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

How to make PLM less complicated and more user-friendly?

How to make PLM less complicated and more user-friendly?
olegshilovitsky
olegshilovitsky
9 February, 2009 | 1 min for reading

I think that PLM in general as well as most other enterprise systems are very non-user friendly. My simple conclusion is that all these systems have a ‘push’ behavior – you need to manage all processes, initiate data transformation, send released design to engineering, release bill of materials to manufacturing… processes, processes, processes. We have too many processes to manage, in my opinion… How we can change and transform PLM systems to behave differently?

I suggest that we don’t focus on processes. Organizations need processes but people are troubled by them. They see processes as something that makes their life more complex and slows down their work. They are not good for people. They are not good to people. I cannot understand processes. BUT I can understand the list of my tasks. I need to have data to make a task happen, yet, in most cases my task depends on changes somebody else makes to the data. So, let’s focus on this and imagine that our PLM system is a single Web. Everything is published and organized. You need to be notified when something is changed. This reminds me of RSS!

In order to create a possible revolution for PLM, I think that we need to formalize 3 fundamental steps:

 1/ Stop dealing with processes and focus on data

2/ Manage people’s tasks

3/ Notify people about data changes

I envision a future PLM system that deals much less with processes and focuses more on data and tools. Process management will become a native part of the IT infrastructure and will be used across organizations, without being limited to a particular application domain. 

Recent Posts

Also on BeyondPLM

4 6
22 June, 2012

Transformation is coming to many places these days. Look how the internet, mobile, cloud (and not only…) transformed our world....

12 November, 2009

My new post on 3D PERSPECTIVES. Best, Oleg      

22 January, 2022

In my two years old article in the Onshape blog, I shared my thoughts about what will be PLM systems...

13 May, 2020

Cloud is everywhere. It is hard to find a single company that is not developing products for cloud environment. Cloud...

27 May, 2021

Unless you lived under a rock for the last year, you should know about the Siemens and SAP partnership. I...

5 August, 2013

Brands are important. Especially when it comes to market differentiation. Examples of brand differentiations are around us. Some car manufacturers...

21 January, 2014

Manufacturing BOM (MBOM) is an interesting topic. After all design and engineering operation,  MBOM defines how product is going to...

18 March, 2013

Disruptive technologies and solutions. This is beloved topic by bloggers, analysts and vendors. We like to talk about how disruption...

4 December, 2018

PLM universe is buzzing after $70M investment that Goldman Sachs put in Aras.  Check my earlier article – Does Aras...

Blogroll

To the top