What is the biggest PLM challenge?

I’m continue the conversation with my PLM blogging buddy – Jos Voskuil at virtualdutchman. For the last two weeks, Jos is running a multi-part blogging series about PLM 2.0. I found this topic engaging and touching lots of important things related to PLM industry discussion, so I decided to put commentary as a separate blog post. Jos’ last post was about PLM challenges. Navigate your browser to the following link and spend time to read Jos’ post. It is worthwhile. The following passage is my favorite:

Instead of being able to implement new concepts or new technology, the implementation became more and more vendor monolithic as other capabilities and applications do not fit anymore. This is against the concept of openness and being flexible for the future. I believe if PLM becomes as rigid as ERP, it blocks companies to innovate – the challenge for big companies is to find the balance between stability and flexibility.

The flexibility is an important topic. It corresponds to some of my previous blogs: PLM out-of-the-box: Missleading or Focusing? and PLM Model: Granularity, Bottom-Up and Change. The ability to deploy pre-configured solution and make an easy change by manipulating multiple elements of PLM infrastructure in a granular way is one of the most important technological aspects related to most of successful PLM implementations. I think Jos nailed these topics in the list of PLM challenges. Here is the list:

-PLM is considered complex to implement
-PLM is a huge IT-project
-PLM requires change and structuring – but what about flexibility
-Where is the PLM value and ROI – user acceptance
-PLM for the mid-market – does it exist ?

Earlier, this year, I had a chance to run Beyond PLM panel discussion during Aras Community Event (ACE). Navigate to the following link to see my presentation and read more comments. Look on the slide from my presentation shows the list biggest PLM challenges as I see them:

What is my conclusion? PLM as it today introduces a significant level of changes in an organization. It can be considered as an organizational improvements and impact organization for the future improvements. However, in many cases, this change is burden organization and people. It is also coming with a significant cost. So, to decrease PLM implementation and future changes cost down is the top priority for all PLM vendors. This is a time to innovate. Just my thoughts, of course.

Best, Oleg

Image: scottchan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net