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

PLM and Spreadsheetware

PLM and Spreadsheetware
Oleg
Oleg
30 July, 2015 | 3 min for reading

plm-spreadsheetware

The debates about PLM and Excel are heating up. The discussion started in earlier blog posts by Lionel Grealou and Jos Voskuil. In addition to that you can read some of my posts from last week related to PLM and Excel – PLM: Need for speed and PLM vs. Spreadsheets: Bullfight and Prohibition.

I’m glad Ed Lopategui joined the conversation about PLM and Excel with his article – Your PLM Logic is Useless: Because I’m Excel. I love how Ed called Excel – The Batman of PLM. Here is my favorite passage:

Excel is the Batman of Product Lifecycle Managment (PLM), a vigilante working outside the system that benefits truly unfettered fanaticism and simultaneously annoys the cognizant authorities. You’ve got to hand it to Excel for its amazing versatility, the amount of surprises in that utility belt has kept the mighty spreadsheet relevant after all these years. Excel’s flexibility is both a blessing and a curse for information governance strategy the world over, and that includes especially PLM. Oh Excel, is there anything that people can’t twist you into doing? After all, some enterprising individuals have used Excel for some rather unusual things over the years.

So, can we say PLM defeated by Excel and we just need to go and hire Chief Excel Officer to run Excel-based PLM system? In my view, PLM vendors made multiple attempts to defeat spreadsheets.  Even so, none of them produced something that can be qualified with something that investors call 10x better than competitors. I hope some vendors will disagree. Please do. And send me customer testimonials attached to your disagreement. Maybe jury is still out. Who knows…

If we cannot defeat Excel and reinvent a new thing, maybe we can embrace it? So, would some sort of smart integration can be helpful? One of the top VC companies in Silicon Valley Andreessen Horowitz just put a bet on a company Blockspring, which is planning to reinvent the way we work with Spreadsheets in Excel and Google. TechCrunch article just put an article about it earlier today – Smart Spreadsheet Service Blockspring Raises $3.4 Million. The idea of Blockspring in a nutshell is to bring the power of Web programming into Spreadsheets. If you familiar with Web APIs and RESTful services, you should love Smart Spreadsheets. It helps to call online services to populate and update data in spreadsheets. Look on the following video for more details – Paul Katsen, of Blockspring founders makes a demonstration of some neat features:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iogmAtZipKU

What is my conclusion? PLM vendors tried to defeat spreadsheets and failed so far. Maybe we should stop our attempts to replace spreadsheets and empower engineering IT folks with smart PLM spreadsheetware? As I predicted few years ago, PLM folks need to learn Web APIs. REST APIs can be used together with spreadsheet services to prevent cloud integration spaghetti. That would be a way to help Excel not to be useless in running some business logic. And it certainly solves some problems related to data import and update. I’m not sure it will solve all PLM problems. But this is clearly an interesting attempt to bring some fresh blood into PLM vs Excel fight. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

Image courtesy of cooldesign at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

 

Recent Posts

Also on BeyondPLM

4 6
9 July, 2023

Hello everyone, the summer is in full swing. The Q2 is over and everyone is I can see how engineering...

2 August, 2010

Some very interesting news is coming from Lockheed Martin. Navigate to the following link – Lockheed Martin Launches Open-Source Social Networking...

10 December, 2014

Cloud PLM adoption is growing. More PLM vendors these days are re-branding and re-building  product and software architecture to keep...

24 November, 2016

It is Thanksgiving or Thanksgiving Day in United States today. I wanted to say some special words to all my...

30 July, 2019

One of the biggest competition is competition with the status quo. Exactly one year ago, I wrote about legacy PLM....

25 September, 2021

The discussions around open source were around for more than a decade. You can check out my articles about PLM...

9 September, 2023

I traveled to San Francisco earlier this week to attend Autodesk DevCon 2023 – the conference for developers and Autodesk...

3 March, 2024

In the world of engineering and manufacturing, managing data efficiently stands as a cornerstone for success. Any engineering or manufacturing...

7 July, 2015

Since I shifted my focus on PLM consulting, I had a chance to meet and talk to many people about...

Blogroll

To the top