In-Person CIMdata’s 2022 PLM Market & Industry Forum Is Cleared For Takeoff

Dear friends, I’m super excited. Later this week, I will be attending the first in-person PLM event for a little bit more than two years. The previous event I attended was Dassault Systemes 3DEXPERIENCE World 2020. The topic back in 2020 was the role of a “platform” in digital transformation. So many things happened during that time. COVID became the most disruptive digital transformation force bringing everyone to the understanding of how cloud technologies are going to help us to work remotely and change the way data is managed and introduce a “new normal” in communication and collaborations.

What is on the agenda?

CIMdata forum is a combination of traditional topics and other research agendas. The forum will present the State of PLM economy presentation by Peter Bilello, CIMdata president. A traditional topic for the CIMdata Industry forum is to hear about the CIMdata PLM industry review for  2021 that traditionally will be presented by Stan Przybylinski, Vice President, CIMdata

Sustainability, but not only…

The main topic on the forum’s agenda is sustainability. Here is a snippet from the CIMdata website.

Sustainability has gone from one of many topics in CSR programs to a global imperative. Combustion and release of greenhouse gases have raised global CO2 levels, and recent commitments to reduce them will fall short of the mark. Ever-growing floating islands of plastic bottles and other waste clog shipping lanes worldwide, slowly degrading into microplastics that are ever-present in our water and, increasingly, air. Much of this degradation results from product creation, logistics, use, and disposal. Thus, PLM is essential to a systemic response. Leading PLM software and service providers are defining the needed metrics, measurement approaches, and enabling technology for their industrial clients. Those clients are pushing toward the “triple bottom line,” assessing CSR efforts based on impacts on people, the planet, and profit. In this Forum, CIMdata will highlight the overall issue and focus on how the global PLM Economy is responding and how well their industrial clients are achieving their sustainability objectives.

Multi-View BOM and Enterprise Architecture

Two additional topics are my favorite on the agenda of the forum. One of them is – The Multi-View BOM potential. Here is a snippet of the topic:

In the Multi-view BOM Approach, a consolidated information resource contains all the information and maintains all the relationships between data elements that are needed to support the perspectives of multiple communities, such as Product, Manufacturing and Service Engineering. The promise of this approach is automated reconciliation and synchronization across domain views that can be created and managed with optimal autonomy. Based on CIMdata’s research and industrial consulting activities in the last five years, commercial PLM solutions have advanced to enable this approach. In response, leaders in many industries are starting to implement multi-view BOM solutions. This presentation will describe several case studies and the expected business value identified by those making these investments.

I had a chance to share my perspective on the topic in several Beyond PLM and OpenBOM blog articles.

BOM Management: Single-BOM, Multi-BOM, Multi-View BOM. How to decide?

How to implement Multi-View BOM strategy

OpenBOM multi-view BOM

The topic of enterprise architecture is also very interesting as it will touch on the transformation of enterprise PLM systems and CIMdata is about to provide some enterprise architecture guidance:

As a strategic business objective, PLM isn’t implemented as a single IT system, but rather a set of solutions that enable a wide range of capabilities that must work together, as well as with a host of related enterprise applications. Getting the resulting enterprise application wrong, not only costs money, but potentially sub optimizes PLM’s impact, as well as the impact of other application areas. To guard against this, and to support the development of sound and comprehensive enterprise architectures, CIMdata created and rolled out its Enterprise Application Architecture framework. This presentation will provide a short update on the framework’s definition, how it helps assess current application environments, define of PLM roadmaps, and guide implementations. CIMdata created and rolled out its Enterprise Application Architecture framework. This presentation will provide a short update on the framework’s definition, how it helps assess current application environments, define PLM roadmaps, and guide implementations.

Conclusion

Super-excited about in-person meetings coming back. Although we learned how to successfully organize our work remotely, there is nothing that can replace in-person meetings and conversations that were so much missed over the last 2 years. It would be interesting to compare two very important years 2020 and 2021 PLM industry results and see what the trajectory of future PLM development goes. Stay tuned to my reports.  Platforms, complex data such as multi-view BOMs and sustainability are three strategic topics you don’t want to miss moving forward into 2022. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

Disclaimer: I’m co-founder and CEO of OpenBOM developing a digital cloud-native PLM platform that manages product data and connects manufacturers, construction companies, and their supply chain networks. My opinion can be unintentionally biased.