COFES 2010 is just around the corner, and I had chance to discuss with Brad Holtz of Cyon Research the potential topics to think and discuss towards the event. We touched the issue of the top PLM industry problems and how it comes to the discussion on Daily PLM Think Tank. So, this morning, I made my first BLOG “Better listening on Google” research and shout “PLM dissatisfaction” search. The article with a complete match to my criteria came in the beginning – “Why is Industry Dissatisfied with PLM?” by Frank Lillehagen, and I decided to make a deep dive into this article and to compare it to my thoughts related to the current PLM industry problems.
The main introductory made by Frank is that PLM actually was too late to the “enterprise app dinner” and was built on top of either CAD, CRM, ERP or even PDM. It was interesting to me, since I have never seen PLM system built on top of CRM. However, I think the main point was clear – in the family of the enterprise engineering apps, PLM appears to be a guilty child who needs to explain his rights to exist and prove all the time his organizational and technological ROI. Later in the article divided into sections: 1- What is missed?, 2- PLM capabilities needed, 3- Towards Product Knowledge Architecture, 4- Where do we go from here? Each section presented from 10 to 20 bullets with lists of issues that need to be done or missed. Actually, in my view those are expected to be a single list of issues, but they were presented in different ways. I made some write up based on the topics that got my special attention:
A PLM architecture should create visual collaborative scenes for proactive behavior and learning-by-doing, enhancing human capabilities and creativity, creating the real-time enterprise, and transforming industrial computing to practical services and work processes.
We need to combine the complementary strengths of computers and humans, in handling and managing data categories, object classes and product families, to provide methods for life-cycle management and reuse.
Huh… It is complex. I must admit, I personally failed to come to the conclusion about the topic after reading this article multiple times. I tried to analyze the list of 20 PLM requirements needs presented by author. However, issue presented there were either completely broad like “Transform IT systems development and industrial computing” or “Support holistic enterprise design of projects, products and work environments” or absolutely theoretical like “Redefine design theory to exploit role-oriented knowledge architectures and product families“.
I almost gave up, nevertheless, the topic of industry dissatisfaction kept me in the focus. Actually, I felt my complete dissatisfaction by my inability to write the conclusion and decided to put my top 3 priority list that can improve the level of PLM Industry Satisfaction. Here we go:
Clean the PLM Language from buzzwords and broad statements. In my view, lack of clarity is absolutely needed as a first step. Customers and industry audience needs to get feeling of simplicity and clarity in definition and implementation.
Open Data Foundation. The main issue here is that currently I observe a huge amount of disruptive data trends in different PLM implementations. Combined with a large amount of legacy data, apps and home grown implementations it created the situation where a significant effort need to move PLM data implementation forward. The potential idea for this foundation is open source data foundation alliance supported by all PLM vendors.
Flexible Integration Capabilities. The integration topic in PLM is currently in the very bad shape. In my view, vendors gave up in their effort to invest into integration. Customers are mostly solving these problems by themselves or by 3rd party products.
An additional issue is social. PLM as an industry needs to come to the level of maturity in their ability to organize PLM events with involvement of multiple mindshare PLM vendors and related to PLM providers and supporters. The understanding of such need is very important. There are an absolute absence of PLM events these days with some small exclusion. The healthy industry needs to be able to consolidate around strong industry leaders and additional technological, vertical, service and other commercial companies.
Just my thoughts… I will continue my “thinking research” and hope to come with some conclusions towards COFES 2010.
Best, Oleg
