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

PLM and industrial internet trend

PLM and industrial internet trend
Oleg
Oleg
10 January, 2014 | 2 min for reading

industrial-internet-plm

Management of product data was always a first and most important imperative for PLM solutions. Depends on vendor strategy and various historical reasons, vendors are focusing on different dimensions of data – CAD design, bill of materials, manufacturing data, supply chain, etc. Regardless on the priority and marketing differentiation, any PLM solution today is trying to cover all data dimensions I  mentioned above.

The ease and flexibility of  data management is what makes some PLM solutions shine better than others. At the end of the day, customers are expecting PLM solution to provide out-of-the-box yet flexible data model to support CAD, Bill of Material, Part, ECO, Simulation and sometimes other data as well. The last one (Simulation) was actually very challenging piece for PLM vendors. To manage significant amount of simulation data together with CAD and BOM data is not a simple tasks. Some vendors built simulation process management solutions  for that purpose.

However, PLM vendors might be caught by something unknown and unexpected. New tsunami of data is expected in manufacturing world. Yesterday, I was talking about IoT trend here. Earlier this morning I was drinking my coffee and skimming Manufacturing Trends to Watch in 2014 article. One of them, caught my attention – The ‘Industrial Internet’ Will Flourish. Here is the passage I specially liked:

If you think the data generated by today’s back office, MES, control, supply chain, and warehouse management systems is overwhelming, just wait. Increasingly, manufactured products from cars to airplane engines to medical devices are being outfitted with sensors and Internet connectivity that allow them to broadcast back to manufacturers information on things like how they’re being used and why they broke, and when they need to be serviced. In fact, it’s estimated that, by 2020, 40% of all data generated will come from such sensors. GE calls this trend the Industrial Internet and estimates that it will add between $10 trillion and $15 trillion to global GDP in coming years.

It made me think, PLM data architecture can be challenged by the wave of data that can be compared to Google and Facebook scale. To process, store, access and analyze this data will take time and resources. Traditional SQL databases will be probably not an ideal solution, which brings me back to my writeup about PLM and Data Management in 21st century.

What is my conclusion? The amount of data is growing exponentially. Soon we will be coming to Yottabytes of data. Industrial internet alert should be a wake-up call for many PLM vendors to think about future data architectures. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

* image credit to trainordaviesdesign.com

Recent Posts

Also on BeyondPLM

4 6
15 February, 2010

I want to get back to social applications and PLM topic. You can ask me why? Last week was the...

3 June, 2018

I’ve been reading almost traditional Kleiner Perkins’ annual internet trends report delivered by Mary Meeker at Code 2018. Almost 300...

14 May, 2015

CAD files. Everyone who is dealing with design and engineering is familiar with this type of data. Large files, many...

3 May, 2011

The ability to use PLM in downstream applications was always a challenge. There are multiple reasons for that – complexity...

3 October, 2019

Unless you lived under the rock and didn’t look around for PLM news for the last decade, you should know...

3 December, 2022

PLM adoption is hard. The history of PLM projects start as engineering projects and, unfortunately, struggles with many aspects related...

1 February, 2025

Martin Eigner’s recent post, 40 Years of PDM/PLM: The Status Quo and the Future (LinkedIn post), caught my attention earlier...

18 July, 2021

How big is the future SaaS/cloud PLM market? As much as this number sounds simple, the answer is not easy...

23 January, 2025

Remember the old Change Control Boards (CCBs)? These teams in manufacturing reviewed and approved changes to product designs, processes, or...

Blogroll

To the top