How to re-imagine PLM? Intro to my talk at PI Congress 2015 in Boston

PI Congress is coming to Boston this year. The program just became available online and you can see it here. PI Congress (formerly known as Product Innovation) is well known as a conference with a strong focus on product and practical use engineering and manufacturing software in the industry. I remember my first experience at very first PI event in London back in 2011.

I’m excited to share topics I will be speaking and discussing at PI Congress this year.

The first session – Re-imagining the PLM Landscape for Future Business will share some of thoughts about current status quo in PLM industry and market. This is a presentation and I will share my observations and ideas how to align the current state of manufacturing business and PLM development. Below you can find a short description of the session:

Re-imagining the PLM Landscape for Future Business (Room 2)

The PLM market has reached a plateau; SMEs do not have the resources to throw at large evaluation and deployment projects and larger companies are dissatisfied with a technology that has changed very little in the 10-20 years since it’s roll-out and offers limited short-term ROI.

The disconnect between customer demands and platform capabilities has led to the need to ask some very important questions as to the future of the PLM industry and the need for change to avoid extinction.

This session will cover: Exploring the desperate need for vendor and software transformation and conflicting paradigms; Understanding the three major inhibitors of current market growth – global collaboration, integration and fast ROI; Re-thinking existing design, product data management and business process paradigms; Clearer cloud strategies as a solution to this rut; Limitations of turning to cloud because of the security, human factor and integration; Re-aligning the software offering with the need for more agile, flexible and global operations

My second session is actually a focus group meeting about next generation of manufacturing companies. It is more a discussion rather than a presentation. I’d like to share my thought about changes in manufacturing landscape, new generation of manufacturing driven by new technologies, business models and opportunities. It will cover wide rages of trends from makers movement and open hardware platforms to hardware startups, incubators and accelerators.

Focus Group – PLM & The Next Generation of Manufacturing Company (Room 4)

The past 3 years has witnessed the dawn of a new generation of manufacturing company that relies on crowdsourcing, crowdfunding and open source practices to bring their designs to market. The opportunity lies in that new and innovative products can be produced with very low initial investments but challenges soon arise, including:

Agile Methods – the new generation of companies are operating differently; Intensive social design activity – products and their designs/functionalities go viral before prototypes are finished; Manufacturing scale-up – socially developed products create a hype that demands fast and scalable manufacturing; Engineering and manufacturing complexity

What does this generation of manufacturer mean for the current software landscape and what mutual learnings can be learnt between traditional and these new-age manufacturers?

What is my conclusion? PI Congress 2015 agenda looks very promising. I can see a good balance in a presence from manufacturing companies, industry and vendors. Of course, I’d love to see you attending my presentations, focus group or just hanging out during the break sessions. The landscape of manufacturing is changing very fast. Large companies are transforming by using new technologies and products. A new generation of manufacturing businesses is establishing just in front of us for the last 3-4 years. It is a good time to be in manufacturing business, which creates lot of opportunities and cool development. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg