Why PLM 2.0 ? : part 1 What is PLM 2.0 ?

 Recently I have been reading various interesting articles, it started with Why Amazon can’t Make a Kindle in the USA from Steve Denning and from here I followed several interesting links.

Most of the articles were business driven and not with a focus on technology. However what caught my attention was the similarity of issues that were raised in these articles as-if it was about PLM.

At the end it is a plea/cry for change to be more competitive in the future. With the current economical stand still, I believe there is a need and an opportunity for this change also in PLM. I am not pointing to regime changes all around the world, but somehow they are all connected to this new wave of globalization and openness to information.

And as my domain is PLM, I took PLM 2.0 as the vehicle to describe the change currently in the PLM world. Although PLM 2.0 is a term invented by Dassault Systems, I will use it as the placeholder to describe the changes in PLM.

In four posts I will guide you in the upcoming weeks through the thought process:

I hope you will stay with me when going through these four steps and look forward to your immediate feedback.

What is PLM 2.0 ?

In 2006 Dassault Systems announced PLM 2.0 as the new generation of PLM implemented on their V6 platform. If you go to the 3DS website you see the following definition of PLM 2.0
Look for the header PLM 2.0: PLM Online for All

In the DS definition you will find several keywords that will help us further to understand the PLM 2.0 capabilities:

a typical Dassault Systems viewpoint, as they are coming from the world or 3D CAD and virtualization and the company’s vision is around lifelike – and life is mostly in 3D.
3D as interface towards all product related information is a paradigm shift for companies that were used to display only metadata on boring tabular screens where you navigate on numbers and text. The other major CAD-related PLM vendors of course could follow this paradigm too, as 3D visualization of information is known to them. However when coming from an ERP-based PLM system you will see 3D is something far out of reach for these vendors (at this moment).

This is what I believe is a crucial keyword for all PLM future implementations it builds upon the Business Information concepts that became in fashion 8 years ago. Online means direct access to the actual data. No information conversion, no need for import or export, but sharing and filtering. What you are allowed to see is actual data and an actual status. Imagine what kind of impact working on-line would have on your organization. Evaluation of trends, Key Performance Indicators directly available – still of course the interpretation to be done by experts.

Intellectual Property – a topic that should be on every company’s agenda. The reason a company currently exists and will exist in the future is based on how they manage their unique knowledge. This knowledge can be based on how certain processes are done, which components are chosen, which quality steps are critical and more. Working in a global collaboration environment challenges the company to keep their IP hidden for others, for sure when you talk about online data. Losing your IP means for a company to be vulnerable for the future – read in the referenced blog post from Steve Jennings about DELL.

This is currently the platform for change as technologies are now enabling people and companies to implement applications in a different manner. Not only on premises, but it could be online, Software As A Service, Cloud based solutions and through standardized programming interfaces, companies could implement end-to-end business process without a huge, monolithic impact. Also Web 2.0 provides the platform for communities.

The concept of communities opens new perspectives for collaboration. In general people in a community, have a common interest or task, and they share thoughts, deliverables back to the community across all company borders. This is the power of the community and the collective intelligence built inside such a community. Without company borders it should give the people a better perspective on their market on their business due to the global participation

The vision is there – now ….

All the above keywords are capabilities for the future and in the world of PLM you see that every PLM vendor / implementer is struggling with them. How to implement them consistently across their offering is the major challenge for the upcoming years, assuming PLM 2.0 is considered as the next step.

If you look at the PLM vendors beside Dassault Systems, you see that Siemens and PTC are closest to following the PLM 2.0 approach, without mentioning the term PLM 2.0. Other vendors even refuse to talk about PLM, but they share already similar components, for example Autodesk.

Interesting to see that the ERP-based PLM vendors do not follow this trend in their communication, they are still working on consolidating and completing their ‘classical’ PLM components

But the classical PLM vendors struggle with the change in paradigm too.

• What to do with current, huge and structured implementations ?
• Is PLM 2.0 having the same demands or can it be different ?

Here you see opportunities for new comers in this market as you can implement online collaboration, intellectual property creation/handling and communities in different manners with different types of implementation demands.

So far my introduction in PLM 2.0. Browsing on the web, I did not find too much other viewpoints on this specific terminology, so I am curious about your thoughts or and complementary comments on this topic.

In my next post I will zoom in into the challenges of PLM and relate them to the PLM 2.0 vision

My take on PLM (classical) and PLM 2.0

Referenced in this context – not directly mentioned:

• IBM visionary presentation from 2006 – Michael Neukirchen
• The future of PLM – Martin Ohly (global PLM blog)
• PLM 2.0 technology or facelift – Oleg Shilovitsky
• Social Media and PLM explained for Dummies – Jos Voskuil
• Going Social With Product Development – Jim Brown