Comments on: Redesign PLM, or Put the People in PLM?

By: PLM and Profitability » Blog Archive » What I Learned: Social Computing Drives Innovation

Tue, 18 Aug 2009 13:23:41 +0000

[...] given recent conversations about putting the people in PLM, people centric PLM, and focusing on people vs. process in PLM in the PLM blogosphere, I thought it [...]

By: Social Computing Drives Innovation | Clarity on PLM

Social Computing Drives Innovation | Clarity on PLM — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 13:20:55 +0000

[...] given recent conversations about putting the people in PLM, people centric PLM, and focusing on people vs. process in PLM in the PLM blogosphere, I thought it [...]

By: Jim Brown

Jim Brown — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 13:30:36 +0000

Jos,
Thank you for grounding the conversation with the reality from your customer experience. Most companies don’t use all of the capabilities of their PLM solutions, as you rightly point out. But from my experience companies are implementing PLM for:

a) An advantage today, typically coordinating product data to start (if they haven’t already done that).

b) Put in place a foundation to build on for tomorrow, that fulfills a much bigger purpose.

So some companies might choose a simpler solution to meet their short-term needs. But then if they want a fuller vision of PLM they need to start over. While others look at the longer term and want to set themselves on a path that can take them further into the promise of PLM. It is a very strategic decision for a company to decide between the two. Other than cost, the decision to go with a simpler tools is user adoption and speed of implementation. That is where templates, business processes, and (hopefully) composite applications that offer much simpler users interfaces can offer the best of both worlds (in my opinion).

Following the analogy I used with Oleg above, if there wasn’t a “Mac” option with simplicity and capability, should we all start using net-books because they are simpler? For some of us, yes. But for many, we really need a lot more out of our computing hardware. So the best answer for many is the PC, and we try to ignore a lot of the complexity. So who will step up and build the “Mac” of PLM?

Thanks for furthering the discussion,
Jim

By: Jim Brown

Jim Brown — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 13:22:12 +0000

Oleg,
Thanks as always for your comments. I think we are in agreement that PLM needs to be simplified, but I don’t see that in conflict with maturity. PLM is complicated because the business of product innovation, product development, and engineering is complicated. PLM maturity includes the incorporation of more people, a broader view of the product, more processes, and a larger portion of the product lifecycle. This PLM “complexity” is replacing countless other systems, documents, and spreadsheets that are running these processes. I don’t see the leading companies willing to turn back the clock and replace PLM with a less functional tool (although there are certainly places for it). What we need is the maturity of the functionality, but recast into an interface that allows them to expose/mask the functionality as they need it and present only the complexity to the user that they need. Maybe I am missing the point, but I like the graphic on your post. I would say the Mac is both a mature – and simpler – solution to computing. Isn’t that what we want from PLM?
I had trouble with your link, it looks like it included an extra character in the URL. This one works: http://plmtwine.com/2009/08/11/why-plm-scares-me/
http://plmtwine.com/2009/08/11/why-plm-scares-me/

By: Some unstructured PLM thoughts « Jos Voskuil’s Weblog

Some unstructured PLM thoughts « Jos Voskuil’s Weblog — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 22:17:31 +0000

[...] based on people, social networking and communities. Look at Vuuch and discussions on PLMTwine and Tech-Clarity. Main question here how will people change, will it be the new workforce that naturally replaces [...]

By: Jos Voskuil

Jos Voskuil — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 12:21:20 +0000

Jim, I fully agree with your statements.

Having read Chris’s blog and many of Oleg’s balloons, I understand the vision where we believe PLM should be (or could be). As most of my work is in the area of implementation and working with customers in the mid-market, I see the huge gap between the 2.0 vision – social product communities etc and the day-to-day understanding and life of people in these companies.

In one way, we dream that capturing and consolidating product knowledge will go with as little as possible effort, like we share information in emails, from the other side we demand for a complete information backbone, which is reliable and contains all information we need on demand and preferable without searching too much.

In general PLM is dealing with the same challenges as knowledge management in every company. It is easy to capture explicit knowledge stored in files, metadata, models etc. The biggest challenge is to make this knowledge accessible by others with a different culture background, interpretation of data etc.

I agree the SOA architecture allows us at the end to establish user environments which are:
- tuned to be friendly enough,
- flexible to be social.

For sure these environments will contain principles of PLM, but also other disciplines – a kind or ERPLMES system. It was one of my dreams for 2050

Best regards

Jos