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

What can we learn from PLM Elders?

What can we learn from PLM Elders?
Oleg
Oleg
1 September, 2019 | 2 min for reading

One of the presentations during last ConX19 event last week in San-Diego, was from Craig Brown, former PLM leader of GM, today CIMdata Executive Consultant or how he called himself during the presentation – “PLM Elder”.

I captured a few slides to share as well as wanted to share some of my thoughts after Craig Brown’s presentation. Here are the three biggest challenges of every PLM strategy and implementation – product complexity, process complexity, and organizational complexity.

How to solve the problem of complexity? You can do it with the integration of knowledge and a foundation of consistent data and change management process? The important element is capturing knowledge alongside the process.

Here is Craig Brown’s vision of PLM – Connect People, Visualize it, Apply Knowledge. All together is done across the entire lifecycle of the product from the initial concept to the maintenance and service.

From vision to execution, it comes down to 5 points – framework for successful execution.

One of my favorite slides is about how to prioritize portfolio spending. Don’t miss this slide, because losing the priority is one of the biggest problems that can happen during large PLM implementation.

Final comments from Craig Brown. Check this out.

I found one comment very interesting. Usually, large PLM implementations have a tendency to be very customized with the high demand for flexibility in everything. The point about “less customization” is something that was very interesting to hear from former GM PLM leader. I look forward to finding an opportunity to discuss it with Craig in the future.

What is my conclusion? Connect vision and execution with the right set of priorities. It is very easy to say, but very hard to do. However, my favorite things I learned are about integration of engineering systems, capturing and applying knowledge, to make PLM measurable and streamline information flows. The last two are the key in my view. There is where these recommendations are connecting to the future of digital lifecycle and the role of data flows I shared earlier. 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
8 June, 2009

We have been talking about collaboration a lot these days. I was thinking about how collaboration can happen with designers....

2 June, 2011

Cloud and Open source are two topics I’m often touching on my blog. In my view, these two trends are...

12 February, 2018

My last post about SOLIDWORKS World 2018 is about dreams. I’ve heard Bernard Charles, Dassault Systemes Vice Chairman and CEO...

22 October, 2020

Digital Twin is at the peak of inflated expectation according to ResearchGate publication and it keeps bringing topics for discussion....

4 February, 2019

Welcome to another weekly update about my BOM Musings video blog. I started this week with a video explaining when...

27 July, 2013

Web as a platform. You can hear many conversations about that nowadays. Started as cloud talks, it comes more to...

6 February, 2009

Let’s start with a strange question – how many “Ps” are there in PLM? Frankly, speaking, I don’t know. I...

25 September, 2009

The term “management” is very misused, in my view. Long time ago, somebody told me – if you don’t know...

23 March, 2019

TGIF. It is a time to think about an everlasting topic – debates about PLM complexity. I was happy to...

Blogroll

To the top