One of the looongest US weekends I remember is going to end. This is a time to get back from relaxing holiday atmosphere to business reality. I’ve been skimming social channels and stumbled on PLM statistics posts published by my good friend and PLM blogging buddy Jos Voskuil. Navigate to the following link – PLM statistics–the result. Read and make your opinion. Jos’ main conclusion – PLM is more vision than tech. PLM implementation is a journey that takes time, effort and resources. Some interesting and funny things came out of comparison of experience and PLM implementation time. Here is the passage I liked:
Here, it was interesting to see that more than 60 % of the respondents have over 8 years of experience. As mentioned related to the previous questions it is necessary to have a long term experience. Sometimes I meet a “Senior” PLM Consultant (business card) with two or three years of experience. I believe we should reserve the word “senior” for PLM with a minimum amount of 5 years experience. And it is also depending on the amount of projects you were involved in. Interesting thought came into my mind. Some vendors claim the provide extreme rapid implementations for PLM ( 2 weeks / 30 days / 3 months). If this is real PLM you could do 25, 12 or 4 PLM projects per year full time.
It made me think about PLM implementations in the way they exist today – journey type of specialized implementation requiring time and effort. I certainly agree with Jos- to change the way companies work requires vision, time and effort. In some situations, PLM implementations are coming to change product development processes established during decades.
However, here is a different angle to look on PLM problem. Business is very dynamic these days. Business environment, ecosystem, technology, human resources, business landscape. What if the current lifecycle of many PLM implementations is not very inline with business needs? It reminds me one of the old PTC slides from COFES Israel – people just want drink beer!
What is my conclusion? New enterprise landscape and business reality will be require a different approach in everything – IT, computing models, enterprise software and implementations. We’ve seen lots of changes in consumer technology space, open source and other places happened over the past 10 years. People are looking how to build new products faster and provide a quick respond on customers demands. So, my hunch some of PLM journeys will be late to deliver results. Just my thoughts…
Best, Oleg
