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

The PLM Gutenberg Revolution

The PLM Gutenberg Revolution
Oleg
Oleg
13 August, 2010 | 2 min for reading

I was thinking about how PLM balance product lifecycle from the standpoint of producing and consuming product data. The product development process, obviously starts from product design, engineering and manufacturing. However, when manufacturers need to ship their product, they need to provide a significant amount of product technical and service information. It made me think about some historical parallels. So, I came to the invention of Johanes Gutenber.

Johanes Gutenber

Wikipedia: Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg (c. 1398 – February 3, 1468) was a German goldsmith and printer who is credited with having introduced modern book printing into Europe. His probable invention of mechanical movable-type printing started the so-called “Printing Revolution” and is often regarded as the most important innovation of the modern period.[1] It played a key role in the development of the Renaissance, Reformation and the Scientific Revolution and laid the material basis for the modern knowledge-based economy and the spread of learning to the masses.[2]

Take few more minutes to watch this video about Gutenberg technology and revolution it created.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qexDBgWM2X8]

The following video fragment shows the original Gutenberg process using Gutenber Press. It was a real revolution back in 1300s.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-BEI_4D7tQ]

Google Books

Now, let’s move to 2000s. Google Books seems to me as a new Digital Gutenberg. The combination of Books availability and printing on demand can create a future of digital and printed information delivery.  Take a look on the following video and compare it with 1300s invention.

Google Books Delivery Process
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyNSap5XSv0]

PLM Gutenberg

Getting back to our PLM land… PLM software vendors recognized the opportunity of digital product information delivery. It resulted in several acquisitions in the PLM world. Take a look on few examples from PLM companies related to the technical documentation and service information delivery.

PTC Arbotext Service Information

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ValTs8k4UWU]

Dassault 3DVIA Composer

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DA_ehmfcQMQ]

Siemens PLM TeamCenter Content Manager

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJIerJ9ShLU]

What is my conclusion today? To consume product information and technical documentation is not less important than produce it. In my view, the consumption story is in a very premature state. We produce a lot of information about product. However, the process of technical documentation and other service information delivery is broken. In my, there is an opportunity to fix it. I’d be interested to know about various examples and your experience in this field.

Best, Oleg

Recent Posts

Also on BeyondPLM

4 6
23 September, 2010

I want to talk about licenses. The topic I’d normally prefer to avoid. Deelip Menezes made a good post about...

6 August, 2009

My prompt today is about how to improve UI. I’ve seen many times, PDM/PLM systems are trying to put as...

3 February, 2011

Yesterday morning Google held an event presenting Android Honecomb – a new operational system completely focused on Tablet devices. Navigate...

20 August, 2009

The following article “The State of BPM: Poised to Take Off” drove my attention few days ago and took me...

4 January, 2018

The world is moving to the cloud environments. For the last decade the number of enterprise companies using or experimenting...

31 December, 2011

Time is running fast, and 2011 is behind us. It is a moment to take a look in the past,...

16 August, 2024

For many years, CAD/PLM – ERP integration was a topic that triggered many questions. As you probably note, I put...

2 February, 2016

Differentiation and positioning might sounds like a very boring marketing term. But it is actually something that can become very...

24 October, 2012

IP (Intellectual Property) is the term used by PLM very often. You probably had a chance to hear about IP...

Blogroll

To the top