PLM Dream Technologies for 2009

 As the New Year is very close, I see this ias a good time to dream about the future. Therefore, I decided to raise “Dream Technologies” for the PLM topic on Think Tank. What are Dream Technologies? Simply, things that I don’t believe can be achieved more than 50%. As this is almost impossible, we can only dream about it for the moment.

 I decided to qualify the following three topics as my dream technologies that in my view can provide a significant impact on future of the development of PLM, (but not limited to PLM, of course)

1.     Persistent Content

2.     Modeling Prediction

3.     Plug off-the-cloud

Persistent Content

This is a technology enabler to keep product data and information available for long periods of time. In today’s systems even a time-span of 5-10 years is something hardly achievable. What about 40-50 and more? More and more industries today and the future will be required to keep life-long information about how their products are designed, built, utilized etc. In the AEC industry, information about buildings need to be used for very long time for maintenance and many other purposes. The Persistent Content technology is something that will allow product data and information to be connected in a meaningful way. At the moment, we contain design information , including design documents and  mostly in PDF formats. Lots of information about design process, manufacturing, supply chain simply gets lost. Making this information available can be mean a great deal for many purposes such as data traceability, analyses and reuse.

Modeling Prediction

I see the following possibility as very promising –analyzing design, manufacturing, supply chain and other related information to product model information in order to predict future behaviors of manufacturing, consumers and perhaps designers. This technology is connected to the idea of persistent content that will allow long a time-space storage for product data and information. As soon as it will be possible, applying a Bayesian inference can provide interesting and promising results. Think about being able to predict how successful the manufacturing process will be for a particular product during a specific time and according to specific manufacturing facilities. Initial usage of predictions have been used in Supply Chain analyses, but the scope of these systems is not holistic and is presently focused only on supply chain performance.

Plug off-the-cloud

Currently, everybody is thinking how to ‘plug-into-the-cloud’. I think it is a good time to develop PLM systems that will allow us to plug-off. This technology will allow customers to use PLM systems in an on-off mode and synchronize/cache content on demand, optimizing connection time, quality and availability. This on-off technology can be very beneficial, since many PLM/CAD applications are, by nature, desktop oriented. By allowing plug-off/on capabilities, their future on ‘the cloud’ will be more promising.

This is my last post before the holidays,I wish all of you Happy Season’s Greetings and all the best!

SYS! – Oleg.