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

PLM and Legacy Product Data Management Systems

PLM and Legacy Product Data Management Systems
Oleg
Oleg
16 August, 2010 | 1 min for reading

Bloomberg Business Week published an interesting story – Big Tech Problem as Mainframes Outlast Workforce. Some facts about IBM mainframe business: aged workforce (55-60), 4,000-5,000 customers, $3.4B revenues, margin 70%. A very interesting business…

This article made me think about some aspects related to aged product development systems, procedures and workforce.

Manufacturing Outlast Workforce
It is not a secret that engineering and manufacturing software wasn’t in the top computer science league for the last 10-15 years. In my view, CAD companies invested a significant amount of time to higher demand for people coming into engineering space. Nevertheless, manufacturing companies workforce is aging.

Product Data Legacy
Engineering and Manufacturing companies are operating a significant amount of legacy software. This software was developed during the last 20-30 years, and many companies are continuously relying on these systems for their daily operation. In addition to that, lots of data management artifacts are loosely managed in multiple legacy, office, excel and other environments.

PLM Slow Ramp-up
The introduction of new product data management and PLM systems has a very slow rate. Modern PLM systems have a very long initial implementation cycle time. Together with customizations and adaptation period it takes years to get them operate on the level that will allow replacement of old legacies.

What is my conclusion? I think, companies will start to think about how not to lose data and non-documented working procedures sooner or later. A lot of product development and manufacturing procedures exist in the people heads and legacy data management systems. Some of them can be just lost. Some of them may cause company liability cases. Do you see it as a problem? What is your company doing with regards to that?

Just my thoughts…
Best, Oleg

Recent Posts

Also on BeyondPLM

4 6
2 June, 2014

Don’t be surprised if your most trusted CAD/PLM service provider will be acquired tomorrow. According to Joe Barkai’s post- PLM...

21 August, 2014

The new normal – we need less money to build software these days. My attention caught Andreessen Horowitz article The...

28 June, 2013

App Store. These two words changed our life for the last few years. You have a problem? We have an...

12 November, 2014

User experience is in focus these days. Slowly, but surely enterprise software companies are coming to the point of understanding...

21 May, 2014

Online business models are disrupting industries. E-commerce was probably one of the first disrupted segments. Just think about it… 10-15...

31 December, 2009

The idea of 3D publishing isn’t new. For the last few years we had chance to see multiple examples of...

9 November, 2016

“Two engineers. Three opinions”. You probably heard this joke before. This is a reality of engineering world. In my view...

19 October, 2015

The topic of “best practices” in PLM implementations usually brings lot of controversy. Since the time PDM and PLM technologies and...

10 June, 2019

I’m coming to PTC LiveWorx 2019 event later this week. For the last several years. PTC established LiveWorx event as...

Blogroll

To the top