To manage business processes across the manufacturing organization is not a simple job. This is a problem product lifecycle management (PLM) system is solving for manufacturing organizations of any size. Sounds great and compelling. PLM vendors can give you many examples of successful PLM implementations. Time for party? Actually not so fast…
The road to implement PLM is painful and requires a significant effort to be taken by a company implementing PLM as well as for PLM vendor and service provider. In my earlier blog – What’s wrong with “analog PLM”? I shared some of my thoughts on a traditional process of PLM implementations – mapping of existing company environment and processes into PLM data architecture.
At the same time, enterprise software is changing. The demand of many organizations (including manufacturing and industrial companies) is to make slow move towards agile and lean systems that won’t require “big bang” change with millions of dollar expenses. The idea of re-imagining PLM one business process at a time is compelling, but to make it happen is not a simple. How to make it happen?
Cloud and mobile are two magic words that often associated these days with a change in the way to enterprise and PLM software can be deployed and implemented. Unfortunately, these are not silver bullets. The challenge of enterprise companies is to avoid getting into cloud integration spaghetti with many new cloud applications and services.
It made me think about possible way to solve a problem of painful process capturing during PLM deployment. Today, it usually done by a team of application engineers getting together with customers to whiteboard business data models and processes. What if we can move it into hands of actual users? Sounds crazy?
My attention was caught by TechCrunch article – Hooks, The App That Lets You Get A Notification For Almost Anything, Lands On Android And Apple Watch. In a nutshell, Hooks allows you to bring notification from multiple mobile applications running on your iPhone or Android device.
Imagine a system that can help users to define hooks based on their existing work habits and processes. It can be events coming from CAD system or Excel spreadsheet. It can be notifications from your invoice ordering or even cloud ERP environment. Notifications will allow to people to take actions converted into a process. Sounds like a dream?
What is my conclusion? I can see a trend towards smart software and devices that can capture life and processes around us. I can capture what matters for me – it is probably not very complex job. “Crowdhooking” can be an alternative way to capture processes for organization. Think about it as an alternative to administrators to do hard work and define processes, which will be abandoned by majority of users in few month. We should leave old fashion administration work for smart software. Just my thoughts…
Best, Oleg
