It is not unusual to hear about problems with PLM systems. It is costly, complicated, hard to implement and non-intuitive. However, I want to raise a voice and speak about data management (yes, data management). Most of PDM/PLM software is running on top of data-management technologies developed and invented 30-40 years ago. The RDBM history is going back to the invention made by Edgar Codd at IBM back in 1970.
I was reading Design News article – Top automotive trends to watch in 2012. Have a read and make your opinion. One of trends was about growing complexity of electrical control units. Here is the quote:
As consumers demand more features and engineers comply, automakers face a dilemma: The number of electronic control units is reaching the point of unmanageability. Vehicles now employ 35 to 80 microcontrollers and 45 to 70 pounds of onboard wiring. And there’s more on the horizon as cameras, vision sensors, radar systems, lanekeeping, and collision avoidance systems creep into the vehicle.
It made me think about potential alternatives. Even if I cannot see any technology these days that can compete on the level of cost, maturity and availability with RDBMS, in my view, now it is a right time to think about future challenges and possible options.
Key-Value Store
These types of stores became popular over the past few years. Navigate to the following article by Read Write Enterprise – Is the Relational Database Doomed? Have a read. The article (even if it a bit dated) provides a good review of key-value stores as a technological alternative to RDBMS. It obviously includes pros and cons. One of the biggest “pro” to use key-value store is scalability. Obvious bad is an absence of a good integrity control.
NoSQL (Graph databases)
Another interesting example of RDBMS alternative is so-called noSQL databases. The definition and classification of noSQL databases is not stable. Before jumping into noSQL bandwagon, analyze the potential impact of immaturity, complexity and absence of standards. However, over the last 1-2 year, I can see a growing interest into this type of technology. Neo4j is a good example you can experiment with in case you are interested.
Semantic Web
Semantic web (or web of data) is not a database technology. Opposite to RDBMS, Key-value stores and graph databases, semantic web is more about how to provide a logical and scalable way to represent data (I wanted to say in “semantic way”, but understand the potential of tautology ). Semantic web relies on a set of W3C standard and combines set of specification describing ways to represent and model data such as RDF and OWL. You can read more by navigating to the following link.
What is my conclusion? I think, the weak point of existing RDBMS technologies in the context of PLM is a growing complexity of data – both from structural and unstructured aspects. The amount of data will raise lots of questions in front of enterprise IT in manufacturing companies and PLM vendors. Just my thoughts…
I read one of the latest VEKTORRUM re-posts about Autodesk and PLM. Navigate your browser to the following link and read the original article from 2007. According to the article – ” There are “more pragmatic, more digestible approaches” to solving engineering data management issues than PLM, he [Carl Bass] said”. It made me think more about Autodesk, data management and PLM strategies.
History
Let’s start from the history. Autodesk has a long history of data management solutions. It contains multiple products. Some of them were developed by Autodesk and for some of them Autodesk partnering with other companies. The most notable Document and Workflow Management system in early 1990s was Autodesk Workcenter (Google is tracking the following link on Autodesk Workcenter). I had a chance to work on few Autodesk Workcenter implementations, so I had my own Workcenter implementation memories going back in 1994-1995. The next big Autodesk data management project was Motiva PDM. Autodesk made a significant investment into Motiva project in the end of 1990s. You can track the following KMWord article – Autodesk and Motiva to Collaborate for PDM. Both, Workcenter and Motiva development were discontinued.
In the beginning of 2000s Autodesk acquired company truEInnovation. The original product truEVault was a foundation of existing Autodesk Vault. This is the Wikipedia quote:
Autodesk Vault was initially known as truEVault; part of an acquisition from a company called truEInnovations, Inc. based in Eagan, Minnesota. truEInnovations was started by two entrepreneurs, Brian Roepke and Dean Brisson in 1999. The company was founded on the basis of bringing a more affordable tool for managing engineering data to the market.
After the asset acquisition of truEInnovations by Autodesk in 2003, Autodesk began to further the integration of the product into the manufacturing product line, starting with Autodesk Inventor.
Autodesk’s Data Management Foundation
For the moment, Autodesk Vault is the foundation of all Autodesk Data Management products. After latest re-branding, Autodesk Vault is a family of PDM products providing a wide range of capabilities started from files vaulting and expanded into areas of Bill of Material Management and Engineering Change Management.
Autodesk is intensively working to provide additional data management features and functions. You can see a short video of Brian Roepke about Autodesk Vault 2011:.
In the following video you can see a new Autodesk Vault 2011 integration with Inventor.
In my view, some of them are very similar to features presented by DS 3DLive and Siemens 3DHD products. See my post – 3DLive, 3DHD, 3D and UI efficiency.
Autodesk and PLM
Steve Wolf of Cyon Research recently published an article on COFES Blog – Who Needs PLM? (). In this article, Steve discussing the latest Autodesk financial results and
The following quote represents Steve’s comparison between Autodesk and other PLM-associated companies.
What’s interesting about Autodesk’s success is that the company’s products consist almost entirely of single-user desktop tools that engineers use to do their jobs faster. Relatively little of Autodesk’s income comes from what its rivals call “product lifecycle management” (PLM) software that combines engineering applications with fiendishly complex enterprise-level software for managing engineering data.
A different opinion presented by CIMData in their latest research paper focusing on how Autodesk will evolve into full-scope PLM provider. I had a chance to discuss this CIMData research before on my blog. This is the PLM think tank link. Take a look on the interesting quote from CIMData website:
… perspective on the transition that Autodesk is executing to transform itself from a supplier of individual PLM-focused point solutions to a supplier of industry-focused solutions that can be the fundamental platform for a company’s overall PLM strategy.
What is my conclusion? I think, Autodesk is going on a very narrow bridge and trying to connect customer’s demands to have a rich scope of data management functions and integration with design tools like Autodesk Inventor. At the same time, Autodesk is trying to avoid getting into positioning data management as a “PLM strategy”. The ugly truth, in my view, is that users are less interested in the TLAs these days and more thinking about products, functions and usability. Just my thoughts…
I want to talk about what I consider as one of the most controversial topics in the industry – PDM vs. PLM. How many times, you had a chance to hear the following question: What is the difference between PDM and PLM? I guess, the only one question can practically compete with this – question about what is PLM? So, I decided to step into this winding road to give you my perspective on that. I will try to get rid of multiple high-level pitches and TLA-oriented presentations.
The Status quo My first shot to get the status quo is to see what Google can show me on this topic. So, the following search, brings some interesting set of links. Here is what I found.
The oldest material I found is the article by Martin Day in CAD Digest – Is PLM the new PDM? . He is giving a deep perspective of PLM definition based on his conversation with Pascal Daloz, back that time VP R&D strategy in Dassault Systems. You can see their opinion about PDM to PLM race as well as the definition of how PLM is expanding PDM.
The later materials about PLM and PDM comparison are related to Solidworks white paper PLM vs. PDM: It All Starts From PDM. You can find this whitepaper on the following link. Their PDM is a subset of the overall solution called PLM. The explanations of SolidWorks PDM people are very simple and straightforward. However, they are giving you too much marketing flavor – buy PDM first and later think about your PLM.
A very interesting perspective on PDM vs. PLM topic provided by Mark J. Silvestri, CEO at Lifecycle Solutions in his video. I found it as a pretty balanced view presenting a very practical historical perspective about expansion of product data management into management a diversity set of moving pieces related to information about products.
Arena Solutions put their sponsored link with “PDM vs. PLM” label pointing on their white paper. You to register, so I did and then discover seven pages long white paper about advantages of PLM solution from Arena. There are few more links. However, they are giving you pointers to the websites of multiple PLM solution providers explaining advantages of PLM software.
PLM Confusion In my view, the most notable confusion around PLM is related to a very different view on this from two opposite sides – vendors and customers. For the last few years, I can hear more and more customers are talking about PLM strategies, concepts and industry adoption. However, in many cases it becomes very controversial when the discussion is moving to the vendor/product side. Most of the vendors pushing “a complete PLM solution” actually missing the point that this solution probably cannot be delivered by a single vendor and customer considering it more as a strategy rather than a product. At the same time, you can see PDM movement into the “commodity space” where PDM is considered as a software to manage CAD data that, in most of the cases, need to be purchased from CAD vendor to prevent version compatibility hassles.
PLM Data Perspective Here is my short take on the PDM vs. PLM from the data perspective. Both TLAs were born to provide a name to a solution that helps engineering and manufacturing companies to manage product data. In the early beginning, it was mostly about vaulting CAD data. However, within the time, companies in that space understood that broader strategy needs to be developed to compete with ERP behemouths that started to capture market in a very aggressive way by consolidating enterprise application around MRP and finance domains. That was the time the idea of managing broader scope of data was born. Solutions started to expand their offering to manage data about requirements, engineering and manufacturing BOMs, supply chain data. However, to sell pure data management is not an easy job. C-level people are not driven by data. They are driven by processes. So, broader data management solution for engineering and manufacturing came to the idea of “Lifecycle”. Finally, PLM was born. In my view, it stands for a broader data management solution that includes the orientation on processes that influence changes of this data as well decision management in a context of this data.
What is my conclusion? The ugly truth of enterprise software – it is all about data and the control over the data. It appears in every solution. It is all about what data you manage, how do you keep your customers accessing and processing this data?. PLM is the attempt to manage data in the much broader scope than PDM. It creates lots of benefits from the standpoint of data completeness and, at the same time, created many overlaps in data management solutions in enterprise organizations.
Just my thoughts. I’m open and looking forward to having a discussion on this topic.
Best, Oleg
In my view, the majority of organizations are collaborating using pure email. PLM implementation has hard time to compete with email to become first class collaboration tools. I had a chance to see an interesting company DokDok making software for Google Apps that allows you to share documents separately from Gmail. The power of this [...]
). Semantic web relies on a set of W3C standard and combines set of specification describing ways to represent and model data such as RDF and OWL. You can read more by navigating to the following link.
