This week is busy for me as I am finalizing several essential activities related to my favorite hobby, product lifecycle management or is it PLM😉?

And most of these activities will result in lengthy blog posts, starting with:
“The week(end) after <<fill in the event>>”.

Here are the upcoming actions:
Click on each image if you want to see the details:

In this Future of PLM Podcast series, moderated by Michael Finocciaro, we will continue the debate on how to position PLM (as a system or a strategy) and move away from an engineering framing. Personally, I never saw PLM as a system and started talking more and more about product lifecycle management (the strategy) versus PLM/PDM (the systems).

Note: the intention is to be interactive with the audience, so feel free to post questions/remarks in the comments, either upfront or during the event.

You might have seen in the past two weeks some posts and discussions I had with the Share PLM team about a unique offering we are preparing: the PLM Awareness program. From our field experience, PLM is too often treated as a technical issue, handled by a (too) small team.

We believe every PLM program should start by fostering awareness of what people can expect nowadays, given the technology, experiences, and possibilities available. If you want to work with motivated people, you have to involve them and give them all the proper understanding to start with.

Join us for the online event to understand the value and ask your questions. We are looking forward to your participation.

This is another event related to the future of PLM; however, this time it is an in-person workshop, where, inspired by four PLM thought leaders, we will discuss and work on a common understanding of what is required for a modern PLM framework. The workshop, sponsored by the Arrowhead fPVN project, will be held in Paris on November 4th, preceding the PLM Roadmap/PDT Europe conference.

We will not discuss the term PLM; we will discuss business drivers, supporting technologies and more. My role as a moderator of this event is to assist with the workshop, and I will share its findings with a broader audience that wasn’t able to attend.

Be ready to learn more in the near future!

Suppose you have followed my blog posts for the past 10 years. In that case, you know this conference is always a place to get inspired, whether by leading companies across industries or by innovative and engaging new developments. This conference has always inspired and helped me gain a better understanding of digital transformation in the PLM domain and how larger enterprises are addressing their challenges.

This time, I will conclude the conference with a lecture focusing on the challenging side of digital transformation and AI: we humans cannot transform ourselves, so we need help.

At the end of this year, we will “celebrate” our fifth anniversary of the PLM Green Global Alliance. When we started the PGGA in 2020, there was an initial focus on the impact of carbon emissions on the climate, and in the years that followed, climate disasters around the world caused serious damage to countries and people.

How could we, as a PLM community, support each other in developing and sharing best practices for innovative, lower-carbon products and processes?

In parallel, driven by regulations, there was also a need to improve current PLM practices to efficiently support ESG reporting, lifecycle analysis, and, soon, the Digital Product Passport. Regulations that push for a modern data-driven infrastructure, and we discussed this with the major PLM vendors and related software or solution partners. See our YouTube channel @PLM_Green_Global_Alliance

In this online Zoom event, we invite you to join us to discuss the topics mentioned in the announcement. Join us in this event and help us celebrate!

I am closing that week at the PTC/User Benelux event in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, with a keynote speech about digital transformation in the PLM domain. Eindhoven is the city where I grew up, completed my amateur soccer career, ran my first and only marathon, and started my career in PLM with SmarTeam. The city and location feel like home. I am looking forward to discussing and meeting with the PTC user community to learn how they experience product lifecycle management, or is it PLM😉?

With all these upcoming events, I did not have the time to focus on a new blog post; however, luckily, in the 10x PLM discussion started by Oleg Shilovitsky there was an interesting comment from Rob Ferrone related to that triggered my mind. Quote:

The big breakthrough will come from 1. advances in human-machine interface and 2. less % of work executed by human in the loop. Copy/paste, typing, voice recognition are all significant limits right now. It’s like trying to empty a bucket of water through a drinking straw. When tech becomes more intelligent and proactive then we will see at least 10x.

This remark reminded me of one of my first blog posts in 2008, when I was trying to predict what PLM would look like in 2050. I thought it is a nice moment to read it (again). Enjoy!

PLM in 2050

As the year ends, I decided to take my crystal ball to see what would happen with PLM in the future. It felt like a virtual experience, and this is what I saw:

• Data is no longer replicated – every piece of information will have a Universal Unique ID, also known as a UUID. In 2020, this initiative became mature, thanks to the merger of some big PLM and ERP vendors, who brought this initiative to reality. This initiative dramatically reduced exchange costs in supply chains and led to bankruptcy for many companies that provided translation and exchange software.
• Companies store their data in ‘the cloud’ based on the concept outlined above. Only some old-fashioned companies still handle their own data storage and exchange, as they fear someone will access their data. Analysts compare this behavior with the situation in the year 1950, when people kept their money under a mattress, not trusting banks (and they were not always wrong)
• After 3D, a complete virtual world based on holography became the next step in product development and understanding. Thanks to the revolutionary quantum-3D technology, this concept could even be applied to life sciences. Before ordering a product, customers could first experience and describe their needs in a virtual environment.
• Finally, the cumbersome keyboard and mouse were replaced by voice and eye recognition. Initially, voice recognition
  
  and eye tracking were cumbersome. Information was captured by talking to the system and by recording eye movements during hologram analysis. This made the life of engineers so much easier, as while researching and talking, their knowledge was stored and tagged for reuse. No need for designers to send old-fashioned emails or type their design decisions for future reuse
• Due to the hologram technology, the world became greener. People did not need to travel around the world, and the standard became virtual meetings with global teams(airlines discontinued business class). Even holidays can be experienced in the virtual world thanks to a Dutch initiative inspired by coffee. The whole IT infrastructure was powered by efficient solar energy, drastically reducing the amount of carbon dioxide.
• Then, with a shock, I noticed PLM no longer existed. Companies were focusing on their core business processes. Systems/terms like PLM, ERP, and CRM no longer existed. Some older people still remembered the battle between those systems over data ownership and the political discomfort this caused within companies.
• As people were working so efficiently, there was no need to work all week. There were community time slots when everyone was active, but 50 per cent of the time, people had time to recreate (to re-create or recreate was the question). Some older French and German designers remembered the days when they had only 10 weeks holiday per year, unimaginable nowadays.

As we still have more than 40 years to reach this future, I wish you all a successful and excellent 2009.

I am looking forward to being part of the green future next year.