SaaS PLM, Product Data and Enterprise Data Analytics

The role and importance of data are growing in modern manufacturing companies. Organizations are using data for insight and decision making. It is not a new thing and organizations did for many years. So, called data warehousing mechanism defined as enterprise-level ETL – platform to extract, transform, and load data in the data warehouses capable storages in a structured manner and usually also pre-aggregated for specific decision tasks. There is a lot of work that needs to be done – get the data, clean, structure, and run the queries. Organizations are using the data and the importance of the data is growing.

Organizations are facing many problems related to data management and intelligence. Here are some aspects of data management that make intelligence and decision support complex

Data volume – the data size is growing, which makes very complex to handle. The data lives in different places and data scale is just skyrocketing. IT is bringing new storage and new capacities, but it feels like always too late and not enough.

Data diversity – modern products are diverse and include a variety of product and business data combined together. Structure, unstructured, multi-disciplinary data, customer data, data from machines, and IoT.

Data velocity – data is not static and changing very fast. Data is capturing in real-time, demand to delivery analytics in real-time and for specific customer situations.

The problems I described are not new, but some of them are getting new faces. In traditional organizations, companies where running ETLs to extract data from transnational databases and turn them in business reports.

The new thing is around cloud (SaaS) platforms. These systems are replacing or complement existing transaction systems. But these systems are not the only source of data, but also a source of new analytics. A completely new source of intelligence created by novel multi-tenant SaaS platforms is becoming only possible because of the nature of these systems. The intelligence provided by these platforms is extremely valuable and not limited to specific data extracted from these systems.

What is my conclusion? Network multi-tenant SaaS platforms are not only a source of information that needs to be consumed by enterprise ETLs and placed in warehouse systems, but these new platforms also provide a new source of analytics and intelligence that needs to be consumed differently in the company The decision support provided by new multi-tenant SaaS platforms can change the way traditional enterprise analytics systems are operating today and bring a new dimension in how data is consumed by organizations and used for decision making. Organizations capable to use modern SaaS platforms will get access to a new level of intelligence, which will help to outcompete traditional PLM and other data providers. 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.