Issue in Focus: Product Data Accessibility: Getting Value from All of Your Product Data explains the importance for manufacturers to be able to access and share product data, regardless of whether it is centralized in a system like PDM or not. Explains that accessing product data and centralizing it are not absolutely linked, and describes…
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The Business Value of Product Data Management
Tech-Clarity Insight: The Business Value of Product Data Management: Achieving Rapid and Extendable Benefits explains how manufacturers use PDM to control their product data, improve their ability to find information, and better share knowledge with other departments. The report shares the experiences of three manufacturers that took a more “out of the box” approach to…
A Maturity Model for Product Data Accessibility?
What I learned as a follow up to my report on Product Data Accessibility is that there is a lot more angst about finding product data than I ever realized. I was amazed at the discussion generated by my blog post about accessing all product data regardless of how it is stored. In particular, there…
Accessing All of Your Product Data Regardless of Where and How it is Stored
A quick peek into some research on … the importance of accessing all product-related information, whether it is stored in a formal system such as Product Data Management (PDM) or not. The report, Issue in Focus: Product Data Accessibility: Getting Value from All of your Product Data, explains the importance for manufacturers to readily retrieve…
Exponential Times – What Does it Mean for Manufacturing and PLM?
What I learned this week … came from watching the Did You Know 3.0 Video and asking myself what it means to the world of manufacturing and product lifecycle management (PLM). The answer? Quite a lot. If you haven’t seen the video, it is worth 5 minutes of your time to give you an entertaining and informative look into the times we live in. The part that really caught me was that we live in “exponential times.” Things are changing rapidly in our personal and professional lives, and manufacturers need to consider the ways the world is changing in order to be relevant with the right products (and the right processes) to capitalize on the future.
One-to-One: Search is Shaping Up with ShapeSpace
I had the chance to talk with … Drew Sherlock of ShapeSpace a while back, and then had the opportunity to meet him in person at COFES. We talked about the importance of search in in engineering and product development, and how searching by shape is adding another way for companies to find (and hopefully easily reuse) parts. Search has received a lot of attention over the years – particularly as companies are trying to consolidate search across multiple data sources using enterprise search. In design and engineering, search has evolved to include parametric search (search based on attributes, typically on metadata that describes a part) to complement more basic text search techniques. But can a company have too many ways to search? Given the potential benefits of reuse – and the tendency for most people to reinvent the wheel when they can’t readily find a good starting point – I will say “not yet.”