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

Do We Need Reporting Standards in PLM?

Do We Need Reporting Standards in PLM?
olegshilovitsky
olegshilovitsky
27 January, 2010 | 2 min for reading

I want to raise discussion about reporting in PLM. We don’t see it much in marketing materials about PLM. I asked myself why? Maybe in there is no need for reports? Maybe the way to present report is obsolete and people are interested to see information by using normal UI of PLM and other systems? If it is so, why so many customers are in love from their “PLM Excels” with all information presented in cells and rows? My hunch is that we have a problem here… Yesterday I had chance to read blog by Joe Barkai about PLM and Sustainability, which led me to some reporting standards initiatives. So, it was a trigger to investigate it more in deep.

Reports in PDM/PLM systems
In my view, reports in PDM and PLM systems are on the very primitive level. Technologically, they seem as an obvious and during evaluation, customers, are ending up by the conclusion that all is possible, and they can extract, re-format, modify data when they will be a real need to do so. However, in practice, reports are rarely coming to the agenda of implementers (correct me, please, if I’m wrong), since normally, they’re so much other things to do…

Hidden Loss
The problem, I see that absence of reporting capabilities is not allowing to the customers to get information about a product in a timely manner and in a readable form. When user interfaces are complicated, most of the users that might be interested to see information, actually cannot put their hands on it.

Is there a place for Reporting Standards?
I don’t see any standard activity in this place, for the moment. However, getting back to IDC blog post,  as much as we can see growing regulation activities, I’d expect increases in potential to establish reporting standards. So, requests for reports will come from regulators. In these case , regulations, will play a role of the trigger in establishing of reporting standards.

What is my conclusion? In my view, reporting capabilities are undervalued by PLM systems today. PLM vendors see reports as a commodity with low value. The reporting activities for the best are part of PLM services and/or implementers. However, looking again, I’d expect to grow an interest from customers to have the ability to provide reports based on data we have in PLM systems. What do you think? What was your “reporting” experience with PLM?

Best, Oleg

Share

Recent Posts

Also on BeyondPLM

4 6
30 July, 2015

The debates about PLM and Excel are heating up. The discussion started in earlier blog posts by Lionel Grealou and Jos Voskuil. In...

1 November, 2013

Product Data Management (PDM) is recently getting more focus and traction. You might think why so? PDM is a mature...

2 November, 2015

Integration is an important element of manufacturing. Time ago, the meaning of integration was to build a manufacturing factory which...

22 May, 2015

I want to talk about PLM sales today. If you want to succeed in sales, a mindset is a right...

15 August, 2022

It is no secret that PLM (product lifecycle management) and ERP systems are two of the most important systems within...

7 January, 2015

There are lot of changes in manufacturing eco-system these days. You probably heard about many of them. Changes are coming...

25 March, 2016

A growing number of manufacturing companies are dependent on the experience of aging workforce. Often process guidelines or rules are...

20 July, 2009

Short prompt – I’m looking on definition of Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) and Product Information Management (PIM). Product lifecycle management...

11 January, 2010

We tend to use word “collaboration” very often in Product Lifecycle Management and related fields. Collaborative Design, Collaboration Product Data...

Blogroll

To the top