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

How Tagging can prevent PLM from a Compulsive Obsessive Disorder Problem?

How Tagging can prevent PLM from a Compulsive Obsessive Disorder Problem?
olegshilovitsky
olegshilovitsky
9 April, 2009 | 2 min for reading

I’m sure you will agree that one of the definite goals of PLM is to organize product related information. Finally, I can find all my product models, relevant drawings, BOMs, customer requirements, manufacturing plans and suppliers bids. Unfortunately, when I look at the existing PLM systems, I see that this is not always simple. Companies utilize multiple software tools to design and manufacture products. Sometimes companies need to develop special software tools to follow specific information related to their catalogs of standard, existing and future developed products etc.

I started to think about the approach we can take for a PLM system to make it significantly simpler compared to what we have today. Actually a few analogies helped me come up with this idea. My MS Outlook contains lots of mails. A while ago, I tried to categorized mails and put them in relevant folders. But this proved to be very painful, as it had been in the past. I started to develop taxonomy for my mails at first, but after a few month or trials, I decided that I will keep all mails in a single folder. But then I had trouble finding what I needed, so I decided to mark my mail with categories. So, today these tags (categories) lets me find relevant mails in seconds.

outlook tagging with categories

Another example is my home computer system with photographs. I can sort them according to multiple criteria. In the end, I finally understood that this is mission is an impossible task, so I put the photos in a calendar-based order and started to mark the photos with tags. Actually, I found that there are many available tagging systems you can use today.

Now, how can I use this experience to help me to build a more efficient user experience for PLM/PDM systems? My proposal is as following – TAG EVERYTHING– products, models, projects, users, documents, ECOs (Engineering Change Orders), BOM etc. With this total tagging approach, we will be able to build an environment that is tuned for a specific company. What is more important is that it will also be customized for a specific user’s need. Users will be able to build tagging systems within time and justify needs and tags usages. Lately, we can eliminate unused or obsolete tags (even if they were created by a specific user).

There are a few systems I evaluated that allow you to tag everything on your computer and are simple to integrate with your PLM system. I’m sure to build these tagging capabilities is relatively simple for existing PLM systems.

Here are some examples:

tagging with gravity 

tagging with taglocity

tagging with taglauncher

And, in the end, I found this approach in the core of Apple Mac. So, this is an open call. What do you think about this approach for PLM? May be you know systems that have already implemented this? Please share your experience.

tag on mac ex2

tag on mac ex1

Recent Posts

Also on BeyondPLM

4 6
27 August, 2021

When it comes to software and business, I like the word “Platform”. It feels strong and powerful, You want to...

11 December, 2013

Storage of information is a big deal. The amount of data around us is growing faster than we can even...

23 December, 2014

I’m following Facebook search development effort. Maybe you had a chance to read my earlier post about that – Why...

12 September, 2014

Cloud is getting wider adoption these days. An interesting trend I observe for the last year – customer are asking...

23 September, 2014

IoT is one of the recent popular buzzwords in business and consumer world. I’ve been touching it in few of...

26 April, 2012

The ability to develop virtual conversation accorss continents and timezones is one of the most exciting parts of my blogging...

2 May, 2012

The first day of ACE 2012 was quite energetic. This is my 3rd year at Aras Community Event. The first...

20 July, 2009

I think we are moving fast toward combination of virtual and physical worlds. How we can get closer and combine...

17 July, 2009

I’m thinking, how PLM can become leaner and efficient. In today’s economical situation and even in general, to make PLM...

Blogroll

To the top