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I am just back from the annual PDT conference (12^th edition), this year hosted in Paris from 9 to 10 November, co-located with CIMdata’s PLM Road Map 2016 for Aerospace & Defense. The PDT conference, organized by EuroStep and CIMdata, is a relatively small conference with a little over a hundred attendees. The attractiveness of this conference is that the group of dedicated participants is very interactive with each other sharing honest opinions and situations, sometimes going very deep into the details, needed to get the full picture. The theme of the conference was: “Investing for the future while managing product data legacy and obsolescence.” Here are some of the impressions from these days, giving you food for thought to join next year.

Setting the scene

Almost traditionally Peter Bilello (CIMdata) started the conference followed by Marc Halpern (Gartner). Their two presentations had an excellent storyline together.

Pieter Bilello started and discussed Issues and Remedies for PLM Obsolescence. Peter did not address PLM obsolescence for the first time. It is a topic many early PLM adaptors are facing and in a way the imminent obsolescence of their current environments block them of taking advantage of new technologies and capabilities current PLM vendors offer. Having learned from the past CIMdata provides a PLM Obsolescence Management model, which should be on every companies agenda, in the same way as data quality (which I will address later). Being proactive in obsolescence can save critical situations and high costs. From the obsolescence theme, Peter looked forward to the future and the value product innovation platforms can offer, given the requirements that data should be able to flow through the organization, connecting to other platforms and applications, increasing the demand to adhere and push for standards.

Marc Halpern followed with his presentation, titled: More custom products demand new IT strategies and new PLM application where he focused on the new processes and methodology needed for future businesses with a high-focus on customer-specific deliveries, speed, and automation. Automation is always crucial to reducing production costs. In this delivery process 3D printing could bring benefits and Mark shared the plusses and minuses of 3D printing. Finally, when automation of a customer specific order would be possible, it requires a different IT-architecture, depicted by Mark. After proposing a roadmap for customizable products, Mark shared some examples of ROI benefits reported by successful transformation projects. Impressive !!

My summary of these two sessions is that both CIMdata and Gartner confirm the challenges companies have to change their old legacy processes and PLM environments which support the past, meanwhile moving to more, customer-driven processes and, modern data-driven PLM functionality. This process is not just an IT or Business change, it will also be a cultural change.

JT / STEP AP242 / PLCS

Next, we had three sessions related to standards, where Alfred Katzenbach told the success story of JT, the investment done to get this standard approved and performing based on an active community to get the most out of JT, beyond its initial purpose of viewing and exchanging data in a neutral format. Jean-Yves Delanaunay explained in Airbus Operation the STEP AP242 definition is used as the core standard for 3D Model Based Definition (MB) exchange, part of the STEP standards suite and as the cornerstone for Long Term Archiving and Retrieval of Aerospace & Defense 3D MBD.

There seems to be some rivalry between JT and STEP242 viewing capabilities, which go beyond my understanding as I am not an expert from the field here. Nigel Shaw ended the morning session positioning PLCS as a standard for interoperability of information along the whole lifecycle of a product. Having a standardized data model as Nigel showed would be a common good approach for PLM vendors to converge to a more interoperable standard.

My summary of standards is that there is a lot of thinking, evaluation, and testing done by an extensive community of committed people. It will be hard for a company to define a better foundation for a standard in their business domain. Vendors are focusing on performance inside their technology offering and therefore will never push for standards (unless you use their products as a standard). A force for adhering to standards should come from the user community.

Using standards

After lunch we had three end-users stories from:

• Eric Delaporte (Renault Group) talked about their NewPDM project and the usage of standards mainly for exchanges. Two interesting observations: Eric talks about New PDM – the usage of the words New (when does New become regular?) and PDM (not talking about PLM ?) and secondly as a user of standards he does not care about the JT/AP242 debate and uses both standards where applicable and performing.
• Sebastien Olivier (France Ministry of Defense) gave a bi-annual update of their PCLS-journey used in two projects, Pencil (Standardized Exchange platform and centralized source of logistical information) and MAPS (Managing procurement contracts for buying In-Service Support services) and the status of their S3000L implementation (International procedure for Logistic Support Analysis). A presentation for the real in-crowd of this domain.
• Juha Rautjarvi discussion how efficient use of knowledge for safety and security could be maintained and enhanced through collaboration. Here Juha talks about the Body of Knowledge which should be available for all stakeholders in the context of security and safety. And like a physical product this Body of Knowledge goes through a lifecycle, continuous adapting to what potentially arises from the outside world

My conclusion on this part was that if you are not really in these standards on a day-to-day base (and I am not), it is hard to pick the details. Still, the higher level thought processes behind these standard approaches allow you to see the benefits and impact of using standards, which is not the same as selecting a tool. It is a strategic choice.

Modular / Bimodular / not sexy ?

Jakob Asell from Modular Management gave an overview how modularity can connect the worlds of sales, engineering, and manufacturing by adding a modular structure as a governing structure to the various structures used by each discipline. This product architecture can be used for product planning and provides and end-to-end connectivity of information. Modular Management is assisting companies in moving towards this approach.

Next my presentation title: The importance of accurate data. Act now! addressed the topic of the switch from classical, linear, document-driven PLM towards a modern, more incremental and data-driven PLM approach. Here I explained the disadvantage of the old evolutionary approach (impossible – too slow/too costly) and an alternative method, inspired by Gartner’s bimodular IT-approach (read my blog post: Best Practices or Next Practices). No matter which option you are looking for correct and quality data is the oil for the future, so companies should consider allowing the flow of data as a health issue for the future.

The day was closed with a large panel, where the panelist first jumped on the topic bimodal (bipolar ?? / multimodal ??) talking about mode 1 (the strategic approach) and mode 2 (the tactical and fast approach based on Gartner’s definition). It was clear that the majority of the panel was in Mode 1 mode. Which fluently lead to the discussion of usage of standards (and PLM) as not being attractive for the young generations (not sexy). Besides the conclusion that it takes time to understand the whole picture and see the valuable befits a standard can bring and join this enthusiasm

Conclusion

I realize myself that this post is already too long according blogging guidelines. Therefore I will tell more about day 2 of the conference next week with Airbus going bimodal and more.

Stay tuned for next week !