrly Hotel in Dearborn, MI. You can have more information...

Blogroll

To the top