One of the biggest challenges for PLM vendors is to extend their product usage beyond engineering applications. Even we can see a dramatic change in understanding of PLM values, business transformation and the need to share information beyond engineering department, for many manufacturing companies PLM is still a glorified engineering database with CAD documents, engineering BOM and ECO workflow. To expand beyond engineering was a big dream for PLM vendors for the last decade. And vendors did some development to make it happen.
Distributed data , role-based navigation, search accessing information in silos and integrate disparate data sources are top requirements to make PLM products more robust in everything that related to data management.
Recently PTC made an announcement of their new product – PTC Kinex, which is a rebranded and extended version of PTC PLM Navigate. In a nutshell, you can think about Kinex Navigate as a search-driven user interface for Windchill (and other IoT apps) developed using ThingWorx application platform. The following Engineering article gives you an idea of what is Kinex Navigate:
Kinex Navigate. The basic idea behind Navigate is to allow a company’s stakeholders to access and use product data derived from multiple other systems of record within the company, through a modern role-based interface, much like other mobile apps. Connected to PLM. The solution also includes preconfigured integration with PTC’s PLM system Windchill, which means that Windchill customers can use information from the field about a product’s functionality and performance to drive further development.
The following PTC video demo PTC Navigate.
PTC Kinex and PTC Navigate made me think about similar developed that were done by other PLM vendors Siemens PLM and Dassault Systemes. I refer to Teamcenter Active Workspace and Dassault 3DEXPERIENCE.
Teamcenter Active Workspace
In a nutshell, Active workspace is search-driven and role based navigation application developed on top of Teamcenter database. If you haven’t heard about Active Workspace, navigate to the following website to learn more.
Dassault Systemes 3DEXPERIENCE
Dassault Systemes made several acquisitions and used the technologies to develop and enhance user experience of their platform. The broad name is 3DEXPERIENCE, but you can see multiple applications behind the scene for navigating, community manage, search, dashboard and others.
What is my conclusion? PLM vendors are focusing how to make their data management platforms more robust and reliable to survive in an ocean of data coming from different applications, legacy databases, online data, connected products and other sources. Such environment is overwhelming and creates lot of challenges for all people and organizations involved into the process – users, administrators, PLM service providers and consultants. An ability to serve a diverse set of users will be one of the key challenges for PLM vendors in the next decade. 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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