I had the chance to talk with … Dassault Systemes CEO Bernard Charles and his team at Dassault’s 2009 customer conference today. I attended the general sessions in the morning and then spent some time speaking with DS execs in a smaller group setting. Once again, Bernard and the team painted a very different picture of PLM than some might have in mind. Dassault does PLM, but the vision does not stop there. It doesn’t matter if you call it PLM 2.0 (as Dassault does) or put some other label on it – DS has a very unique view on what the future will look like. And they have plans to play a broader role than CAD, CAE or product design.
Product Development
People Tagging in Product Development
What I learned this week … was sparked by some recent social networking announcements on people tagging. The most recent was that Facebook plans to offer tagging very similar to what Twitter offers. This follows other announcements around geo-tagging, but I am really most interested in how tagging people can help in product development (and overall in product innovation).
Mining Social Network Emotions and Opinions for Product Development
What I learned this week …came from an article in The New York Times by Alex Wright. The article, Mining the Web for Feelings not Facts, was a great look into a concept that is new to me, an emerging field called “sentiment analysis.” The article defines sentiment analysis as “translating the vagaries of human emotion into hard data.” The examples show companies using data analysis techniques to gain insight into what social media (such as social networks and blogs) are saying about their company. My thoughts immediately turned to the value this information would have to product developers to understand how customers feel about their products, and what a great tool this could be in the social computing toolkit for PLM.
Redesign PLM, or Put the People in PLM?
What I learned this week … is based on a post in Vuuch Voice. The post, People Centric PLM – A New PLM Age Is Born, really made me think. I don’t know where Chris Williams got the picture, but I don’t think it looks like him at all. Well, maybe a little. After recovering from the shock of the picture, I really started thinking about whether social computing in PLM requires a reinvention of PLM, or whether we are talking about augmenting the capabilities that PLM already provides?
Should You “Exnovate” your Product Portfolio?
What I learned this week … came from a blog entry by Paul Hobcraft on Innovation Tools asking “What is ‘exnovation’ and where does it fit in the innovatin life cycle?” I found “exnovation” an intriguing term and an interesting concept. And then, as usual, I tried to think about how manufacturers could apply it to their product lifecycles to enhance product profitability.
Why is Implementing PLM Hard?
What I learned this week … is that there are still some technical challenges that make implementing PLM challenging, but that is not what this post is about. The technical challenges include customization, data migration, and integration among others. See Oleg’s post on the “3 main factors of mainstream PLM adoption” for more detail on each of these, and his views on why these three factors impact the adoption rate of PLM. I accept Oleg’s premise on these factors (although we will likely continue to debate the relative priority of ERP integration) from a technical perspective. But I think any technical conversation about PLM implementation has to be complemented with a view on why PLM is really hard – you have to change the way people work in order to improve your product development performance and your product profitability.