COFES 2015: Product Lifecycle, Supply Chain and Data Networks

I had a chance to share my thoughts about complexity of product lifecycle in supply chain at COFES 2015 Design and Sustainability symposium. Manufacturing companies and software vendors are facing new enterprise reality these days – distributed environment, connected work and cloud software. On the other side we have skyrocketing complexity of products. Each product is a system these days. Think about simple activity tracking device. It is a combination of hardware, mobile application, cloud data services, big data analytics and API to work with partners. The complexity of modern luxury car is 100M line of software code. Think about product information changes in the system which is combined from engineering, customer, field support and connected devices working together.

Product data complexity is introducing new level of challenge in front of software vendors. I think it is a time for software vendors to think how to break limits of existing PLM architecture to support a level of complexity demanded by manufacturing environment and complexity of products.

So, what to do if a single database approach is dead? Federated architecture was one of the approaches PLM vendors used in the past (Actually, I think, this is probably the only one that works in production for very large enterprises). But this approach is expensive in implementation and requires too much “data pumping” between silos. Opposite to that, an experience of some companies with network based data architectures shows some promising results.

What is my conclusion? The growing complexity of manufacturing environment and products creates the demand for new product lifecycle architectures. These architectures will be able to support management of multidisciplinary product data (mechanical, electronic, software) and will operate as a global distributed data network. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg