Speed is one of the most fundamental competitive advantage these days. Companies are under continuous stress to deliver result faster. This is a time for PLM architects and developers to think about “speed” as a core competitive advantage that can help them to win over existing PLM incumbents. While setup and installation problems are gone now as a result of massive cloud invasion, implementations and UX paradigms are still the same old fashion PLM. So, how to add speed to PLM environment?
Last year, I’ve made few points whey speed matters for the future of PLM development. Check out my earlier blog – PLM: need for speed. I outline 3 needs for speed – 1/ speed of installation; 2/ Speed of implementation; 3/ speed of clicks.
Today, I want to talk about another aspect of speed – speed of real time data sharing and collaboration. My attention was caught by Onshape blog – Sharing Design Workloads on Tight Deadlines. In the CAD world, Onshape is one of the first pioneers offering real time collaboration in the design environment. The article brings an example of how many people can do work faster together by sharing your design workload with the team.
It made me think back about the concept of moving from sync to link in PLM environment. Although all PLM systems available today are database driven and most of them have some elements of web technologies allowing to use the via browsers, the reality is that sharing data and staying on the same page in PLM driven environment is extremely hard. There are many downstream scenarios purely relying on dumping data into Excel spreadsheets and PDF reports. You can see problems with data access for supply chain, contractors and partners. In some situations multiple PLM environment are in place and prevent people from collaborating and accessing the same data in the same time.
What is my conclusion? I’d like to add “need for share” as a very important PLM “need for speed” improvement. There is a tremendous demand to share data and collaborate between departments, partners, sales, contractors, suppliers and customers. All together, it brings a question how traditional PLM systems will survive in a completely different “connected” environment. Current practices of data sharing and collaboration between different environments are bizzare and sometimes can remind you the picture I put at the beginning of this blog post. There is a real need to jump from bizzare data sync between environments and systems to a new paradigm of data sharing and real time collaboration. Just my thoughts…
Best, Oleg
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Disclaimer: I’m co-founder and CEO of openBoM developing cloud based bill of materials and inventory management tool for manufacturing companies, hardware startups and supply chain. My opinion can be unintentionally biased.
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