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
21 June, 2010

My post “How To Manage ECO Without Paying $1’500 Per Seat” raised a very interesting discussion on Zero-Waite State blog...

12 June, 2021

PLM is the system, technology, and process at the heart of your product development. It is a central control point...

6 January, 2011

Mobile communication is evolving. Lots of new things happen. iPhone was a revolutionary device that introduced back-end camera and allowed...

27 March, 2017

Lifecycle management is one of the most fundamental value propositions PLM systems are selling. The ability to manage lifecycle of...

28 October, 2009

Amazon announced Amazon RDS. In my view, this is the next logical level of cloud services’ deployment. Now you can...

19 October, 2015

The topic of “best practices” in PLM implementations usually brings lot of controversy. Since the time PDM and PLM technologies and...

30 August, 2009

Short note this Sunday. Take a look on a very interesting blind test site comparing different search engines – Bing...

21 November, 2010

I was reading NYT on my flight today. The following article made me feel bad. Google TV, Usability is Not...

5 May, 2019

My attention was caught by CIO article – The digital transformation debate: It’s about people AND technology. In many voices...

Blogroll

To the top