PLM systems have been touted as the next generation of product development technology for just about 10 years! WOW!!! It is hard to believe it has actually been this long, time flies when your having fun… Massive amounts of spending and value has been created through the advent and installation of PLM, but are we done? No we are not, cycle times must be faster, designs must now be green and quality is expected. The battle for time to market continues. PLM and CAD have both done tons to shortened the development cycle. CAD makes a designer more effective and PLM makes release more effective. While I have not fully qualified this I think that prior advances in CAD happened about every 10 years. Pro/ENGINEER had about a 10 year run before the slump and if I am right this was about the same for the prior CAD systems. So what does that say for SolidWorks which is somewhat over 10 years old and what about PLM being 10 years long in the tooth?

I will borrow Oleg’s simplification position and simplify the development process into three simple states – Design, Release and Manufacture. Both the Release and Manufacture stages can be defined as stages that require a rigid and controlled approach, while the Design stage is defined by terms like uncontrolled, discovery, trade-off and innovation. Another way to characterize these is to say Release and Manufacture is about controlling the result or finished entities of the product and how they are combined while the Design process is about people and how they come together to determine what should be the finished target. This position or characterization is confirmed by the actions of at least two of the BIG PLM vendors, PTC and DS. PTC has determined people need a new system during the Design process and has released Windchill Product Point and DS has invested millions into the French start-up Blue Kiwi. Both target people but have nothing in common. Both PTC and DS have taken people centric PLM action but it is very interesting to see that they are both headed in different directions. Product point starts from File based PLM and adds people based features by adopting them from MS Sharepoint and DS completely ignores the notion that there are Files and has focused on People and Profiles. Same target different approaches.

So is Design server by File based PLM tools or does Design require a new People Centric PLM Solution.

What is more important People centric or Process centric?  And are these mutually exclusive?  Certainly people need to be involved in a Process but what they do and how/when they interact is scripted and for this reason a Process is not People centric.  Current day PLM tools are Process centric and therefore have limited the value that can be realized by any one person.  The Process centric approach has also limited the ability of PLM to move up stream in the design process (PLM is used in the last 10% of the development process and therefore there is a market opportunity defined by the remaining 90%).  If you simplify the development process into three segments – Design, Release and Manufacture you can say Design is People centric with Release and Manufacture being very Process centric.  Can a People centric solution be Process centric and can a Process centric tool be People centric?  Could we imagine deep in the labs of Twitter there is a group of people building a workflow add-in?  And what about Facebook, will we have workflow engines and configurators that we use to manage our friends?  Imagine a Facebook application that allows you to maintain people you dislike and if any of your friends friend one of your dislikes then they are defriended (actually not a bad idea!).  The new marketing platform of Social Product Development or Socially enabled PLM is tearing at the debate of People versus Process. 

People centric solutions improve our ability to connect and communicate to others within a “Context” that is interesting or important to us.  People centric must be evaluated from two fronts, first expansion of the people we might want to connect with (Discovery) and second improved connection (Communication).  With respect to time-to-market I struggle to see the value of Discovery.I know who is on my team and how they contribute – Do I or will I really be able to Discover people in my organization that will provide value to what I am doing?  On the flip side time-to-market can be improved through improved Communication - Keeping people on the same page is the number one issue or pain point within a product development project!  Sit in any team meeting and you will hear “I wish I knew you had done that” or some variation on this sentence.  There is just so much going on… and everything is so interconnected…  Parametric, Feature based and Associative CAD improved time-to-market by improving the way change is distributed across the geometric dimension of the product.  In its essence it reduced the need to communicate or automated the communication.

While it might never be clear what came first, it is clear that the egg is Process centric and the chicken is akin to People centric.  Like herding kittens, have you ever tried to force a chicken into a Process?  The only thing you have going for you is the herd mentality of a chicken or the fact the chicken will act stupidly (stupidly is now a learning phrase)… Like people the chicken is not interested in Process.  People like chickens do not want to become a cog in a machine, they want to think and act versus being scripted.  Going back to Design, Release and Manufacture I would challenge the objective of Release and Manufacture is to script these and the objective of design is to act and think.  So can a system that forces you into a script also be a system that improves your ability to think, act and communicate and hence your improve your time-to-market?

Oleg touched on a subject that seemed to strike at the hart – he questioned the value and opportunity for PLM to be “Open Sourced“.  After re reading the post and all the comments I was struck by the fact that NO ONE asked the question or re phrased the question relative to the PLM companies and current solutions just becoming more open.  All the obvious items were discussed, it could reduce sales cost (which I doubt), anyone could contribute, solution cost would be less and the ROI would be better.  What I see missing in all this is the simple fact that that the customer would get more value out of current solutions if they were actaully open!  I know everyone will say the current tools are open, but they would be answering from a technology point of view not an agreement point of view.  Certainly if you are allowed to get a “license” then you could develop something or customize the current PLM tools.  But the process to become licensed could not be an more CLOSED if you put a committee to work with this as their objective.  A big part of the value of open source has to do with the fact that I do not need to ask you to modify or customize your code.  I am OPEN to do it, when I want and to the extent that I want!  The simple idea of allowing people access to your APIs will have a major impact on PLM success.  Therefore I think the question needs to be re stated as “Is there a value in PLM being open” and drop the idea that PLM needs to be open source.  PLM can not be open sourced!  The PLM market is just to small for an open source approach… there are not armies of people who will care to contribute… 

But imagine if PLM did become open, it would align with newest PLM marketing platform Social Media, or in the case of PTC Social Product Development.  If something is social is it open?  In order to be social does the solution need to be open?  What do people think – does a solution need to be open to be social?  Another aspect of social and something Oleg has written about multiple times is the fact that social solutions or WEB 2.0 solutions are mashable.  So again can a solution be considered social if it cannot be mashed? 

To think about this from another aspect look at the social media solutions that have become market worthy!  If you take a the cream of these off the top and look at the twinkle we call twitter, facebook and myspace you see that none of these are open source, but they are all OPEN!  And each has an open source competitive version that struggles to be successful…  I would conclude that open source is not the right question and that by dropping source from the question and focusing on open you are then on the right track.