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

PLM data-driven user experience

PLM data-driven user experience
Oleg
Oleg
2 May, 2017 | 3 min for reading

Nobody wants to sell plain bagels these days. People are looking for differentiation. It is very much true for what is happening in the world of PLM software. PLM vendors are looking for differentiation factors for their PLM suites, platforms and applications. The differentiation process is actually orthogonal to the need to developing business practices suporting engineering rules, standards and many other things associated with the way engineering and manufacturing company is doing business. After all, it is all about design, 3D models, drawings, bill of materials, ECO / MCOs, inventory, manufacturing planning. Recent PLM marketing gizmos introduced us to platforms, digital PLM, connected PLM, customer-driven PLM, business of engineering, cloud PLM, etc. But it still feels very much as “fake” differentiation factors. After all, I never heard about users looking after “connected PLM” or “digital PLM”.

It made me think about Amazon e-commerce vision and retail industry. The differentiation in retail industry is hard and price is usually the only thing that can differentiate 2 stores located on the same street. Back in 1998, Jeff Bezos had a vision for the internet. He was few years into building of Amazon. Here is almost 20 years old article from Washington Post- Amazon Gets Personal With E-Commerce.

As Bezos sees it, the success of electronic retailers will depend on their ability to analyze each customer’s tastes and create unique experiences from the moment they walk in the virtual door. “If we have 4.5 million customers, we shouldn’t have one store,” he says. “We should have 4.5 million stores.”

Amazon was one of the first Internet sites to customize pages for each registered customer, offering recommendations for books and music through a process called “collaborative filtering.” Using mathematical formulas, it arrives at predictions by comparing a customer’s previous purchases and stated preferences (click “Not for Me” to weed out lousy suggestions) with the preferences of other people who bought the same titles.

It made me think about personalization as a next differentiation factor for PLM software. PLM is very much focused on people and processes. This is a place to source information and data to personalize user experience. Most of people can give you something like role-based user interface by programmatically hiding features and functions defined for a specific role. But this is so much 1995 vision of personalization. Think about future personalized user experience driven by rich set of data produced by systems, extracted from processes and personalized for your tasks and priorities in the organization. Sounds like sci-fi movie. It could be… But 1998 vision of Jeff Bezos was also like sci-fi movie. Actually Jeff Bezos was a sci-fi buff who named his dog after the “Star Trek” character Kamala.

What is my conclusion? The future differentiation of PLM platform is in user experience. Although “experience” became another noisy word in the lexicon of marketing and executives, to make it data driven by what actually every person does in a manufacturing company, can be an interesting challenge. Everyone has a dream. This is PLM. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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
17 February, 2014

For the last few years, open source was one of the major disruptive factor in tech. Open source powers world’s...

13 May, 2016

Happy Friday! Let me think about future PLM moonshot. I want to talk about intersection of product lifecycle and AI. Have you heard...

24 February, 2014

I think Facebook buying WhatsApp for $19B was a refreshing experience for everybody. For the last week, I’ve got tsunami...

13 February, 2022

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

14 January, 2019

Hello… This is Oleg with Beyond PLM and my video blog about Bill of Materials :). If you missed my earlier...

1 February, 2017

After decades of using emails threads and sequential workflow diagrams for collaboration in enterprise, the shift is coming – welcome...

30 May, 2012

Social, Community, Website, Engineers, Challenges, CAD, MCAD, 3D Viewer… Everybody in CAD/PLM business understand, viewer is an important component of...

3 September, 2023

It is a long weekend in the US. The time to catch up on what you missed during the slow...

25 September, 2022

Develop3D article The Future of CAD brings up a discussion with the representatives of leading CAD vendors and a few...

Blogroll

To the top