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Meanwhile, two weeks of a partial lockdown have passed here in the Netherlands, and we have at least another 3 weeks to go according to the Dutch government. The good thing in our country, decisions, and measures are made based on the advice of experts as we cannot rely on politicians as experts.
I realize that despite the discomfort for me, for many other people in other countries, it is a tragedy. My mental support to all of you, wherever you are.
So what has happened since Time to Think (and act differently)?
All Hands On Deck
In the past two weeks, it has become clear that a global pandemic as this one requires an “All Hands On Deck” mentality to support the need for medical supplies and in particular respiration devices, so-called ventilators. Devices needed to save the lives of profoundly affected people. I have great respect for the “hands” that are doing the work in infectious environments.
Due to time pressure, innovative thinking is required to reach quick results in many countries. Companies and governmental organizations have created consortia to address the urgent need for ventilators. You will not see so much PR from these consortia as they are too busy doing the real work.
Still, you see from many of the commercial participants their marketing messages, why, and how they contribute to these activities.
One of the most promoted capabilities is PLM collaboration on the cloud as there is a need for real-time collaboration between people that are under lockdown. They have no time setting-up environments and learning new tools to use for collaboration.
For me, these are grand experiments, can a group of almost untrained people corporate fast in a new environment.
For sure, offering free cloud software, PLM, online CAD or 3D Printing, seems like a positive and compassionate gesture from these vendors. However, this is precisely the wrong perception in our PLM-world – the difficulty with PLM does not lie necessary in the tools.
It is about learning to collaborate outside your silo.
Instead of “wait till I am done” it should become “this is what I have so far – use it for your progress”. This is a behavior change.
Do we have time for behavioral changes at this moment? Time will tell if the myth will become a reality so fast.
A lot of thinking
The past two weeks were weeks of thinking and talking a lot with PLM-interested persons along the globe using virtual meetings.
As long as the lockdowns will be there I keep on offering free of charge PLM coaching for individuals who want to understand the future of PLM.
Through all these calls, I really became THE VirtualDutchman in many of these meetings (thanks Jagan for the awareness).
I realized that there is a lot of value in virtual meetings, in particular with the video option on. Although I believe video works well when you had met before as most of my current meetings were with people, I have met before face-to-face. Hence, you know each other facial expressions already.
I am a big fan of face-to-face meetings as I learned in the past 20 years that despite all the technology and methodology issues, the human factor is essential. We are not rational people; we live and decide by emotions.
Still, I conclude that in the future, I could do with less travel, as I see the benefits from current virtual meetings.
Less face-to-face meetings will help me to work on a more sustainable future as I am aware of the impact flying has on the environment. Also, talking with other people, there is the notion that after the lockdowns, virtual conferencing might become more and more a best practice. Good for the climate, the environment, and time savings – bad for traditional industries like aircraft carriers, taxis, and hotels. I will not say 100 % goodbye but reduce.
A Virtual PLM conference!
I was extremely excited to participate in the upcoming PLM Innovation Forum (PLMIF) starting on April 28th, organized by TECHNIA. I have been visiting the event in the past a few times in Stockholm. It was a great place to meet many of the people from my network.
This time I am even more excited as the upcoming PLMIF will be a VIRTUAL conference with all the aspects of a real conference – read more about the conference here.
There will be an auditorium where lectures will be given, there are virtual booths, and it will be a place to network virtually. In my next post, I hope to zoom in on the conference.
Sustainability, a circular economy, and modern PLM should go together. Since 2014, these topics have been on the agenda of the joint CIMdata Roadmap/PDT conferences. Speakers like Amir Rashid KTH Sweden, Ken Webster Ellen MacArthur Foundation, and many others have been talking about the circular economy.
The Scandinavian mindset for an inclusive society for people and the environment for sure, has influenced the agenda. The links above lead to some better understanding of what is meant by a circular economy and a sustainable future, as also the short YouTube movie below:
The circular economy is crucial for a sustainable future. Therefore, I am looking forward to participating in the upcoming PLM Innovation Forum on April 28th, where it will be all about digitalization for sustainable product development and manufacturing. Hopefully, with the right balance towards the WHY-side of our brain, not so much about WHAT.
You are welcomed to register for free here: the virtual PLM Innovation Forum – we might meet there (virtually).
The PLM Green Alliance
The PLM Green Alliance had been announced some months ago, started by Rich McFall and supported by Bjorn Fidjeland, Oleg Shilovitsky, and me.
It was the first step to proactively bringing people together to discuss topics like reducing our carbon footprint, sharing and brainstorming about innovations that will lead to a sustainable future for ourselves and our children, grand-grand-children. The idea behind the PLM Green Alliance is that a proactive approach is much cheaper in the long term as we can still evaluate and discuss options.
This brings me back to the All hands On Deck approach we currently use for fighting the COVID-19 virus.
In a crisis mode, the damage to the people and the economy is severe. Besides, in a crisis mode, a lot of errors will be made, but don’t blame or joke about these people that are trying. Without failure, there is no learning.
We are in a potential time of disruption as the image shows below, but we do not have the complete answers for the future
Think about how you could pro-actively work on a sustainable future for all of us. This will be my personal target, combined with explaining and coaching companies related to topics of modern PLM, during the current lockdown and hopefully long after. The PLM Green Alliance is eager to learn from you and your companies where they are contributing to a more sustainable and greener future.
Do not feel your contribution is not needed, as according to research done by the Carr Center’s Erica Chenoweth: The ‘3.5% rule’: How a small minority can change the world. It could be an encouragement to act instead of watching who will determine your future.
Conclusion
While learning to live in a virtual world, we might be realizing that the current crisis is an opportunity to switch faster to a more sustainable and inclusive society. For PLM moving to data-driven, cloud-based environments, using a Model-Based approach along the whole lifecycle, is a path to reduce friction when delivering innovations. From years to weeks? Something we wished to have today already. Stay safe!
In my previous post, I shared my observations from the past 10 years related to PLM. It was about globalization and digitization becoming part of our daily business. In the domain of PLM, the coordinated approach has become the most common practice.
Now let’s look at the challenges for the upcoming decade, as to my opinion, the next decade is going to be decisive for people, companies and even our current ways of living. So let’s start with the challenges from easy to difficult
Challenge 1: Connected PLM
Implementing an end-to-end digital strategy, including PLM, is probably business-wise the biggest challenge. I described the future vision for PLM to enable the digital twin –How PLM, ALM, and BIM converge thanks to the digital twin.
Initially, we will implement a digital twin for capital-intensive assets, like satellites, airplanes, turbines, buildings, plants, and even our own Earth – the most valuable asset we have. To have an efficient digital continuity of information, information needs to be stored in connected models with shared parameters. Any conversion from format A to format B will block the actual data to be used in another context – therefore, standards are crucial. When I described the connected enterprise, this is the ultimate goal to be reached in 10 (or more) years. It will be data-driven and model-based
Getting to connected PLM will not be the next step in evolution. It will be disruptive for organizations to maintain and optimize the past (coordinated) and meanwhile develop and learn the future (connected). Have a look at my presentation at PLM Roadmap PDT conference to understand the dual approach needed to maintain “old” PLM and work on the future.
Interesting also my blog buddy Oleg Shilovitsky looked back on the past decade (here) and looked forward to 2030 (here). Oleg looks at these topics from a different perspective; however, I think we agree on the future quoting his conclusion:
PLM 2030 is a giant online environment connecting people, companies, and services together in a big network. It might sound like a super dream. But let me give you an idea of why I think it is possible. We live in a world of connected information today.
Challenge 2: Generation change
At this moment, large organizations are mostly organized and managed by hierarchical silos, e.g., the marketing department, the R&D department, Manufacturing, Service, Customer Relations, and potentially more.
Each of these silos has its P&L (Profit & Loss) targets and is optimizing itself accordingly. Depending on the size of the company, there will be various layers of middle management. Your level in the organization depends most of the time on your years of experience and visibility.
The result of this type of organization is the lack of “horizontal flow” crucial for a connected enterprise. Besides, the top of the organization is currently full of people educated and thinking linear/analog, not fully understanding the full impact of digital transformation for their organization. So when will the change start?
In particular, in modern manufacturing organizations, the middle management needs to transform and dissolve as empowered multidisciplinary teams will do the job. I wrote about this challenge last year: The Middle Management dilemma. And as mentioned by several others – It will be: Transform or Die for traditionally managed companies.
The good news is that the old generation is retiring in the upcoming decade, creating space for digital natives. To make it a smooth transition, the experts currently working in the silos will be missed for their experience – they should start coaching the young generation now.
Challenge 3: Sustainability of the planet.
The biggest challenge for the upcoming decade will be adapting our lifestyles/products to create a sustainable planet for the future. While mainly the US and Western Europe have been building a society based on unlimited growth, the effect of this lifestyle has become visible to the world. We consume with the only limit of money and create waste and landfill (plastics and more) form which the earth will not recover if we continue in this way. When I say “we,” I mean the group of fortunate people that grew up in a wealthy society. If you want to discover how blessed you are (or not), just have a look at the global rich list to determine your position.
Now thanks to globalization, other countries start to develop their economies too and become wealthy enough to replicate the US/European lifestyle. We are overconsuming the natural resources this earth has, and we drop them as waste – preferably not in our backyard but either in the ocean or at fewer wealth countries.
We have to start thinking circular and PLM can play a role in this. From linear to circular.
In my blog post related to PLM Roadmap/PDT Europe – day 1, I described Graham Aid’s (Ragn-Sells) session:
Enabling the Circular Economy for Long Term Prosperity.
He mentioned several examples where traditional thinking just leads to more waste, instead of starting from the beginning with a sustainable model to bring products to the market.
Combined with our lifestyle, there is a debate on how the carbon dioxide we produce influences the climate and the atmosphere. I am not a scientist, but I believe in science and not in conspiracies. So there is a problem. In 1970 when scientists discovered the effect of CFK on the Ozone-layer of the atmosphere, we ultimately “fixed” the issue. That time without social media we still trusted scientists – read more about it here: The Ozone hole
I believe mankind will be intelligent enough to “fix” the upcoming climate issues if we trust in science and act based on science. If we depend on politicians and lobbyists, we will see crazy measures that make no sense, for example, the concept of “biofuel.” We need to use our scientific brains to address sustainability for the future of our (single) earth.
Therefore, together with Rich McFall (the initiator), Oleg Shilovitsky, and Bjorn Fidjeland (PLM-peers), we launched the PLM Green Alliance, where we will try to focus on sharing ideas, discussion related to PLM and PLM-related technologies to create a network of innovative companies/ideas. We are in the early stages of this initiative and are looking for ways to make it an active alliance. Insights, stories, and support are welcome. More to come this year (and decade).
Challenge 4: The Human brain
The biggest challenge for the upcoming decade will be the human brain. Even though we believe we are rational, it is mainly our primitive brain that drives our decisions. Thinking Fast and Slow from Daniel Kahneman is a must-read in this area. Or Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that shape our decisions. Note: these books are “old” books from years ago. However, due to globalization and social connectivity, they have become actual.
Our brain does not like to waste energy. If we see the information that confirms our way of thinking, we do not look further. Social media like Facebook are using their algorithms to help you to “discover” even more information that you like. Social media do not care about facts; they care about clicks for advertisers. Of course, controversial headers or pictures get the right attention. Facts are no longer relevant, and we will see this phenomenon probably this year again in the US presidential elections.
The challenge for implementing PLM and acting against human-influenced Climate Change is that we have to use our “thinking slow” mode combined with a general trust in science. I recommend reading Enlightenment now from Steven Pinker. I respect Steven Pinker for the many books I have read from him in the past. Enlightenment Now is perhaps a challenging book to complete. However, it illustrates that a lot of the pessimistic thinking of our time has no fundamental grounds. As a global society, we have been making a lot of progress in the past century. You would not go back to the past anymore.
Back to PLM.
PLM is not a “wonder tool/concept,” and its success is mainly depending on a long-term vision, organizational change, culture, and then the tools. It is not a surprise that it is hard for our brains to decide on a roadmap for PLM. In 2015 I wrote about the similarity of PLM and acting against Climate Change – read it here: PLM and Global Warming
In the upcoming PI PLMx London conference, I will lead a Think Tank session related to Getting PLM on the Executive’s agenda. Getting PLM on an executive agenda is about connecting to the brain and not about a hypothetical business case only. Even at exec level, decisions are made by “gut feeling” – the way the human brain decides. See you in London or more about this topic in a month.
Conclusion
The next decade will have enormous challenges – more than in the past decades. These challenges are caused by our lifestyles AND the effects of digitization. Understanding and realizing our biases caused by our brains is crucial. There is no black and white truth (single version of the truth) in our complex society.
I encourage you to keep the dialogue open and to avoid to live in a silo.
For me, the joint conference from CIMdata and Eurostep is always a conference to look forward too. The conference is not as massive as PLM-Vendor conferences (slick presentations and happy faces); it is more a collection of PLM-practitioners (this time a 100+) with the intent to discuss and share their understanding and challenges, independent from specific vendor capabilities or features. And because of its size a great place to network with everyone.
Day 1 was more a business/methodology view on PLM and Day 2 more in-depth focusing on standards and BIM. In this post, the highlights from the first day.
The State of PLM
Peter Bilello, CIMdata’s president, kicked of with a review of the current state of the PLM industry. Peter mentioned the PLM-market grew by 9.4 % to $47.8 billion (more than the expected 7 %). Good for the PLM Vendors and implementers.
However, Peter also mentioned that despite higher spending, PLM is still considered as a solution for engineering, often implemented as PDM/CAD data management. Traditional organizational structures, marketing, engineering, manufacturing, quality were defined in the previous century and are measured as such.
This traditional approach blocks the roll-out of PLM across these disciplines. Who is the owner of PLM or where is the responsibility for a certain dataset are questions to solve. PLM needs to transform to deliver end-to-end support instead of remaining the engineering silo. Are we still talking about PLM in the future? See Peter’s takeaways below:
We do not want to open the discussion if the the name PLM should change – too many debates – however unfortunate too much framing in the past too.
The Multi View BOM
Fred Feru from Airbus presented a status the Aerospace & Defense PLM action group are working on: How to improve and standardize on a PLM solution for multi-view BOM management, in particular, the interaction between the EBOM and MBOM. See below:
You might think this is a topic already solved when you speak with your PLM-vendor. However, all existing solutions at the participant implementations rely on customizations and vary per company. The target is to come up with common requirements that need to be addressed in the standard methodology. Initial alignment on terminology was already a first required step as before you standardize, you need to have a common dictionary. Moreover, a typical situation in EVERY PLM implementation.
An initial version was shared with the PLM Editors for feedback and after iterations and agreement to come with a solution that can be implemented without customization. If you are interested in the details, you can read the current status here with Appendix A en Appendix B.
Enabling the Circular Economy for Long Term Prosperity
Graham Aid gave a fascinating presentation related to the potentials and flaws of creating a circular economy. Although Graham was not a PLM-expert (till he left this conference), as he is the Strategy and Innovation Coordinator for the Ragn-Sells Group, which performs environmental services and recycling across Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Estonia. Have a look at their website here.
Graham shared with us the fact that despite logical arguments for a circular economy – it is more profitable at the end – however, our short term thinking and bias block us from doing the right things for future generations.
Look at the missing link for a closed resource-lifecycle view below.
Graham shared weird examples where scarce materials for the future currently were getting cheaper, and therefore there is no desire for recycling them. A sound barrier with rubble could contain more copper than copper ore in a mine.
In the PLM-domain, there is also an opportunity for supporting and working on more sustainable products and services. It is a mindset and can be a profitable business model. In the PDT 2014 conference, there was a session on circular product development with Xerox as the best example. Circular product development but also Product As A Service can be activities that contribute to a more sustainable world. Graham’s presentation was inspiring for our PLM community and hopefully planted a few seeds for the future. As it is all about thinking long-term.
With the PLM Green Alliance, I hope we will be able to create a larger audience and participation for a sustainable future. More about the PLM Green Alliance next week.
The Fundamental Role of PLM in Data-driven Product Portfolio Management
Hannu Hannila (Polar) presented his study related to data-driven product portfolio management and why it should be connected to PLM. For many companies, it is a challenge to understand which products are performing well and where to invest. These choices are often supported by Data Damagement as Hannu called it.
An example below:
The result of this fragmented approach is that organizations make their decisions on subjective data and emotions. Where the assumption is that 20 % of the products a company is selling is related to 80 % of the revenue, Hannu found in his research companies where only 10 % of the products were contributing to the revenue. As PPM (Product Portfolio Management) often is based on big emotions – who shouts the loudest mentality, influenced by the company’s pet products and influence by the HIPPO (HIghest Paid Person in the Office). So how to get a better rationale?
Hannu explained a data-driven framework that would provide the right analytics on management level, depending on overall data governance from all disciplines and systems. See below:
I liked Hannu’s conclusions as it aligns with my findings:
- To be data-driven, you need Master Data Management and Data Governance
- Product Portfolio Management is the driving discipline for PLM, and in a modern digital enterprise, it should be connected.
Sponsor sessions
Sponsors are always needed to keep a conference affordable for the attendees. The sponsor sessions on day 1 were of good quality. Here a quick overview and a link if you want to invest further
Configit – explaining the value of a configurator that connects marketing, technical and sales, introducing CLM (Configuration Lifecycle Management) – a new TLA
Aras – explaining their view on what we consider the digital thread
Variantum – explaining their CPQ solution as part of a larger suite of cloud offerings
Quick Release – bringing common sense to PLM implementations, similar to what I am doing as PLM coach – focusing on the flow of information
SAP – explaining the change in focus when a company moves toward a product as a service model
SharePLM – A unique company addressing the importance of PLM training delivered through eLearning
Conclusion
The first day was an easy to digest conference with a good quality of presentations. I only shared 50 % of the session as we already reached 1000+ words. The evening I enjoyed the joint dinner, being able to network and discuss in depth with participants and finished with a social network event organized by SharePLM. Next week part 2.
Sorry for the delay between this post and the previous post. A break with a lot of PLM work on my side and no adverts on your side: win-win. But now I have time to continue the serial around PLM 2.0. We are in the middle.
A small recap on the agenda:
| First post | : What is PLM 2.0? – published Aug 24th |
| Second post | : Challenges in current PLM – published Sept 4th |
| This post | : Change in business – published Oct 3rd |
| Final post | : Why PLM 2.0 – conclusions |
In the first post I described the changes in PLM messaging from vendors – PLM 2.0 or similar terms. In the second post I described the current challenges of PLM, which are well known – if you have access to in LinkedIn to the PLM related groups you will find discussions around the challenges of current PLM. And they set the spirit – good or bad.
Now in this post I will bring up some trends, which to my opinion, unmistakably must lead to a new way of PLM in order to adapt to the future.
Generation Y – a new generation of workers
Generation Y: It is interesting to learn that everywhere companies are complaining or warning that their existing workforce is going to retire with all their knowledge without decent follow-up. In parallel they state it is difficult to find new employees with similar skills that will guarantee the future of the company. The new generation of workers, often identified as Generation Y, has different skills and different motivations.
Some interesting generalizations (note I am not a social anthropologist).
The older generations were raised with the concept: Knowledge is Power – You as an individual needed to have in-depth skills to be the right person for a job – a job is your life and for life. As a negative result of this approach, you see that exactly this older generation sometimes ‘sits’ on their knowledge as a kind of job guarantee – they do not like sharing information – “Come to me and I will help you” is their motto till they retire.
Generation Y does not have this job for life attitude – they look more for short term success and fulfillment and therefore they do not fit so well in the way traditional companies work. They are not the type of knowledge workers previous generations had, but they are, thanks to their skills with modern digital media, capable of finding information and combining information into knowledge. They work different.
The interesting observation from my side is that Generation Y is exactly the type of people PLM requires, as it is all about sharing and combining data. What is blocking their acceptance for current PLM is that the implementation is not architected to their work motivation. Look at:
- The way information is stored (too structured),
- The way information is presented (too structured, boring screens).
- The way information has to be entered in the system (too unfriendly – overkill)
For them PLM needs to move more to an intuitive way of presenting information, capturing data as-if it is something like serious gaming. And the new PLM needs to have a way to manage structured and unstructured data combined.
For companies that complain, they are losing skilled workers in the future, they should not complain but adapt. They should look forward and solve the problems for the future, which means a different way of doing business and implementing PLM. Do not choose what the dinosaurs did.
New styles of business management
Here I want to come back to my first post – I was intrigued by reading Steve Denning’s posts and its relation to PLM. Through the post Why Amazon can’t Make a Kindle in the USA, I found the post The Death and Reinvention of Management the best fitting with my PLM drive.
Steve describes five fundamental shifts in management that make companies ready for the 21st century.
Take time to read the post (and go more in-depth if you get as enthusiastic as me) – but come back to read the rest of this post
I summarize/quote the five shifts from Steve here (as I am sure not everyone has done the reading):
1. The company’s goal has to shift to one of delighting clients i.e. a shift from inside-out (“You take what we make”) to outside-in (“We seek to understand your problems and will surprise you by solving them”)
2. The role of the manager has to shift from being a controller to an enabler, so as to liberate the energies and talents of those doing the work and remove impediments that are getting in the way of work.
3. The mode of coordination shifts from hierarchical bureaucracy to dynamic linking, i.e. to a way of dynamically linking self-driven knowledge work to the shifting requirements of delighting clients.
4. There is a shift from value to values; i.e. a shift from a single-minded focus on economic value and maximizing efficiency to instilling the values that will create innovation and growth for the organization over the long term.
5. Communications shift from command to conversation: i.e. a shift from top-down communications comprising predominantly hierarchical directives to communications made up largely of adult-to-adult conversations that solve problems and generate new insights.
Here we see the typical PLM 2.0 targets. I will translate them into our PLM terminology.
Shift # 1 – The shift to delight clients – from which PLM vendor do we hear this statement? Which PLM vendor puts the customer in focus, instead of their “superior” technology?
Shift #2, #3 and #5 are typical PLM 2.0 capabilities which I described in my first post. See below the PLM 2.0 differentiators:
And where do we find shift #4? How do PLM vendors address this change beyond marketing?
My conclusion on this point: Both PLM and management require a change to be ready for the 21st century – It is exactly what generation Y is looking for, it is exactly what future consumers are looking for. However currently classical PLM and classical Management are dominating the thought process – and they do not like change so much as it would put past investments and achievements at risk.
The Importance of Social Media
Already described in the two previous trends, social media concepts fit exactly in the shift that we see towards the future. It impacts the way companies change their marketing and address their customer base. In parallel it affects the ways teams collaborate in the product development space, innovation teams are global product development teams.
My thoughts: Social media might look like a hype, but the basic concepts of social media will be required for future PLM
Globalization for SMB
The major trend from the past decade is that SMB’s (Small and Medium Businesses) do not longer serve and fight for a regional existence. Competition and customers come from everywhere and production is more and more outsourced. The traditional company that is #1 in their region does not longer exist. Even SMBs have to consider ways to collaborate globally – again another driver for PLM 2.0
My thought: Traditional SMBs are never the leading companies in new trends, they hang on their core knowledge and have probably a longer way to go to really adapt to the future. Startup SMBs with no historical hindrance are likely to outperform them.
Innovation, Intellectual Property & War on Patents
In a global market, innovation is the key driver to be successful combined with the point above: delight the customer. In order to delight the customer you need to innovate as delightment does not come from commodities.
And with innovation I am not only addressing the consumer market, innovation is required in all areas: green products, green production as world climate and its population forces us to change.
The successful products for the future will be those that are bringing innovation and when your company owns this Intellectual Property, your near future is going to be profitable,
Therefore the “War for Patents” will be everywhere. We currently see in the news the tablet and Smartphone patents wars, but it pops up everywhere, some more visible than others.
A “War for Patents” costs a lot of money (mainly spent to lawyers). Therefore the balance should be found between protecting your IP and to innovate faster. In this way your patents become less relevant because newer exist. To my opinion the new PLM should be the engine for innovation first and secondly the system to protect your IP
Conclusion:
Again too many words for a blog post, but the topic is huge and I hope you see the need for a different PLM (PLM 2.0): A PLM that is targeted to the change in business all around the world. The monetary crisis which is another symptom of the old business gives us a chance to change. We need to change organizations and collaboration to remain profitable in the future – don’t be an ostrich
My thoughts –looking forward to your feedback
Like many people, the meditation of the dark Christmas days and the various 2009 reviews give you a push to look back and reflect. What happened and what did not happen in 2009?
And what might happen in 2010?
Here my thoughts related to:
ERP-related PLM vendors
Here I think mainly about Oracle and SAP. They have already identified PLM as an important component for a full enterprise solution. They are further pushing their one-shop-stop approach . Where Oracle’s offering is based on a set of acquired and to-be-integrated systems, SAP has been extending their offering by more focus on their own development.
If you are one of those companies that require PLM, and believe all software should come from one vendor (beside Microsoft), it is hard to decide.
As there might be real PLM knowledge in the Oracle organization as an effect of the acquisitions, but is it easily accessible for you? Is it reflected in the company’s strategy ?
With SAP I am even more in doubt; here you might find more people with ERP blood having learned the PLM talk. Maybe for that reason, I saw mostly Oracle as a PLM option in my environment and very few SAP opportunities for real PLM.
I assume in 2010 Oracle will push stronger and SAP try harder.
CAD-related PLM vendors
In this group you find as the major players PTC, Siemens and Dassault Systems. Autodesk could be there too, but they refuse to do PLM and remain focused around design collaboration. All these PLM vendors are striving to get the PLM message towards the mid-market. They have solutions for the enterprise, but to my feeling, most of the enterprises in the traditional well-know PLM markets, like Automotive and Aerospace, are in a kind of stand-still due to economical and upcoming environmental crisis.
It is sure business will not be as usual anymore, but where will the sustainable future go? Here I believe answers will come from innovation and small mid-market companies. The bigger enterprises need time to react so before we see new PLM activities in this area it will take time.
Therefore all PLM vendors move in directions outside engineering, like apparel, life sciences, and consumer packaged goods. These industries do not rely on the 3D CAD, but still can benefit from the key building blocks of PLM, like lifecycle management, program and portfolio management and quality/compliancy management. The challenge I believe for the PLM vendors is: Will these CAD-focused organizations be able to learn and adapt other industries fast enough? Where does 3D fit – although Dassault has a unique vision here.
For the mid-market, the PLM vendors offer more OOTB (Out Of The Box) solutions, mostly based on limited capabilities or more common available Microsoft components like SharePoint and SQL Server. This is not so strange as according to my observation, most smaller mid-market companies have not really made or understood the difference internally between document management and product data management, including Bill Of Materials not to be managed in Excel.
I assume 2010 the CAD related PLM vendors initially will focus on the bigger enterprises and new industries, the smaller mid-market companies require a different approach
PLM-only vendors
This is an area which I expect to disappear in the future, although this is also the area where interesting developments start to happen. We see open source PLM software coming up with Aras leading and we see companies coming up with PLM on-demand software, Arena as the first company to sell this concept.
The fact that the traditional PLM-only vendors disappeared in this area (Eigner bought by Agile, Agile bought by Oracle, MatrixOne bought by Dassault Systems) indicates that the classical way of selling PLM-only was not profitable enough.
Either PLM needs to be integrated in companywide business processes (which I believe), or there will be PLM-only vendors that find a business model to stay alive.
Here I hope to see more clarity in 2010
Smaller mid-market companies
What I have seen in the past year is, that despite the economical crisis, PLM investments by these companies remained active. Maybe not in purchasing much more licenses or implementing new PLM features. Main investments here were around optimizing or slightly extending the PLM base. Maybe because there was time to sit still and analyze what could be changed, or maybe it was planned but due to work pressure, it was never executed. Anyway there was a lot of activity in this area not less than in 2008.
An interesting challenge for these mid-market companies will be to remain attractive for the new generation. They are not used to the classical ways of structured work as most of the current workforce is used to.
Social networking, social PLM, I have seen the thoughts, discussions and benefits, still trying to see where it will become reality.
2010 is another chance.
Sustainability and going green
This is an area where I am a little disappointed and this is perhaps not justified. I would expect with the lessons learned around energy and the upcoming shortage of natural resources, companies would take the crisis as a reason to change.
To my observation most of the companies I have seen are still trying to continue as usual, hoping that the traditional growth will come back. The climate conference in Copenhagen also showed that, we as human beings, do not feel pressured enough to adapt, by nature we are optimists (or boiling frogs).
Still there are interesting developments – I assume in the next few years we will see innovation coming – probably first from smaller companies as they have the flexibility to react. During the European Customer Conference in Paris, I heard Bernard Charles talking about the concept of a Bill Of Energy (The energy needed to create, maintain and demolish a product) As PLM consultants we already have a hard time explaining to our customers the various views on a BOM, still I like the concept, as a Bill Of Energy makes products comparable.
2010 the acceptance of Bill Of Energy
Here I want to conclude my post for this year. Thank you all for reading and sharing your thoughts and comments with this community. My ultimate conclusion for 2009 is, that is was a good PLM year for the mid-market, better as expected but the changes are going slow. Too slow – we will see next year.
I am writing this week’s post on my way to a customer to finalize an implementation and in parallel describing the Return On Investment of this project. But before that, I would like to have a short note about my previous post ‘Free PLM software does not help companies“.
The reason I wrote this post was because I wanted to assure that companies do not believe that ROI for implementing PLM is based on the software costs. PLM implementations are a combination of software, business skills and the company culture. Specially in the current economical situation, I wanted to make clear that these factors are not overlooked. Also I did not want to say Open Source PLM is bad, I made my points on the messaging, however in functionality and usage I do not see a big difference between other types of PLM systems. I got some interesting comments on this post and I advise all of you, who have read the post to go through the comments to get a broader perspective. Once I have had some more opportunity to investigate this area deeper, I will come with a more in-depth post on this topic.
To PLM or Not To PLM
But now back to: To PLM or Not To PLM, where I wrote in a first post on this topic that before judging the costs and ROI of PLM, we should start analyzing our current processes and situation and use this as a baseline to guesstimate the PLM benefits.
The first PLM phase to analyze is the concept phase, where new ideas are picked up (or not). Actually this is the phase where we define the future of the company. The economical recession in a way forces companies to rethink their strategy and fortunately all of the competition is in a similar position. downturn means less activities, the company might be in the position to allocate time to address these analysis for PLM ROI. Instead of making people redundant, use these people to work on a new and optimized product strategy.
Existential questions to ask yourself as a company
The basic questions to ask about the concept phase:
- Do we know where our products are currently in their lifecycle ?
Measure: quantity, sales trends, margin
Analyze: is our portfolio healthy ? - How do customer rate our products ?
Measure: market share, market awareness, customer satisfaction, quality, field issues
Analyze: will customers keep on buying from us ? - Where are we different from the competition ?
Measure: where do we win/ where do we loose and compare per quarter ?
Analyze: how can we improve the success ratio ? - In case of bidding
Measure: how many bids do we handle per quarter and with which effort
Analyze: What is the win percentage and how to influence this ? - Who are our customers ?
Measure: does the 80-20 rule apply – does 80 % of the revenue come from 20 % of the customers ?
Analyze: What is the trend specially in relation to the current market situation - Where does innovation come from ?
Measure: the amount of new ideas, the source (people, customers) and the ones that reach it to the portfolio
Analyze: Do we have a guarantee for innovation ?
Additional questions to be asked due to current financial and global situation: 
- How do we strive for climate neutral products – sustainable development ?
Measure: the amount of energy used to build the products but also to recycle and what remains
Analyze: How can we change our products and production process ? - How do we capture our company’s IP due to the aging workforce in most of the countries
Measure: How many people with the specific knowledge will retire in 5 – 10 years ?
Analyze: Where and how can I assure this knowledge remains in the company ?
For many of the above questions you might say that you know how to conduct your business as you are doing most of these activities and even more. However the question you should ask yourself also is: How long does it take to answer these questions and to react on these trends ?
Because all the above topics are positively influenced by PLM – here it the PLM ROI !
Project and Portfolio Management, company wide workflow process allow the company to measure, to run analysis and to have information within hours (or worse case in days), where in a company where every department and discipline has their own environment, the effort to collect this information becomes huge and not natural. And as it will take a lot of time to collect the information, people tend to react on their guts or intuition, which might be wrong if you are among the wrong people or if the world changes in a way never seen before.
Additional capturing product and process knowledge allows companies to contain their IP. And just to make this point clear: Product knowledge is not only CAD and Bills of Materials. It is all collected information: issues during design, during production, coming from field services, best practices used and more. The challenge anyway for every PLM system is to provide an environment, user-friendly enough for all users, to start managing their total product IP in a single environment.
Conclusion
PLM as a total approach brings a lot of value and control in the concept phase, the phase where the company’s future is merely defined. And it is obvious that the future should be green and sustainable. Use the current downturn to shape the future – the questions in this post and your analysis should be the base.
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