I have been a regular reader of your blog for some time now and am intrigued by your view of the PLM industry.

Ranjana’s view is quite interesting, and probably more mainstream, and obviously contrary to the view offered by the major PLM providers today. Most PLM systems I know seem to bring a specific process definition to the customer (not necessarily optimized for their industry) and hope to map the customer’s process to that. This “PLM implementation”, always done with minimal strategizing and insight into the customer’s business and by professional consultants, is fraught with problems. The customer is not fully aware of the PLM system’s capability and the implemetor is not completely educated on the nuances of the customer’s processes – almost like two ships passing each other at sea. The implementation result frequently seems to be a combination of workarounds, patchwork, exact and approximate mappings. One could even argue that such a system could lower the productivity of an average customer.

Perhaps the current architectures of PLM systems are simply inadequate for capturing & encoding the unique processes (except for a small common set) in most customers. The common set I refer to happens to be the ‘PDM’ portion of PLM. And maybe the customers are throwing good money after bad in attempting to “implement” the PLM system, while continually discovering new impediments that forces them to rethink their own processes to meet the PLM system’s restrictive frameworks, and never really reaching the ‘end of the road’.

Otherwise, I cant see how most consumers seem to be consistently talking about huge amounts of resources spent on and the inordinate delays in their PLM implementation, while also being unhappy about the end result.

Regards

Kumar

Kumar hi,

Jos

PLM implementations (service providers and stakeholders) require a specific approach to make organisations adapt the PLM processes, since PLM processes are not visibly similar to practical processes. An effort is requried to map practical processes to PLM processes. Or alternativel PLM vendors should provide processes similar to practical processes for specific domains.

Also, it very important that PLM be viewed with repsect to the domain it is being implemented. PLM solutions for large and multidisciplinary organisations are way far off from being realistic.

Thanks Ranjana – i think we are fully aligned – i believe PLM vendors sometimes build their tools too generic to cover as many industries (i had this discussion in the past many times with the SmarTeam R&D), where as a customer you would like to have the PLM work oriented to your industry (including optimized handling / gui)

Jos

I need your help in my study M.TECH. in Product Lifecycle Management
(PLM). As this course is been launched first time in India, we were not able to get exact documentations or study material of PLM. May be these data is available with PLM Companies but these are SECURED.

If you do have any kind of study material, can you share with me on the email pmsagare@yahoo.co.in That will be my pleasure.

I am trying to go in deep of any of the topics below

1. Work as an Administrator
2. Decide Software development Architecture
3. Implementation of PLM in an industry (decide criterias)
4. Customize the available software

with discussions with many people, they want me to go for either of the two
1. Implementation of PLM in an industry
2. Customize the software

Again, customization needs seperate and core and special knowledge of Programming, as I am basically a Mechanical Engineer working with CAD/CAE, I hope will take more time… and I may go away from my basic stream. So I may decide
IMPLEMENTATION of PLM Criterias and Techniques

Your suggestions please.

Thank you.

Prashant hi, as mentioned in my email, an excellent overview can be found on http://www.global-plm.com success

Designing the software to
1. Manage the CAD/CAM/CAE/CFD Data
2. Human Resource Department
3. Finance Department
4. Marketing Department
5. Supply Chain Management (may come under Marketing)
6. Customer Relation Management (may come under Marketing)

Can be done seperately.

The available tools like e-mail can also be used to DATA TRANSFER using LIGHT WEIGHT DATA FILE FORMATS to be used.

Only the thing is DATA SECURITY.
That only we have to manage. And depends on PERSON who is going to be an ADMINISTRATOR.

Hope is one solution. Because I am a Student only.

Thank you.

Prashant M. Sagare
M.Tech. PLM
Latur
Maharashtra State, India

pmsagare@yahoo.co.in

Dear Prashant, thanks for your reaction and I am happy to see your optimistic view – I also believed things were very easy to identify. What I learned in reallity is that PLM is not a departemental solution, it requires a different way of working for all departments, different responsibillities and different mandates. These changes and a lot of details that destory the ideal PLM picture are the challenges a PLM implementer is facing

Jos