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.
#1 by Ken on August 12, 2009 - 12:09 pm
It amazes me how many people overlook Siemens PLM’s product TeamCenter Community Collaboration. It is a Sharepoint based collaboration product that has been available for several years. It appears that PTC and DS are just a little bit behind the times in regards to “People Centric PLM”.
#2 by Stan Przybylinski on August 12, 2009 - 1:15 pm
Hi Chris,
From the DS side, are you forgetting the social software features already built into V6? There is clearly a File focus there, with associated applications, data, etc.
#3 by Chris on August 12, 2009 - 9:41 pm
Ken I am shocked I missed this, as you are right and just the other day someone from Siemens told me Vuuch is a competitor due to this product. I don’t know much about the solution but I need to investigate even though I doubt we are a competitor. Ken do you see Vuuch as a competitor?
#4 by Chris on August 12, 2009 - 9:53 pm
Stan I agree V6 has some social aspects and therefore should be mentioned but it is not a new start as is Blue Kiwi or Product Point as it is the same overly structured appraoch extended and requires everything to come from one vendor which is certainly not a social media approach. I guess what needs to be explored is to evaluate and define what makes something social and if you add a buddy list or HTML documents it should be considered social. Or maybe there is no feature/function list that can be defined… Certainly if you use the market as a measure Open needs to be at the top of the list, followed by expandable via the open nature slash the ability to create a mashup http://plmtwine.com/?s=mashup.
#5 by Chris on August 13, 2009 - 4:45 am
Ken we look forward to you guys giving Vuuch a try.
#6 by Oleg Shilovitsky on August 13, 2009 - 5:22 am
Hi Chris, some additional thoughts – http://plmtwine.com/2009/08/13/plm-dont-fight-processes-focus-on-people/. I think there is cycle in business process & people. Once you start from capturing existing business processes you can get better in the future. I think this cycle broken today in many solutions and implementations. Regards, Oleg.
#7 by Tom Shoemaker on August 17, 2009 - 1:01 pm
Chris-
Regarding our (PTC’s) “file-based approach”…I’d say your commentary is partly accurate. That is, PTC’s solutions for social product development use and augment the social computing capabilities of SharePoint. In this respect, it’s fair to say that since a fundamental concept of SharePoint is file-based collaboration, then, yes, PTC’s approach takes a similar tact. However, the fact that Windchill ProductPoint can/does assist in the more fluid design stages of PD is not incompatible with the point of people-centricity. Even though the focus on **processes** may be less emphasized in these early, ideation stages, there is still often (though not always) a need to share product data. That said, it’s important that the system be able to deal with such data, which, as we all know is its own special animal — structured files with numerous interdependencies. So, even though idea management/rapid info exchange may necessarily be averse to rigid processes, often these functions still need to share and maintain the integrity of (structured) product data in order to be successful.
Phew. Long winded but I hope it made some sense.