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

PDM vs. PLM: An Integration Perspective

PDM vs. PLM: An Integration Perspective
Oleg
Oleg
30 August, 2010 | 3 min for reading

I’m continuing discussions about PDM vs. PLM differences. I’d encourage you to take a look on my previous two posts related to this topic: PDM vs. PLM: A Data Perspective and PDM vs. PLM: A Process Perspective. My next PDM vs. PLM comparison perspective is related to integration of PDM or PLM systems with other systems and processes in the organization.

Data Integration

For PDM, data integration is the ability to facilitate an exchange between product data records, other enterprise systems and extended value chain. The most important and very important is PDM – ERP integration. This integration provides an ability to exchange design, engineering and manufacturing data. For PLM data integration becomes more complex and needs to include an expanded set of application and data sources. Some of advanced data integration PDM projects are including federation of data between multiple systems.

Process Integration

When it comes to business and product development processes, both PDM and PLM systems can provide a significant influence on how these processes can be integrated. However, PDM system process scope is normally very limited and stay focused on engineering documents and data lifecycle. PLM process integration is focused on the ability of PLM system to have a tight connection with other processes. Most of them are ERP-based. These days it becomes more and more important to have a good support for integrated product development processes.

Social Integration

This is a relatively new aspect of integration and related to the ability of PLM system to be integration with social tools. Tools like Yammer and others represent a new class of tools helping people to collaborate in the organization. Both PDM and PLM systems provide a context for social tools. It can come as data about product, documents, changes processes and everything that helps to identify social relations. For example, by analyzing your product data, you can find a knowledge expert in a particular filed in the organization, etc.

What is my conclusion? Both PDM and PLM systems have very strong dependencies on their ability to be integrated within an organization. PDM integrations are oriented on data access, transfer and interoperability between a PDM and other systems in the enterprise. Data is the main focus of PDM integrations. It may include a different type of data integrations – manual, automatic, one or bi-directional data integrations. However, when it comes to Product Lifecycle Management, the scope of integration can be increased dramatically. It may include integration of processes, people and social context. The ability of PDM and PLM system to integrate what other systems and people in the organization are critical for successful implementations. This of the reasons why PDM and PLM implementations often fail in the organization.

Update: When I finished this post, I found a new post coming from Kurt Chen of Technology Evaluation Center. Kurt posted PDM vs. PLM A Matrix View. What I liked in Kurt’s post is the focus on the PDM/PLM need to be integrated with people and system in the manufacturing organization. This is a key in my view.

Best, Oleg

Recent Posts

Also on BeyondPLM

4 6
26 October, 2017

Digital transformation and innovation are among  the most powerful trends you can hear these days. The traditional three letter acronyms...

8 February, 2020

I’m coming to 3DEXPERIENCE World 2020 next week. It feels unusual, but also interesting and encouraging. For the last few...

14 April, 2010

A couple of weeks ago I had healthy debates about PLM and Innovation with Jim Brown of TechClarity. If you...

7 July, 2017

Engineers are usually get frustrated with discussions about PDM / PLM strategies and solutions. For most of them, it sounds...

11 June, 2013

Recently, I’ve been talking a lot of search paradigm and findability in PLM. In many aspects, web search changed our life....

13 July, 2017

Unless you live under the rock, you know what is SOA (Service Oriented Architecture). It was style of software design...

13 July, 2010

My new website and blog is BeyondPLM. The original post is here. This week I am launching my new web...

2 June, 2009

I think that I’m not exaggerating by saying that every conversation about “collaboration” last week started from  the Google Wave...

22 August, 2017

Security is important to make cloud solution successful. Even latest researches shows security is not the first concern from companies...

Blogroll

To the top