Over the weekend, I was captivated by an article by Jos Voskuil titled PLM Can Change – Waiting for the Business. Jos’s core message resonates deeply: Digital Transformation, and particularly PLM, is stagnating because businesses aren’t stepping forward with decisive plans and vision to drive transformation. According to Jos, the technology is there, but without leadership and clear execution, organizations fall behind. The result makes business processes to make slow progress towards transformation to help companies to improve effectiveness of their decision process and key performance indicators of the success in product lifecycle management, supply chain management, digital transformation efforts and eventually in production process and supply chains.
While I fully agree with Jos’ perspective on business leadership, I found the problem and more complex and business leadership alone won’t change it. The article made me think on why digital transformation remains stuck for many manufacturing businesses and engineering organizations I see around me, both small and large businesses. What forces are needed to shift the landscape. Let’s talk about it today.
Three Reasons Digital Transformation Strategy is Stuck
PLM software and PLM vendors these days are making great stories about how successful digital transformation can happen using their technologies – digital twin, digital thread, connected processes, etc. However, talking to many companies in manufacturing industry and digital transformation leaders I found a distinct three reasons that make digital transformation strategies and effort to struggle and eventually stuck . Here are these three reasons: (1) lack of strategy and vision; (2) cultural resistance and poor change management and (3) siloed data and poor integration.
Lack of Clear Strategy and Vision
Many companies embark on digital initiatives without a well-defined roadmap. They may adopt technology for the sake of it, without considering how it aligns with core business objectives. Without setting clear goals or having a vision, projects become fragmented, losing focus and ultimately failing to deliver expected outcomes.
Cultural Resistance and Poor Change Management
Digital transformation isn’t just about implementing new software; it’s about transforming how an organization operates. Employees and even management often resist this change due to fear of the unknown, lack of understanding, or insufficient training. Successful initiatives need more than just technology—they require a cultural shift supported by structured change management strategies.
Siloed Data and Poor Integration
For any digital transformation, data is key. But when data is fragmented across departments, Excels and different tools it becomes difficult to integrate new technologies into existing legacy systems. This can lead to inefficiencies, data discrepancies, and hinder the progress of transformation. Successful digital change needs a strong focus on data management and system interoperability. Although, PLM tech is accumulated a significant amount of tools, these tools are not pulling through in a way that is sufficient to break the current analog data status quo.
These challenges are only exacerbated when organizations lack executive buy-in, allocate insufficient resources, or fail to adapt to fast-evolving market conditions.
Why PLM Stagnates: Three Forces to Move Forward
Jos’s article rightfully points to the first reason—lack of clear strategy and vision. Without business incentives, management won’t act. This is a management problem that must be addressed with a well-articulated strategy linked to business factors. The second force is cultural resistance, which either needs time to dissipate as new generations enter the workforce or can be overcome through education and structured change management.
But the third force is technology. This is where current PLM technology falls short in terms of democratizing the tools and making them widely accessible. Let’s dive deeper into each of these.
1. The Strategic Force: Creating a Clear Blueprint
A PLM strategy should serve as the foundation of a company’s digital transformation. This means crafting a business blueprint that clearly defines the role of PLM within the broader company goals. The roadmap should be flexible enough to accommodate future changes, yet specific enough to guide everyday decisions.
A great example of strategic thinking comes from an earlier article by EY on digital transformation in discrete manufacturing. The report (Is Your Digital Strategy Fit for the Future?) highlights the need for businesses to rethink their operational models using data-driven, cloud-enabled platforms. Companies need to focus on customer data access and cloud manufacturing, making their value chains more transparent and responsive to the demands of a digital future. A clear strategy connects all these components into a cohesive vision that drives digital transformation forward.
2. The Cultural Force: Education and Engagement
Without shifting the company culture to embrace digital transformation, even the best strategies will fail. Education is critical. As the EY article stresses, competitive dynamics are pushing companies to rethink their digital strategies. But without teaching employees and management how new technologies will improve operations, businesses will remain stuck in the past—relying on outdated processes like files, folders, Excel, and email.
Companies should prioritize digital education, not just for their IT departments but across the entire organization. Explaining how technologies can be applied is essential, but that’s only part of the equation. The company’s culture needs to evolve, embracing flexibility and innovation at all levels. A culture that welcomes change and views technology as an enabler of progress can break through the inertia of digital stagnation.
3. The Technological Force: Accessible Tools for Everyone
Finally, technology needs to be simpler and more accessible. The B2C technologies like Google, social networks, and more recently, AI tools like ChatGPT have demonstrated that simplicity drives widespread adoption. In B2B we’ve seen a great success of data management tools such as SharePoint in the past, a very successful Sales and Marketing tools. However, many PLM systems remain overly complex and difficult to adopt.
This complexity creates a barrier. For smaller manufacturers who might not have the resources for extensive training or large-scale implementations. For larger companies, it results in end of support from management that doesn’t want to support tools for multi-year roadmaps with no clear outcome (both personally for PLM champions and for organization from ROI perspective). Tools need to be democratized, offering intuitive interfaces, low-friction adoption processes, and interoperability across systems. The absence of a “make it work” button in legacy PLM solutions means businesses spend too much time on implementation, troubleshooting, and system maintenance rather than leveraging technology to improve their operations.
Where is the “Make It Work” Button?
At the heart of this discussion is the business’s search for that elusive “make it work” button. Companies are stuck not because they lack the will to transform, but because implementing these strategies is complicated and often overwhelming. Without intuitive, integrated tools, even the best-laid plans will flounder. That’s where many manufacturing businesses—large and small—find themselves today.
The solution? PLM vendors need to focus on democratizing technology, offering simple, easy-to-implement solutions that don’t require months or even years of integration and training. The tech exists, but it needs to be more accessible and aligned with real-world business needs.
What is my conclusion?
There is a need to develop a balanced approach to digital transformation. Business alone and management won’t pull it off. And even if it does, these projects will fail and stuck between lack of clear education and old technology tools that need too much changes to happen with a slow ROI that will lead to diminished returns and lack of management continue to invest in this strtategy.
In the end, digital transformation requires a delicate balance between a clear vision, a supportive culture, and accessible technology. A strong business strategy must set the course, but without educational initiatives and technology that’s easy to adopt, that strategy will remain just a vision on paper.
The path forward for companies, especially in the manufacturing sector, lies in combining these three forces into a cohesive plan. Only then will they find the “make it work” button, allowing their digital transformations to truly take off. Just my thoughts…
Best, Oleg
Disclaimer: I’m the co-founder and CEO of OpenBOM, a digital-thread platform providing cloud-native PDM, PLM, and ERP capabilities. With extensive experience in federated CAD-PDM and PLM architecture, I’m advocates for agile, open product models and cloud technologies in manufacturing. My opinion can be unintentionally biased.
