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

PI Congress Munich and distributed innovation

PI Congress Munich and distributed innovation
Oleg
Oleg
9 March, 2016 | 3 min for reading

PI Munich event is over. Now it is the time to digest information, scroll through the notes, tweets and business cards. It was a great set of presentations, meetings and information exchange. One of my favorite presentation during the second day of the event was Jos Voskuil’s – The PLM identity crisis (you can see presentation here).

jos-voskuil-plm-identity-crisis

Jos provided a very interesting  perspective on PLM trends. He made a great point about PLM “one liners”. Take a look on few examples here. It reminded me one of my earlier articles – PLM Vendors and Differentiation: Square the Circle.

However, my absolute favorite was a slide about PLM and future of innovation. Here is the link and picture below:

decentralized-innovation

It made me think about future distributed manufacturing, connected factories and supply chain. In the past, manufacturing was centralized with significant presence of big enterprise. Very small and agile companies can work much more efficiently. But communication is a real challenge. It must be a way to solve it. Thinking about future of small and very small enterprise made me think about roots going back to the invention of the internet. Navigate to the following article – Paul Baran and the Origins of Internet. It is a fascinating reading and I highly recommend you to review it. The following visualization and passage can give you an idea how roots of the internet looked like.

At that time, RAND focused mostly on Cold War-related military issues. A looming concern was that neither the long-distance telephone plant, nor the basic military command and control network would survive a nuclear attack. Although most of the links would be undamaged, the centralized switching facilities would be destroyed by enemy weapons. Consequently, Baran conceived a system that had no centralized switches and could operate even if many of its links and switching nodes had been destroyed.

Baran envisioned a network of unmanned nodes that would act as switches, routing information from one node to another to their final destinations. The nodes would use a scheme Baran called “hot-potato routing” or distributed communications.

distributed-computation

So, the future looks very distributed. How manufacturing companies will collaborate and manage processes? The previous model of linear workflows and asynchronous collaboration is dead. Then, what is next? I want to come back to the idea and question of interactive user experience. Engineers are working in a real time and collaborating instantly on the same piece of contextual data – drawing, 3D model, bill of materials.While the idea is not very unique for consumer oriented communication software, it can be a novel for enterprise.

existing-eco-processes-are-dead

What is my conclusion? New models of collaboration between the teams can help to innovate. The communication will be the key element of future networking model. It will help to people to work simultaneously, bring information in context and generate new ideas based on ad-hoc processes. The role network is mandatory. It will facilitate future innovation. Just my thoughts..

Best, Oleg

Picture source – PI Congress, Jos Voskuil and Business Insider

Recent Posts

Also on BeyondPLM

4 6
5 October, 2011

Business Intelligence (BI) is a fascinating combination of words. Each time I hear about BI, I’m confused a bit. The...

26 May, 2010

The following request in LinkedIn On Demand Discussion Group – Can Someone Provide The List of PLM OnDemand/SaaS vendors? So I...

6 December, 2020

The discussion about single-tenant vs multi-tenant cloud PLM models is getting more interesting every day. And it is not only...

31 August, 2017

For many years, selling PLM was a fascinating adventure. Tons of stories were published about marketing and sales tactics, selling...

1 September, 2013

The core fundamental part of every PDM/PLM application is database and related data model. The history of data modeling is...

3 January, 2020

It was never a better time to be in the PLM business than today. I said it in my last...

18 June, 2010

Say “PLM” to anyone, and you hear the words “complex” and “expensive”. However, thinking about trajectories of different technologies, I...

17 May, 2019

Everyone speaks about the platforms these days. The word “platform” is overused, but all PLM vendors have started to use...

9 May, 2014

I’ve been doing data management system for the last 20 years. The one thing you learn very fast – 3D...

Blogroll

To the top