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

Can PLM Use Twitter To Predict The Future Of Products?

Can PLM Use Twitter To Predict The Future Of Products?
olegshilovitsky
olegshilovitsky
19 April, 2010 | 2 min for reading

I can see multiple debates these days related to the social software – Social Networking, Microblogging and others. Despite the absolute success of websites like Facebook and Twitter, there are still a lot of questions related to benefits of such software and experience for enterprise and product development. I see two possible direction, social software can be used in product development and PLM: Collaboration and Business Analytics. Collaboration was the first obvious space, where developers of CAD and PLM software focused on. It was pretty simple. Web 2.0 apps drove lots of interest and provide attractiveness to be applied in the product development. However, the second option seems to me very interesting.

Product Intelligence and Social Trends Analysis

I had chance to come across the following post on BrainSolis blog. Brian wrote about Twitter trending topics and potential power of untapped information that located in Twitter. It made me think more globally about possible usage of analytics in analyzing trending topics on the market of specific products as well as related problems such as deflects, claims and other situations. You can, for example, to use tools that calculate number of times a specific word or phrase mentioned on twitter.

Product Development Tools Evolution
What do you think about the future of your design tool? During last years, I had chance to hear lots of debates about that. One of the topics that requires attention is related to how we can increase intelligence of design tools to empower engineers towards getting better decisions. I can see multiple directions here – physical analysis, visualization, intelligence. Ability to add more tools and capabilities in hands of engineers and developers can be beneficial.

Product Planning and Social Analytics
Ability to analyze potential of the future product can be a powerful option. It can come in the context of different phases of product development. In the planning phases- to understand what is trending on the market, during advanced development phase – to see potential social communication related to future development, during the maintenance phase- do discover bugs and other customer issues.

What is my conclusion today? Social software provides an interesting area, since it touches the communication with existing and potential users. Users are the most important asset for any company. To be able to get more information about them can be an interesting opportunity for the future PLM and related development tools.

Just my thoughts…
Best, Oleg

Disclaimer: I’m co-founder and CEO of OpenBOM developing a digital network platform that manages product data and connects manufacturers and their supply chain networks.

Share

Recent Posts

Also on BeyondPLM

4 6
15 June, 2009

Prompt note on Amazon Kindle DX announcement. Look Kindle DX review. It includes embedded wireless support and new native PDF...

1 July, 2016

PLM has deep roots into process and workflows. You can find pieces of process implementation everywhere – starting from CAD...

6 August, 2023

For years, manufacturing companies managed the division of two disciplines PLM and ERP in a very simplistic way – PLM...

21 September, 2010

Last week I had healthy debates with one of my blog readers about different options to deploy PLM for the...

16 March, 2009

Today, I’d like to discuss the relationships between Product Lifecycle Management and Enterprise Collaboration. Enterprise collaboration continues to be important....

12 August, 2019

Standards are important. They play an important role in our life. There are a different type of standards. There are...

11 December, 2008

Organizational expectation from PLM implementation is to organize entire lifecycle process of product in organization. With this expectation PLM positioned...

25 January, 2018

There are not so many pure PLM events in this world. Product Innovation (PI) formerly known as PLM innovation is...

7 April, 2019

One of the topics of my special interest at SuiteWorld 2019 last week was around Manufacturing. NetSuite is growing in...

Blogroll

To the top