I’ve been on the road for the last few days. It occurred to me that I hardly imagine my travel experience without mobile applications – I used Uber to get to the airport, United mobile app to check-in and get on board, Google Maps to find location and Waze to help navigating when car navigation system stuck into construction and closed roads. I communicated with my colleagues and family using Slack and Google Chat. I was taking notes using Evernote mobile. I was able to upload my presentation slides using Google Drive mobile.
Now think about manufacturing company. In one of my earlier articles, I’ve been sharing my thoughts about Mobile PLM innovation continuum. I still believe manufacturing is a goldmine for mobile developers. At the same time I think something is missed to turn that opportunity in the reality.
My attention this morning was caught by VMWare blog article – Bringing Mobile Moments to the Enterprise. Check it out. The article speaks about 3 stages of mobile development in consumer market – Initiation, Evolution and Maturity.
Initiation was the initial influx of mobile devices, seven or eight years ago, when smartphones and tablets finally caught on. In the Evolution stage, websites were made more mobile-friendly and the development of mobile-specific applications steadily became a multibillion-dollar industry. In the third phase, Maturity, mobile-first and even mobile-only apps—like WhatsApp and Snapchat—were introduced to deliver maximum value for mobile users by making the most of smartphone and tablet hardware (including GPS, camera, wireless connectivity, a streamlined user experience, and so on).
While the consumer marketplace is now reaping the benefits of the Maturity stage, the enterprise world is still stuck somewhere between Initiation and Evolution. And it’s time for businesses to catch up.
The article made me think about why PLM is so slow to find its mobile moment. Think about manufacturing company. It can be small or large company. It doesn’t matter. Their design and engineering work is heavily dependent on desktop CAD systems saving information using files. These files can be synchronized to Dropbox or Google Drive, but you cannot do anything with these files on mobile device, besides to view them if you are lucky to have an app to support that (there are few available today). Moving downstream in the development stages, it gets even more complicated. Simulation, analysis, manufacturing planning, procurement, orders and shipments. The diversity of application is high and most of the applications are saving data using databases and files making them not available for easy extraction and visualization. Could you imagine the whole chain of operation experience happening on mobile devices?
What is my conclusion? Thinking about mobile development stages, we are still in early evolution stage. Almost every person in manufacturing company has mobile device. At the same time, the engineering and manufacturing application environment is not mobile friendly. Something should happen for application developers, so they will put focus on developing of mobile applications. It should start from the early focusing on design and requirements and then going to manufacturing, maintenance and support. Eliminate files, make application to focus on data and actions. Software vendors in engineering space should start thinking about mobile enablement for everything they do. This is probably the first steps to unlock PLM goldmine. Without that, PLM mobile moment won’t happen. Just my thoughts…
Best, Oleg
Image courtesy of Ambro at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
