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

Top Five Disappointing PLM Technologies

Top Five Disappointing PLM Technologies
olegshilovitsky
olegshilovitsky
22 May, 2009 | 2 min for reading

Once in a while, industries, companies, or developers come up with something that they think will change the technological and product landscape. PLM is no exception in this lineup of excitements and disappointments. Here are five technologies, that disappointed me in the CAD/CAE/PDM/PLM world listed from least to most disappointing): 

#5 – 3D Search

The CAD and PLM industries probably developed the most advanced capabilities to create 3D models, design products and everything around us. But they are pretty unsuccessful at being able to find them, once designed.

 #4 – Viewers

One of the top requirements of PDM since the early days is the ability to view what designed without running a CAD system used to design a specific product. So, I’d expect that viewers should be a commodity. But, unfortunately, this is not happened and the ability to view products/models continues to be a challenge for an organization

 #3 – CAD Interoperability

The inability of CAD vendors to agree on how to exchange models continues to affect people in the industry. You can see people spending their entire lives translating files from one CAD to another. You can still find “translation departments” in organizations. Quite a large amount of companies in our industry still focuses primarily on interoperability. So far, it looks like this problem will be still with us for awhile…

 #2 – PDM/PLM to ERP Integrations

When I look at the problem of integrating PDM (and later PLM) with the ERP environment, I see that the same list of unresolved problems has remained for at least  the last ten years. New PDM, PLM and ERP systems have been developed, technologies for EAI, middleware, programming languages have changed, but the problem of how  to integrate PDM/PLM with ERP in a robust way still faces us.

 #1 – PLM Standards

This is my ‘favorite’ disappointment. Standards are like toothbrushes. Everybody needs them, but nobody wants to use those of somebody else. There is some correlation between this problem and CAD interoperability. There are a few more/less stable standards – STEP, IGES. But this space continues to disappoint me with the lack of an approach that can change the status quo of “yet another standard development” adopted by one or two vendors only.

 So far, this is my perspective on my disappointments. At the same time, I see each topic in my list as both a challenge and opportunity. And I’m looking forward to an interesting (rather than disappointing) discussion…

Recent Posts

Also on BeyondPLM

4 6
27 October, 2009

PLM is moving fast towards social computing and social product development. I had chance to share some of my previous...

5 June, 2009

Last week we discussed a lot MS Excel capabilities for PLM. Why Do I Like My PLM Excel Spreadsheet? PLM Excel...

30 April, 2018

Time ago, I published an article saying Aras PLM lines up against Windchill, Enovia and Teamcenter. Here is the conclusion...

22 March, 2016

Engineering.com article Winners and Losers When Industry Giant Bosch Consolidates CAD and PLM shed some lights on the recent announcement of...

11 March, 2018

Long time ago, PLM companies brought the idea and vision for extended enterprise. The idea is very simple. PLM tools...

23 June, 2016

Unless you live under a rock, I’m sure you’ve heard about one of the largest acquisitions in tech world – Microsoft...

19 March, 2009

I wanted to get back to micro-blogs, and more specifically, to Twitter.  In one of my previous posts, I discussed...

9 April, 2009

I’m sure you will agree that one of the definite goals of PLM is to organize product related information. Finally,...

10 September, 2018

I’m coming to ConX18 conference next week organized by Institute of Process Excellence.  Here is what you can learn about...

Blogroll

To the top