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

COFES 2015: Product Lifecycle, Supply Chain and Data Networks

COFES 2015: Product Lifecycle, Supply Chain and Data Networks
Oleg
Oleg
17 April, 2015 | 1 min for reading

complexity-product-data-supply-chain

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.

COFES 2015: Product lifecycle, supply chain and data networks from Oleg Shilovitsky

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

Recent Posts

Also on BeyondPLM

4 6
26 November, 2016

Speed is one of the most fundamental competitive advantage these days. Companies are under continuous stress to deliver result faster....

14 August, 2022

Although many manufacturers still rely heavily on document-based Bill of Materials (BOM) Excel files, the days of these archaic systems...

4 November, 2020

The era of four digits acronyms is coming. Check out my FLaaS article. If you never heard about LCAP, it...

26 August, 2020

The roots of PLM are in CAD file data management. It was so obvious for CAD vendors to store data...

8 May, 2018

People are hard. We know that. There are so many articles written about complexity of changes, people management and PLM...

22 February, 2016

Over the weekend, I had a chance to read Steven Sinofsky’s article – Disruption and Woulda, Coulda, Shoulda… He speaks about...

18 August, 2015

You might think “social trend” is over for enterprise product lifecycle management. PLM companies are not buzzing too much about...

15 November, 2010

Last week in Orlando, I had a chance to attend Microsoft’s presentation during DSCC2010 keynote presentation. Microsoft’s trajectory is interesting....

4 March, 2015

  My yesterday post – Will cloud CAD inherit data interoperability problem? raised few interesting discussion about cloud data management...

Blogroll

To the top