I find it interesting that the demo shows primarily business aspects of the product (inventory, sales, quality, supplier, supplier specs) versus technical ones. In my ERP-PLM roles research, I have discussed ERP as “the business of manufacturing” while PLM is “Innovation” focused. This demo (to me) would suggest that any technical work that needed to be done, such as determining whether the new screen require any changes to the embedded software, impacts regulatory compliance, taxes the power supply, or changes the manufacturing processes, happens outside of this system. Where would that work be managed? Simply changing a BOM (without an engineering change request or approval process, but again I am nitpicking) is typically not the answer to a more complex problem.

I know it’s a simple demo. And it does a great job showing how business information for a product can be consolidated and viewed. But what about engineering? I know SAP has done some work there too, I was surprised not to see it.

Just my initial reactions. Thanks to Ulf for passing this along.

Jim

I think a couple of people were interested in links to more SAP PLM information.

Check out YouTube for example for a high-level demo.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=liK3nIHC6nw

Besides that, you might want to visit the SAP PLM BPX Community page, there is an overview presentation on SAP PLM 7.0 posted there:
http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/bpx/plm

Regards, Ulf.