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

3 reasons PDM implementation can cost you more than you expected

3 reasons PDM implementation can cost you more than you expected
Oleg
Oleg
28 September, 2016 | 3 min for reading

pdm-unexpected-cost

Engineers don’t like PDM (product data management) and consider it as an unnecessarily evil. At the same time, complexity of data in engineering environment is skyrocketing. Companies are losing time and money on searching and organizing engineering data. As a result, many manufacturing companies are looking how better organize engineering and product data. PDM eventually has the answer. However, it often comes with cost and complexity.

Tech-clarity article and animation Getting started with PDM sponsored by Siemens PLM. According to Jim Brown,

It’s part of a series of animations we’ve done to help companies understand the business value of PDM, recognize the choices they have for different styles of PDM systems, and learn how they can start fast without painting themselves into a corner.

I’m in agreement with the idea of expandable PDM. But my attention was actually caught by the following two slides presenting duration and price of PDM implementations. According to Jim Brown,

the research on the cost of PDM was not conducted by Siemens. It was a survey executed by Tech-Clarity. 

pdm-project-duration

pdm-implementation-cost

Just think about the numbers – 8 of 10 companies need to spend more than 1 month to implement PDM and more than 50% of companies need to spend at least $50K before it will happen. After many years, PDM is remaining an expensive project. I didn’t find numbers about PDM projects going out of planned budget, so if you have one – please share.

These numbers made me think about what are potential reasons to spend more than you expect on PDM project. I came with top 3 reasons I’ve seen in many companies.

1. Data is not centralized

In most of PDM implementation, the first tasks is centralize data that potentially can be scattered across multiple locations – desktop computers, remote drives, shared network location. These are typical places. IT people are usually surprised how much information lives in cloud services such as Dropbox, Google Drive and others these days. To collect all the data and make it available and import into PDM system is a bigger task that you can think about.

2. Specific CAD versions are not supported

Engineering projects have long lifecycle and it is not an unusual thing that data is produced by multiple CAD systems with different versions. A potential problem can be caused by incompatibility between PDM and specific CAD software versions. It might require additional development services.

3. You messed up with data mapping between CAD and PDM

This one is a potentially biggest sucker of resources. As we know, everything works during demos. However, when you bring real data to PDM system is the time when rubber hits the road. CAD files are full of custom data that needs to transferred to PDM. It is not trivial process and in many situations you might have a significant expense to make alignment between PDM systems and your data.

What is my conclusion? To implement PDM is still an expensive project. Existing desktop CAD were created to store data using files systems and never been prepared to support data management systems. Therefore PDM implementations are painful. You can avoid some problems, but you cannot eliminate it completely. Every PDM implementation is a compromise between complexity of CAD files and databases. New generation of cloud CAD data management systems will have to rethink the way data is managed by eliminating files from data management process. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

[Update 29-Sep-2016] this blog was updated following the comment made by Jim Brown. 

Want to learn more about PLM? Check out my new PLM Book website.

Disclaimer: I’m co-founder and CEO of openBoM developing cloud based bill of materials and inventory management tool for manufacturing companies, hardware startups and supply chain. My opinion can be unintentionally biased.

Recent Posts

Also on BeyondPLM

4 6
5 April, 2014

I’ve been following CIMdata PLM market industry forum earlier this week on twitter. If you’re are on twitter, navigate here...

20 January, 2011

I’m attending PLM Innovation Congress 2011 in London these days. Lots of interesting presentations and discussions are going here. I recommend...

26 February, 2013

Simplification is a trending topic these days. Finally, everybody wants to simplify everything. Vendors are crying to simplify portfolios, developers...

7 August, 2022

I was catching up on some of the social media reading over the weekend. My attention was caught by Deloitte’s...

7 November, 2016

CMS wire blog article written by David Roe brought news about Microsoft Power Apps. Navigate here to read more. Power Apps...

15 December, 2015

Back in 1990s, I was developing applications for AutoCAD. It was before Windows became popular. I was working for a...

30 March, 2010

Thanks for one of my readers who sent me the link to Wrench Enterprise. Their presentation about project collaboration and...

13 October, 2016

  Workflow is one of the most fundamental elements of PLM systems today. Implementations of workflow technology might be different...

1 August, 2016

Autodesk promised to integrated Autodesk Fusion Lifecycle (know as PLM360) with everything. Check my old blog here. Promised as something...

Blogroll

To the top