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

Manufacturing future will depend on solving old PLM/ERP integration problems

Manufacturing future will depend on solving old PLM/ERP integration problems
Oleg
Oleg
18 March, 2014 | 2 min for reading

plm-erp-mes-smart-manufacturing

How to integrated PLM and ERP? This is such an old topic. I’ve been discussing it on the blog so many times. Here are just few of them – The ugly truth about PLM/ERP integration volleyball, BOM and CAD-PDM-PLM-ERP Integration Challenges, 3 steps how to put PLM / ERP each in their place. The good news – the importance of PLM/ERP integration is well known and recognized by everybody. The bad news – it sounds like not solved problem after all years and attempts.

My attention caught last year Wired article – The ‘Smarter’ Manufacturing Enterprise. Article speaks about communicating between devices and people in manufacturing organization and extended enterprise. The common goal – fast production. Speed and efficiency are two factors that rule modern manufacturing and looks like will be even more dominant factors in the future.

However, every manufacturing today is managed by multiple enterprise systems. Communication and integration between these systems will be a show stopper to make the future smart manufacturing dream into reality. Here is my favorite passage from the article.

Why are serious people talking about this now? Because for the first time, the essential technologies that make it possible finally exist at all levels, across not only the factory, but up and down the entire enterprise. Intelligence permeates every corner of today’s manufacturing enterprise, from the RFID tag on the part, to the machine that moves it on the production line, to the truck that hauls it away. Now the trick is to make all these systems work in harmony as one.

In other words, the fundamental systems of manufacturing — enterprise resource planning (ERP), product lifecycle management (PLM), manufacturing execution systems (MES) and industrial automation—have to operate together, seamlessly, like a single well-oiled machine. 

It made me think again that current PLM/ERP integration model with complicated data synchronization is bad and won’t work for future of manufacturing. It is heavily relies on the idea of data synchronization and replication between systems. It is too costly to implement and maintain. It is sometimes too slow and requires lots of data manipulation and transformation.

What is my conclusion? Previous siloed enterprise models used data ownership as one of the fundamental models. To own data and allow access in a silo (such as PLM, ERP or MES) was one of the first priorities. Today and tomorrow the speed of communication will be more important. To make collaboration and communication fast will be a criteria for future models to survive. For manufacturing companies and PLM vendors today it means one simple thing – to fix old PLM/ERP integration problems. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

Recent Posts

Also on BeyondPLM

4 6
14 May, 2012

Normally, I’m trying to avoid the topic of PLM competition. Not very often, readers or attendees at conference are approaching...

6 April, 2017

In my earlier blog I demystified the notion of “monolithic” PLM marketing and shared some technological aspects related to PLM...

20 March, 2012

The internet changed our life for the last decade. I don’t think somebody will argue about that. Cloud is trending....

13 September, 2010

Last week I published my visual guide how to choose PLM. This post was the most popular during the whole...

22 December, 2008

I was looking at the evolution of PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) and BIM (Building Information Modeling) and found interesting parallels...

18 September, 2017

When you present about “cloud” and “PLM” topic, the question of security was always the one on the top.For many...

7 October, 2014

Processes and workflows is a big topic in PLM. If you think about PLM as a way to manage a...

28 September, 2015

Onshape’s $80M additional investment led by Andreessen Horowitz was clearly one of the big news last week. I shared some...

30 January, 2019

Digital Twin buzzword is trending and everyone in manufacturing is building some kind of Digital Twin. PLM folks might have...

Blogroll

To the top