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

PLM vs. BPM or What do you think about IBM PDIF?

PLM vs. BPM or What do you think about IBM PDIF?
olegshilovitsky
olegshilovitsky
2 July, 2009 | 2 min for reading

ibm-pdifIn one of my previous posts, I raised the question if PLM needs to develop its own process tools. Looking at the few announcements made by IBM and Siemens PLM, I asked myself the following question again:  Where is PLM going regarding the implementation of Business Process Management (BPM) and SOA related frameworks? For the moment, I have more questions than answer, but my basic assumptions follow:

  1. From the PLM standpoint, business processes (or collaborative business processes) are a significant portion of what enterprise PLM does.
  2. There are about 100 companies in the world that are doing something more or less associated with Business Process Management (analysts normally talk about 10-20 top players).
  3. Pure BPM players are rarely involved into PLM implementations; PLM companies normally provide workflow and process functionality by themselves.

Comparing PLM and BPM process capabilities, I have concluded that:

  1. PLM provides a very good product-oriented workflow, but is relatively weak in enterprise functions and administration, and other middleware components.
  2. The BPM offering is always more agile and more generic compared to PLM business processes.
  3. BPM normally provides connectivity adapters… and for PLM products too.

The very interesting piece of IBM PDIF framework is related to IBM Web Sphere Process Server and additional process-oriented middleware components. I wonder what combination of PLM software from Siemens PLM will support the process components of PDIF and how they will work together. Similar frameworks are available with other big enterprise stakeholders such as Microsoft, SAP, and Oracle. How can their respectful products provide similar functionality?

Speaking broadly about PLM and BPM, I found the following questions interesting.

  1. Will PLM follow the traditional path and continue to develop BPM components to make their PLM Process technologies stronger?
  2. Will PLM vendors be interested in the acquisition of one of the available BPM pure players to get more “process stuff” on board?
  3. Will PLM adjust more to the BPM capabilities of large enterprise and platform vendors?

I look forward to your comments and opinions.

Recent Posts

Also on BeyondPLM

4 6
19 September, 2017

I was invited to give a keynote at IpX Symposium. For those of your who was involved into Configuration Management...

14 January, 2011

I read the article in Yahoo News – ERP investments to slow in 2011. According to the Forrester research, many...

9 July, 2023

Hello everyone, the summer is in full swing. The Q2 is over and everyone is I can see how engineering...

24 May, 2010

An interesting post was published by Luna-Tech research about the Business Process Management redefinition. Only few years ago, PLM was...

5 July, 2017

Forbes article Roundup of Cloud Computing Forecast in 2017 gives you a perspective on how much cloud will impact business. According...

5 April, 2016

Hardware is growing these days. There are many new companies developing innovative products  It was enabled for new manufacturing technologies...

13 June, 2017

Experience is a new mantra in our world. Software vendors are taking it sometimes to extremes by starting to offer...

11 April, 2016

Last Saturday I attended a roundtable discussion at COFES 2016. The name of the discussion – The Federated Toolbox was...

8 January, 2009

While looking at the amazing development of 3D Gaming Technologies recently , I’ve been wondering – is it possible to...

Blogroll

To the top