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

PLM often fails. Can we develop PLM Bible?

PLM often fails. Can we develop PLM Bible?
Oleg
Oleg
22 May, 2019 | 3 min for reading

Do you know that the Bible ranks first among literary works by a number of languages they have been translated into (3,312, at least one book)? Check here. Varying parts of the Bible are considered to be a product of divine inspiration and a record of the relationship between God and humans.

Professor John K. Riches, Professor of Divinity and Biblical Criticism at the University of Glasgow, says that “the biblical texts themselves are the result of a creative dialogue between ancient traditions and different communities through the ages”,[21] and “the biblical texts were produced over a period in which the living conditions of the writers – political, cultural, economic, and ecological – varied enormously”.

If you think about the process of biblical text development, you can see a long lifecycle process involving people, habits, procedures and many other aspects of human life.

Now let’s get back to PLM. People often coming to religion when something wrong happening in their life. Business is part of our life very often. Helena Gutiérrez of Share PLM said we need to have PLM bible.

PLM implementations often fail. Where is the problem? Why do so many companies struggle to extract value from their PLM programs? Is it because not all PDM systems are implemented flawlessly? Or is because PLM is too complex? Last week, after digesting the bad news, I asked my customer: “If you were given another chance, what would you do differently?” After a moment’s silence, he said: “I would start with a PLM Bible.”

In my experience, savvy PLM implementations have one thing in common: They ALL have consistent ways of doing things. They have a blueprint that shows users how they work with their products and data. It’s their PLM Bible.

The key phrase here is the phrase – how they work with their products and data. That’s the bible. The things are probably simple – how to operate with design structures, Bill of Materials, changes, baselines, etc.

Going back to the definition of The Bible – it is result shared between people. However… not in PLM. And Helena proved it in the following passage – You can’t be successful at PLM without your very own PLM Bible.

I was thinking for the moment, we have a chance to bring a PLM Bible everyone can agree about and follow the rules. Nope. Not in PLM. In PLM, everyone wants to have his/her own PLM Bible.

What is my conclusion? Semantic matters. The Holy Book was not simply called “Holy” by chance. It is because it contains some very fundamental things people shared. Can we do the same about PLM? I wish we could… Can we agree on some fundamental thing and share them? For example, how to define Part Number, organize data in a structure, create Bill of Materials structure, define ECO, etc. If the PLM industry can make it, we can call it PLM Bible. Otherwise, it feels like every company is developing its own Bible. My PLM, your PLM, his PLM, their PLM… Feels like PLM as a Religion (PaaR). Each one pulls his own rules. On demand. 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
14 April, 2010

A couple of weeks ago I had healthy debates about PLM and Innovation with Jim Brown of TechClarity. If you...

20 February, 2015

I’m planning to attend PI Congress event in Dusseldorf next week. As part of the preparation, I’m taking a look...

14 January, 2020

Professional life is about priorities. And sometimes, choices are very tough and you have to say no. I’ve been invited...

9 September, 2012

No, this blog post is not about Dassault 3D Experience. Even more… this post is not about PLM. Last week,...

24 September, 2010

Some time ago, one of my readers wrote me a comment with the question about Reference Designators and Find Numbers....

3 July, 2012

Social becomes a norm these days. It is interesting to see how many things surrounding us transformed and wearing “social...

19 November, 2021

Today’s manufacturing companies are facing challenges that go far beyond the typical issues of labor shortages, rising material costs, and...

26 November, 2011

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

20 May, 2009

I think language is one of the barriers for successful collaboration. Therefore, I’m really excited about a new feature in...

Blogroll

To the top