Best-practices aren’t good enough for PLM?

What I want to discuss today is PLM Best Practices. Frankly saying, my thoughts about the topic were accelerated by COFES 2010 theme publishing “COFES 2010: Best-practices aren’t good enough“. So, it brings me to think in loud about what we call “best practices”. I think, you can hear a lot about this in PLM community. Best practices became very popular and had promoted as the way to have an efficient PLM implementation. You can find it in different “envelops” and combinations – best practices, industry solution, express offering etc. But speaking with different people in our community, I identified two main trends, if you will, in everything related to best practices:

1. Support best practices coming from PLM vendors. This community of people truly believes, PLM providers, by supporting best practices will release packages that will be ready to use and will be adopted very quickly by organization. For the small organizations, it will help to reduce the cost of implementation. For the big organizations, it will provide a framework to change way organization work. Customers don’t need to spend time to define processes, models, implementation specific stuff. Just install and go…

2. Support flexible configurable PLM software. This community is actually very opposite to previous one. From the standpoint of these people, PLM vendors have no sufficient knowledge to provide pre-packaged configurations. In addition, they believe in uniqueness of product development processes in the organization (even in the same industry). In their view, PLM software vendors need to focus on producing highly configurable, flexible software that can be customized, configured, adapted for specific customer needs.

So, what is my conclusion for today? I don’t see any of these approaches as a “silver bullet”. And I definitely see advantages of both directions. I’d be interested in open discussion with you to share and discuss your experience, vision and future thoughts.

Best, Oleg