Product development and manufacturing is very different from company to company. Therefore, I’m not surprised anymore when I see multiple ways companies are defining what is Product Lifecycle Management. Some time ago, I started to gather these definitions in order to share with the readers of my blog. I was reading Aras’ blog and watching Nexteer presentation by David Lien and Bob Lipscomb about strategies, selection and implementation process of Aras PLM.
PLM Definition – Nexteer.
PLM is a global system that manages the complete set of product and process definition data, information, business processes, and the roles of peoples assigned with with a product through all stages from its creation to retirement. The PLM system is the central information hub for everyone associated with a given product, streamlining product and process development and facilitating communication among those working with a product.
You can watch the following presentation to see more about PLM implementation at Nexteer, which I found very interesting
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRNATYojq_Q
PLM and ERP Implementation Patterns
The presentation made me think about the pattern of “singularity” in PLM implementation. I call it ERP-pattern. Look on the following slide. The idea of customer to centralize all data related to product and processing isn’t very new. This is so called “single point of truth” implementation is still very popular.
At the same time, future explanation about keeping PDM implementation and synchronizing between PLM, PDM and ERP shows some weakness. To move all data to a single place is very complicated process. To make it in steps is probably a viable strategy. Keeping PDM and ERP “as is” just a confirmation of that.
What is my conclusion? Manufacturing clearly wants to optimize product development processes across the enterprise. The single point of truth is leveraging the simplicity of SQL-database experience for the last 20 years. At the same time, centralization and replication of data are complicated and expensive processes. Managing phased implementation creates a set of new problems related to the ability to maintain the data transformation and synchronization within the time. I’m interested to know your opinion. Do you see any alternatives the singularity in PLM? Just my thoughts…
Best, Oleg
