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
24 March, 2015

My attention was caught by Manufacturing Trends to watch in 2015 article written by Jeff Moad at Manufacturing Leadership Community. I...

29 July, 2020

PLM events go digital. If you missed my earlier blog about transformations of events, please check it here – PLM...

23 January, 2019

Digital transformation is a new darling of technological marketing PLM. It is promising to transform processes and organize data and...

3 June, 2012

Files. It is so obvious, right? We are using files everywhere in our life. Documents, Pictures Photos, Excel spreadsheets, CAD...

21 April, 2021

During the last few days, I’ve been getting many questions about Autodesk and Upchain. Thanks to all my online and...

24 September, 2009

Dell’s $3.9bn acquisition of Perot Systems few days ago drove me to think about PLM and Services for some time....

8 August, 2018

One of the readers of my blog, raised the topic of PLM for SMB. Long time ago I was working...

17 February, 2012

Kenesto just did the first appearance at SolidWorks World 2012 in San Diego. It was a good opportunity, to see...

25 February, 2024

In the evolving landscape of Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) and Product Data Management (PDM) implementations, Project Management and document management,...

Blogroll

To the top