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

Future of PLM beyond complex answers from nostalgic PDM experts

Future of PLM beyond complex answers from nostalgic PDM experts
Oleg
Oleg
10 January, 2019 | 2 min for reading

PLM was started few decades ago and it looks like coming to some sort of mid-life crisis. I can see it by an increased number of questions about PLM challenges, accumulated problems, regrets about past projects and challenges in existing implementation.

There is growing number of questions about  ability of organizations “to sell” PLM acronym in current state of business in manufacturing companies. I recommend you to listen to Peter Bilello of CIMdata. The following video was published by Plm.tv recently and raised a good number of comments and questions on LinkedIn. Check it out here.

 

My two favorite pictures related to status quo in PLM business are coming from these two articles PLM is not simple by Jos Voskuil and What PLM identify crisis by Lionel Grealou.

There are few important points mentioned in the image below. PLM is mostly used by engineering teams and has many challenge to grow beyond that point. Sold by vendors and VARs, implemented by special PLM IT organizations. What is missed in this picture is clearly beneficiaries of PLM implementations.

Jos Voskuil’s article is stressing the focus on challenges related to organizational transformation and, in that context, alerting us that simple approaches might not work.

Videos, pictures and articles made me come back and think again about the question if we can still sell PLM acronym. Here is the thing… The ideas of PLM are really good. Companies that found how to sell PLM are in huge business advantages these days. But, PLM industry should change its perspective on complexity. Traditional PLM approach – complexity is the reality of transformation and… PLM. Thinking beyond traditional PLM  – complexity is a challenge. To solve this challenge PLM industry should embrace sophistication and simplicity. Combined together they can move PLM forward and bring PLM technologies and products to a new place.

What is my conclusion? Can you sell PLM paradigm? Yes… this is what company are selling today. The buzzwords and trends are changing, but the idea of product lifecycle is fundamentally right idea. However the challenge is to make it simple and sophisticated at the same time. Whoever will figure out this formula will be the next PLM leader. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

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

Recent Posts

Also on BeyondPLM

4 6
4 October, 2012

During the last two days I attended Autodesk University Russia in Moscow (AU.RU). This year event got a status of...

2 September, 2016

For the last decade Product Lifecycle Management became of the important backbones manufacturing company is using to organize data about...

20 July, 2016

Nobody is surprised by the amount of distributed work we do these days. The time when designers, engineers and manufacturing...

10 December, 2014

Cloud PLM adoption is growing. More PLM vendors these days are re-branding and re-building  product and software architecture to keep...

7 June, 2010

I’m continuing with my top 5 posts on PLM Think Tank. Do you think PLM is a trending word on...

26 November, 2011

I’m coming to AU 2011 this year. As you already know, Autodesk is planning to unveil their PLM story. In...

23 October, 2011

I want to talk about an interesting segment of cloud technologies – cloud SQL Database. For the last months, I’ve...

22 June, 2009

Short note this morning. I was impressed to see Google Labs product – Google Fusion Tables. This is Google’s experimental...

23 October, 2015

Workflow management is boring. And complicated. I know many people that literally hate workflows. Unfortunately, enterprise software is fully hooked on process management...

Blogroll

To the top