PLM and Selling Data

Manufacturing companies aggregating a lot of data these days. Data is coming from many places. For many years, product development, manufacturing and supply chain was major sources of data in companies. Nowadays, data is coming from outside of a company. Internet, social network and communication created new source of information. The intersection of data from inside of a company and outside data is a very interesting place. I’ve been reading Forester blog – Mo’ data mo’ problems few days ago written by Clarence Villanueva. The publication discusses a potential value of data created during marketing campaigns. Here is a quote:

…a client was looking to have a marketing company take its point-of-sale (POS) data to prepare email campaigns. Upon closer review of the contracts, data ownership was ambiguously defined and nested in three separate areas: the Master Services Agreement (MSA), SOW, and an addendum. When you trace the definition through the various documents, the only thing made clear on data ownership was that the campaigns resulting from the ETL (extract, transform, load) process were owned by the client. What about the POS data that was sent over to the marketing services company?

This example made me think about multiple cases when manufacturing companies as well as outside companies such as suppliers, service providers and many other entities can create an interesting value from the combination of the data owned by them – product information, sales information, contracts, customer data, etc. Imagine PLM software will be able to combine these pieces of data into valuable assets.

What is my conclusion? I think PLM has an opportunity to convert data into valuable assets. I can see more companies adopting PLM these days. Cloud PLM will provide an additional opportunity to connect data coming from multiple sources – supply chain, subcontractors and customers. Sounds like an important topic and cool opportunity. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg