PLM Think Tank July’s Top 5

Summer is vacation time. I spent first week of August in Orlando Disney Word with family and my photo camera. I’d like to share few of my pictures taken there.

If you are interested to see more of my pictures, navigate your browser to the following link. Now, let me get you to the PLM Think Tank July’s top five list.

PDM vs. PLM: A Data Perspective

In this post I started a discussion about one of the most confusing topics related to PLM – What is a difference between PDM and PLM? Here is my short brief from this post: The ugly truth of enterprise software – it is all about data and the control over the data. It appears in every solution. It is all about what data you manage, how do you keep your customers accessing and processing this data?. PLM is the attempt to manage data in the much broader scope than PDM. It creates lots of benefits from the standpoint of data completeness and, at the same time, created many overlaps in data management solutions in enterprise organizations. The PDM vs. PLM posts will continue and last week I posted my “PDM vs. PLM: A Process Perspective“.

PLM, BOM, Excel – How To Make It Right?

I’m getting back to the “Excel stories” this month too. Some PLM companies started to understand that they can build some business around preparing your future Excel to PLM migration. I’m covering one of these stories in this post. I think, MS Excel is a big deal for PLM companies. Customers are voting for Excels. PLM vendors may understand that their previous “Export To Excel” strategy was wrong, and they need to change it now. The competition with Excel will be growing as much as PLM vendors will be trying to expand their solutions to be used by more people in companies. So, give away some Excel templates can be a very good idea.

Top 3 Elements of Successful Social PLM Strategy

Here is my dive into “social PLM” ocean. Facebook and other social software generated a massive trend in enterprise applications. This trend will impact everything that PLM is trying to accomplish for years. I can see many Facebook-clones today. Creating a successful Facebook-clone will require to understand the content and specific characteristics of enterprise and PLM applications. I’m discussing various aspects of applying social strategies in PLM space.

How To Define PLM?

In this post, I’m catching discussion on a very big topic. What is the definition of PLM? I presented two very orthogonal definitions coming from PLM journalist and PLM mindshare vendor. This post caused multiple comments and discussions in LinkedIn forums. I’m planning to come with new post very soon on the same topic summarizing all I learned so far.

PLM and Legacy Data

Legacy data rarely coming into PLM strategic discussions. However, I think, legacy data is important. The amount of data is growing in the exponential manner. To handle legacy data and systems is a very painful task. Each time we come with new systems, the problem of legacy data comes up again. PLM needs to learn to handle foreign lifecycle data or lifecycle data produced by previous versions of PLM systems. It seems to me as a very important functionality that almost missed today.

Best, Oleg