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

PLM Collaboration: 5 Questions to Ask Before You Make a Choice

PLM Collaboration: 5 Questions to Ask Before You Make a Choice
Oleg
Oleg
3 August, 2010 | 2 min for reading

Collaboration is a widely used term, and I found it sometime even overused. Collaborative development, Collaborative PDM, Collaborative PLM, Collaborative design, etc. Collaboration market has grown rapidly over the past few years with many companies are trying to get slice of this huge market space. However, I found, people usually can be confused when they need to decide about what collaboration tool to choose. So, I wanted to come with this list of questions that may help you in during this choice.

1. Where will your team be working?
This is a very important question to answer. Despite a wide adoption of the internet, the availability of high-quality fast internet lines is going down significantly if you move outside of North America and Europe. You need to take into account how the tool of your choice will perform in such a situation.

2. What is the scalability of a tool?
Another, obvious, but extremely important case is a scalability factor. How the tool will be able to scale up. There are multiple characteristics, I’d propose to use here: 1/ the ability for more than 2 people to participate in a collaborative session; 2/ the ability to scale up with the number of people in an organization; 3/ ability to run multiple collaboration sessions concurrently.

3. What is the level of integration?
You definitely want to have a tool that able to provide you integration with your environment – operation systems, virtual environments, design tools and many others. For design and product development, the integration with CAD viewers, CAD systems and other specific tools can be a significant portion of your decision.

4. How stable is a company producing the tool?
There are two main criteria you want to analyze with regards to a company-vendor stability. 1/ the newcomer factor; 2/ merger and acquisition factor. There are many newcomers who are trying to provide solutions in this space. You want to estimate the level of risk in working with a new vendor. Another one, you need to estimate what is the potential of a company-vendor to be acquired and stop providing a support for functions that will be important for you.

5. How bleeding edge do you need to be?
This is last, but not least. New technologies are fascinating and important. However, you need to decide and balance between new technological beta versions and stable applications that need to be used in a production environment. Your team will not appreciate multiple disconnects, interruptions and other “premature effects” that usually coming with new products.

What is the conclusion? Collaborative tools are very important, in my view. Global development environment, manufacturing and need to support your customers and vendors can put collaboration tools in the list of mission critical applications.

I know, it is hard to come with a short list. Nevertheless, this is my initial shot. I’m looking forward to hearing if you had an experience in your decisions related to collaborative tools. Please share it with me.

Best, Oleg

Recent Posts

Also on BeyondPLM

4 6
15 June, 2015

Cloud is taking PLM vendors by storm. Just few years ago, the question if manufacturing companies will adopt cloud raised...

26 June, 2022

In the digital age, it’s more important than ever to keep track of your data. Managing the complexity of the...

15 November, 2017

Many years ago, I had a customer who asked me to develop “one button” data management application. I made a...

9 February, 2015

The race towards CAD in the cloud is getting more interesting every day. I’ve been watching SOLIDWORKS World 2015 live...

2 April, 2025

Last week, I attended the CIMdata event. Check my article and thoughts where I covered the event. As usual, for...

28 May, 2012

The following twitter message from @raykurland of TechniCom, NJ market research and consulting firm woke me up during the long Memorial...

3 March, 2024

In the world of engineering and manufacturing, managing data efficiently stands as a cornerstone for success. Any engineering or manufacturing...

28 March, 2016

We live in a data-driven world these days. We are surrounded by data in our everyday life. Our ability to...

13 September, 2023

In person events are coming back in a full swing and I’m happy to see a growing number of opportunities...

Blogroll

To the top