What Would Happen If PLM Vendors Agree About Data Standards?

There is an elephant in the room – PLM vendors business models are built for data locking. You can hear vendors themselves are talking about it. Watch Aras SVP Marc Lind speaks about it here. Digital thread and digital transformation of manufacturing companies bring the question about standards (or interoperability) back on the discussion tables and whiteboards. A few weeks ago, at ConX19 in San-Diego, the discussion about standards came as a question during the vendor panel. PLM vendors sitting on the panel (Aras and Upchain) agreed about the importance of the standards, but guess what? None of the large PLM vendors were presented on the panel. Joseph Anderson of IpX promised a vendor-agnostic standard.

There is an elephant in the room – PLM vendors business models are built for data locking. You can hear vendors themselves are talking about it. Watch Aras SVP Marc Lind speaks about it here. Digital thread and digital transformation of manufacturing companies bring the question about standards (or interoperability) back on the discussion tables and whiteboards. A few weeks ago, at ConX19 in San-Diego, the discussion about standards came as a question during the vendor panel. PLM vendors sitting on the panel (Aras and Upchain) agreed about the importance of the standards, but guess what? None of the large PLM vendors were presented on the panel. Joseph Anderson of IpX promised a vendor-agnostic standard.

[Joseph Anderson] We will make it work. CM2-600 is the vendor agnostic baseline standard for PLM requirements.

This is very interesting promise, especially taking into account a conflict between having standards and PLM business models.

Let’s dream a bit. It is Sunday after all. What would happen if PLM vendors agree about standards? The interesting part that iif you speak to vendors, you will find them in agreement about the need to have a standard. Each vendor has some standard related activity and would suggest that their standards are the best fit to be used by the industry. And from that point, customers are on their own to figure out what to do. What can work differently? I can think about 3 scenarios in which vendors’ behavior would change. Before bringing these scenarios, I’d like to point on a specific standard activity not related to PLM vendors and enterprise software that can give you some idea of standards in a digital world.

The standard activity I’m talking about is called schema.org. If you’re not familiar with this initiative, please check Wikipedia article. Also, read this article – Schema.org: Evolution of Structured Data on the Web.The most interesting part of Schema.org initiative is collaboration between main search vendors – Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Yandex.

In 2011, the major search engines Bing, Google, and Yahoo (later joined by Yandex) created Schema.org to improve this situation. The goal was to provide a single schema across a wide range of topics that included people, places, events, products, offers, and so on. A single integrated schema covered these topics. The idea was to present webmasters with a single vocabulary. Different search engines might use the markup differently, but webmasters had to do the work only once and would reap the benefits across multiple consumers of the markup.

Schema.org was launched with 297 classes and 187 relations, which over the past four years have grown to 638 classes and 965 relations. The classes are organized into a hierarchy, where each class may have one or more superclasses (though most have only one). Relations are polymorphic in the sense that they have one or more domains and one or more ranges.

What is interesting is how all vendors considered that standardization and providing a tool to help webmasters is important for a better organization of data on the web. The key element of the agreement is to separate data representation standards and search engines functions. Search engines can use this data differently, but still, data can be shared by everyone.

Switching back to manufacturing and PLM vendors I can see an opportunity to consolidate between PLM vendors to create a unified open product data representation. However, to do so, companies should have incentives. Think about search engine vendors – their work wasn’t philanthropic. In manufacturing, there are several opportunities to bring common foundations. Here are few examples – (1) Large industry networks; (2) Very large OEM and its supply chains; (3) Digital transformation and new business models. It requires dedication and business innovation.

What is my conclusion? There is a need to create a data foundation that can be used by multiple PLM companies as a platform to build PLM solutions. By doing so, the industry will create a platform for better data management, while PLM vendors will improve interoperability. At the same time, it will not limit PLM vendors to innovate and build new solutions. Just my thoughts…

PS. If you’re interesting to discuss data management foundation for manufacturing companies, please send me email to oleg at beyondplm dot com.

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.