PLMx Chicago – Killing PLM, Factory as Social Network and PLM Police

We have an independent PLM event, the PLM Road Map series.

Killing acronyms is hard. You need to have something to replace it with. In my talk about Industry 4.0 at our PLM Market & Industry Forum workshops series in the spring I used a figure from a previous “PLM replacement” discussion around platforms and platformization. We talked about three levels: the product innovation platform, an alternative positioning that some of the solution providers have adopted.

This is subsumed under a broader “innovation platform” that is more about organizational and strategic innovation. This is important for broader digitalization initiatives which requires changes throughout the organization.

This all is subsumed under the broadest category “business platforms”. This level is necessary for Industry 4.0 because one of the elements of the vision is being able to dynamically configure global value chains with “App store simplicity.” Many of the leading PLM solution providers are working in this area: SAP with Ariba, Infor with GT Nexus, Dassault Systemes with their Marketplace, etc.

The other part of the Forum presentation, and others I have given at events in 2018, is that if you are product company and are pursuing a digitalization strategy then your PLM “game” must be on point, to use some current lingo. Whether you call it PLM or something else you need to manage the digital thread to help animate digital twins across the lifecycle to help you reach your digitalization/Industry 4.0 objectives.

Stan Przybylinski
Vice President
CIMdata, Inc.

I caught this one a bit late , but was fascinated to learn about Hackrod. As you know I have a background in CAD and PLM and more recently I got into AR and VR developing in unity and our own game engine. The more I used game engines the more I realised they are a critical component of the digital twin. They add interaction and simulation to the otherwise dead CAD data, and bridge the gap into operation. As far as I know nobody is looking at Game engine work flow and PLM in conjunction but I sure will be now…!

Unity (with pixyz) are just catching up with unreal here , who have been looking at the Content creation tools to game engine workflow for a while with their data smith product. As a PLMer I really don’t like that both are doing a copy with reference to get the models and data into the game engine, as this makes keeping the digital twin in sync an addtioanal challenge. Boeing have extra middleware just to ensure the AR applications they deploy are based on configured models for example. When I was working on the pipeline fromCAD to game engine we did a direct referencing into the CAD database to read the geometry I the game engine,i.e. No copies! That approach does have limitations but for design review type activities (in VR) it kept the master model intact.