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In my earlier post The weekend after PDT Europe I wrote about the first day of this interesting conference. We ended that day with some food for thought related to a bimodal PLM approach. Now I will take you through the highlights of day 2.
Interoperability and openness in the air (aerospace)
I believe Airbus and Boeing are one of the most challenged companies when it comes to PLM. They have to cope with their stakeholders and massive amount of suppliers involved, constrained by a strong focus on safety and quality. And as airplanes have a long lifetime, the need to keep data accessible and available for over 75 years are massive challenges. The morning was opened by presentations from Anders Romare (Airbus) and Brian Chiesi (Boeing) where they confirmed they could switch the presenter´s role between them as the situations in Airbus and Boeing are so alike.
Anders Romare started with a presentation called: Digital Transformation through an e2e PLM backbone, where he explained the concept of extracting data from the various silo systems in the company (CRM, PLM, MES, ERP) to make data available across the enterprise. In particular in their business transformation towards digital capabilities Airbus needed and created a new architecture on top of the existing business systems, focusing on data (“Data is the new oil”).
In order to meet a data-driven environment, Airbus extracts and normalizes data from their business systems and provides a data lake with integrated data on top of which various apps can run to offer digital services to existing and new stakeholders on any type of device. The data-driven environment allows people to have information in context and almost real-time available to make right decisions. Currently, these apps run on top of this data layer.
Now imagine information captured by these apps could be stored or directed back in the original architecture supporting the standard processes. This would be a real example of the bimodal approach as discussed on day 1. As a closing remark Anders also stated that three years ago digital transformation was not really visible at Airbus, now it is a must.
Next Brian Chiesi from Boeing talked about Data Standards: A strategic lever for Boeing Commercial Airplanes. Brian talked about the complex landscape at Boeing. 2500 Applications / 5000 Servers / 900 changes annually (3 per day) impacting 40.000 users. There is a lot of data replication because many systems need their own proprietary format. Brian estimated that if 12 copies exist now, in the ideal world 2 or 3 will do. Brian presented a similar future concept as Airbus, where the traditional business systems (Systems Engineering, PLM, MRP, ERP, MES) are all connected through a service backbone. This new architecture is needed to address modern technology capabilities (social / mobile / analytics / cloud /IoT / Automation / ,,)
Interesting part of this architecture is that Boeing aims to exchange data with the outside world (customers / regulatory/supply chain /analytics / manufacturing) through industry standard interfaces to have an optimal flow of information. Standardization would lead to a reduction of customized applications, minimize costs of integration and migration, break the obsolescence cycle and enable future technologies. Brian knows that companies need to pull for standards, vendors will deliver. Boeing will be pushing for standards in their contracts and will actively work together with five major Aerospace & Defense companies to define required PLM capabilities and have a unified voice to PLM solutions providers.
My conclusion on these to Aerospace giants is they express the need to adapt to move to modern digital businesses, no longer the linear approach from the classic airplane programs. Incremental innovation in various domains is the future. The existing systems need to be there to support their current fleet for many, many years to come. The new data-driven layer needs to be connected through normalization and standardization of data. For the future focus on standards is a must.
Simon Floyd from Microsoft talked about The Impact of Digital Transformation in the Manufacturing Enterprise where he talked us through Digital Transformation, IoT, and analytics in the product lifecycle, clarified by examples from the Rolls Royce turbine engine. A good and compelling story which could be used by any vendor explaining digital transformation and the relation to IoT. Next, Simon walked through the Microsoft portfolio and solution components to support a modern digital enterprise based on various platform services. At the end, Simon articulated how for example ShareAspace based on Microsoft infrastructure and technology can be an interface between various PLM environments through the product lifecycle.
Simon’s presentation was followed by a panel discussion where the theme was: When is history and legacy an asset and barriers of entry and When does it become a burden and an invitation to future competitors.
Mark Halpern (Gartner) mentioned here again the bimodal thinking. Aras is bimodal. The classical PLM vendors running in mode 1 will not change radically and the new vendors, the mode 2 types will need time to create credibility. Other companies mentioned here PropelPLM (PLM on Salesforce platform) or OnShape will battle the next five years to become significant and might disrupt.
Simon Floyd(Microsoft) mentioned that in order to keep innovation within Microsoft, they allow for startups within in the company, with no constraints in the beginning to Microsoft. This to keep disruption inside you company instead of being disrupted from outside. Another point mentioned was that Tesla did not want to wait till COTS software would be available for their product development and support platform. Therefore they develop parts themselves. Are we going back to the early days of IT ?
Interesting trend I believe too, in case the building blocks for such solution architecture are based on open (standardized ?) services.
Data Quality
After the lunch, the conference was split in three streams where I was participating in the “Creating and managing information quality stream.” As I discussed in my presentation from day 1, there is a need for accurate data, starting a.s.a.p. as the future of our businesses will run on data as we learned from all speakers (and this is not a secret – still many companies do not act).
In the context of data quality, Jean Brange from Boost presented the ISO 8000 framework for data and information quality management. This standard is now under development and will help companies to address their digital needs. The challenge of data quality is that we need to store data with the right syntax and semantic to be used and in addition, it needs to be pragmatic: what are we going to store that will have value. And then the challenge of evaluating the content. Empty fields can be discovered, however, how do you qualify the quality of field with a value. The ISO 8000 framework is a framework, like ISO 9000 (product quality) that allow companies to work in a methodological way towards acceptable and needed data quality.
Magnus Färneland from Eurostep addressed the topic of data quality and the foundation for automation based on the latest developments done by Eurostep on top of their already rich PLCS data model. The PLCS data model is an impressive model as it already supports all facets of product lifecycle from design, through development and operations. By introducing soft typing, EuroStep allows a more detailed tuning of the data model to ensure configuration management. When at which stage of the lifecycle is certain information required (and becomes mandatory) ? Consistent data quality enforced through business process logic.
The conference ended with Marc Halpern making a plea for Take Control of Your Product Data or Lose Control of Your Revenue, where Marc painted the future (horror) scenario that due to digital transformation the real “big fish” will be the digital business ecosystem owner and that once you are locked in with a vendor, these vendors can uplift their prices to save their own business without any respect for your company’s business model. Marc gave some examples where some vendor raised prices with the subscription model up to 40 %. Therefore even when you are just closing a new agreement with a vendor, you should negotiate a price guarantee and a certain bandwidth for increase. And on top of that you should prepare an exit strategy – prepare data for migration and have backups using standards. Marc gave some examples of billions extra cost related to data quality and loss. It can hurt !! Finally, Marc ended with recommendations for master data management and quality as a needed company strategy.
Gerard Litjens from CIMdata as closing speaker gave a very comprehensive overview of The Internet of Thing – What does it mean for PLM ? based on CIMdata’ s vision. As all vendors in this space explain the relation between IoT and PLM differently, it was a good presentation to be used as a base for the discussion: how does IoT influence our PLM landscape. Because of the length of this blog post, I will not further go into these details – it is worth obtaining this overview.
Concluding: PDT2016 is a crucial PLM conference for people who are interested in the details of PLM. Other conferences might address high-level customer stories, at PDT2016 it is about the details and sharing the advantages of using standards. Standards are crucial for a data-driven environment where business platforms with all their constraints will be the future. And I saw more and more companies are working with standards in a pragmatic manner, observing the benefits and pushing for more data standards – it is not just theory.
See you next year ?
In this post observations from the PDT 2015 conference which took place in the IVA Conference Center, part of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Services in Stockholm.
The conference was hosted by Eurostep supported by CIMdata, Airbus, Siemens Energy and Volvo AB.
For me, the PDT conference is interesting because there is a focus on architecture and standards flavored with complementary inspiring presentations. This year there were approximate 110 participants from 12 countries coming from different industries listening to 25 presentations spread over two days.
Some highlights
Peter Bilello from CIMdata kicked off the conference with his presentation: The Product Innovation Platform: What’s Missing.
Peter explained how the joined vision from CIMdata, Gartner and IDC related to a product innovation platform is growing.
The platform concept is bringing PLM to the enterprise level as a critical component to support innovation. The main challenge is to make the complex simple – easier said than done, but I agree this is the real problem of all the software vendors.
Peter showed an interesting graph based on a survey done by CIMdata, showing two trends.
- The software and technology capabilities are closing more and more the gap with the vision (a dream can come true)
- The gap between the implemented capabilities and the technical possible capabilities is growing too. Of course, there is a difference between the leaders and followers.
Peter described the three success factors determining if a platform can be successful:
- Connection: how easy is it for others to connect and plug into the platform to participate as part of the platform. Translated to capabilities this requires the platform to support open standards to connect external data sources as you do not want to build new interfaces for every external source. Also, the platform provider should provide an integration API with a low entry level to get the gravity (next point)
- Gravity: how well does the platform attract participants, both producers, and consumers. Besides a flexible and targeted user interfaces, there must be an infrastructure that allows companies to model the environment in such a manner that it supports experts creating the data, but also support consumers in data, who are not able to navigate through details and want a consumer-friendly environment.
- Flow: how well does the platform support the exchange and co-creation of value. The smartphone platforms are extremely simple compared to a business platform as the dimension of lifecycle status and versioning is not there. A business platform needs to have support for versioning and status combined with relating the information in the right context. Here I would say only the classical PLM vendors have in-depth experience with that.
Having read these three bullet points and taking existing enterprise software vendors for PLM, ERP, and other “platforms” in mind, you see there is still a way to go before we have a “real” platform available.
According to Peter, companies should start with anchoring the vision for a business innovation platform in their strategic roadmap. It will be an incremental journey anyway. How clear the vision is connected to business execution in reality differentiates leaders and followers.
Next Marc Halpern from Gartner elaborated on enabling Product Innovation Platforms. Marc started to say that the platform concept is still the process of optimizing PLM.
Marc explained the functional layers making up a product innovation platform, see below
According to Marc, in 2017 the major design, PLM and business suite vendors will all offer product innovation platforms, where certain industries are more likely to implement product innovation platforms faster than others.
Marc stressed that moving to a business innovation platform is a long, but staged, journey. Each stage of the journey can bring significant value.
Gartner has a 5-step maturity model based on the readiness of the organization. Moving from reactive, repeatable, integrating towards collaborating and ultimately orchestrating companies become business ready for PDM first, next PLM and the Product Innovation Platform at the end. You cannot skip one of these steps according to Marc. I agree, PLM implementations in the past failed because the company was dreaming that the PLM system would solve the business readiness of the organization.
Marc ended with a case study and the conclusions were not rocket science.
The importance of change management, management understanding and commitment, and business and IT joined involvement. A known best practice, still we fail in many situations to act accordingly, due to underestimation of the effort. See also my recent blog post: The importance of change management for PLM.
Next session from Camilla Wirseen was a real revelation. Her presentation: We are all Peepoople – innovation from the bottom of the pyramid.
She described how Anders Wilhemson, original a professor in architecture, focused on solving a global, big problem addressing 2.5 billion people in the world. These 2.5 billion persons, the poorest of the world, lack sanitation, which results in a high death rate for children (every 15 seconds a child dies because of contaminated water). Also the lack of safe places for sanitation lead to girls dropping out of school and women and children being at risk for rape when going to toilet places.
The solution is a bag, made of high-performance biodegradable plastics combined with chemicals, already in the bag, processing the feces to kill potential diseases and make the content available as fertilizer for the agricultural industry.
The plastic bag might not be new, but adding the circular possibilities to it, make it a unique approach to creating a business model providing collection and selling of the content again. For the poorest every cent they can earn makes a different.
Currently in initial projects the Peepoo system has proven its value: over 95 % user acceptance. It is the establishment that does not want to introduce Peepoo on a larger scale. Apparently they never realized themselves the problems with sanitation.
Peepoo is scaling up and helping the bottom of our society. And the crazy fact is that it was not invented by engineers but by an architect. This is challenging everyone to see where you can contribute to a better world. Have a look at peepoople.com – innovation with an enormous impact!
Next Volvo Cars and Volvo Trucks presented similar challenges: How to share product data based on external collaboration. The challenge of Volvo Cars is that it has gone through different ownerships and they require a more and more flexible infrastructure to share data. It is not about data pushing to a supplier anymore, it is about integrating partners where you have to share a particular part of your IP with the partner. And where the homegrown KPD system is working well for internal execution, it was never designed for partner sharing and collaboration. Volvo Cars implemented a Shared Technology Control application outside the firewall based on Share-A-space, where inside and outside data is mapped and connected. See their summary below. A pragmatic approach which is bringing direct benefits.
![clip_image002[10]](https://josvoskuil.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/clip_image00210.jpg "clip_image002[10]")
Concluding from the Volvo sessions: Apparently it ‘s hard to extend an existing system or infrastructure for secure collaboration with an external partner. The complexity of access right, different naming conventions, etc. Instead of that it is more pragmatic to have an intermediate system in the middle, like Share-A-space, that connects both worlds. The big advantage of Share-A-space is that the platform is based on the ISO 10303 (PLCS) standard and, therefore, has one of the characteristics of a real platform: openness based on standards.
Jonas Hammerberg from the Awesome Group closed day one with an inspiring and eye-opening presentation: Make PLM – The Why and How with Gamification FUN.
Jonas started to describe the behavioral drivers new generations have based on immediate feedback for the feeling of achievement, pride and status and being in a leading environment combined with the feelings of being in a group feeling friendship, trust, and love.
Current organizations are not addressing these different behaviors, it leads to disengagement at the office / work floor as Jonas showed from a survey held in Sweden – see figure. The intrinsic motivation is missing. One of the topics that concerns me the most when seeing current PLM implementations.
The Awesome group has developed apps and plug-ins for existing software, office and PLM bring in the feelings of autonomy, mastery and purpose to the individual performing in teams. Direct feedback and stimulating team and individual performance as part of the job.
By doing so the organization also gets feedback on the behavior, activity, collaboration and knowledge sharing of individuals and how this related to their performance. An interesting concept to be implemented in situations where gamification makes sense.
![clip_image002[12]](https://josvoskuil.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/clip_image00212.jpg "clip_image002[12]")
Owe Lind and Magnus Lidström from Scania talked about their Remote Diagnostics approach where diagnostic readings can be received from a car through a mobile phone network either to support preventive maintenance or actual diagnostics on the road and provide support.
Interesting Owe and Magnus were not using the word IoT (Internet of Things) at all, a hype related to these capabilities. Have a look here on YouTube
![clip_image002[14]](https://josvoskuil.files.wordpress.com/2015/10/clip_image00214.jpg "clip_image002[14]")
There was no chance to fall asleep after lunch, where Robin Teigland from the Stockholm School of Economics took us in a whirlwind through several trends under the title: The Third Revolution – exploring new forms of value creation through doing more with less.
The decomposition of traditional business into smaller and must faster communities undermine traditional markets. Also concepts like Uber, Bitcoin becoming a serious threat. The business change as a result of connectivity and communities leading to more and more networks of skills bringing together knowledge to design a car (Local Motors), funding (Kickstarter) – and it is all about sharing knowledge instead of keeping it inside – sharing creates the momentum in the world. You can look at Robin’s presentation(s) at Slideshare here.
All very positive trends for the future, however, a big threat to the currently established companies. Robin named it the Third Revolution which is in line with what we are discussing in our PLM world, although some of us call it even the Fourth Revolution (Industry 4.0).
Professor Martin Eigner from the Technical University of Kaiserslautern brought us back to reality in his presentation: Industry 4.0 or Industrial Internet: What is the impact for PLM?
Martin stood at the base for what we call PLM and already for several years he is explaining to us that the classical definition for PLM is too narrow. More and more we are developing systems instead of products. Therefore, he prefers the abbreviation SysLM, which is more than 3 characters and therefore probably hard to accept by the industry.
System development and, therefore, multidisciplinary development of systems introduces a new complexity. Traditional change management for Mechanical CAD (ECO/ECR) is entirely different from how software change management is handled (baselines / branches related to features). The way systems are designed, require a different methodology where systems engineering is an integral part of the development process, see Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE).
Next Martin discussed 4 potential IT-architectures where, based on the “products” and business needs, a different balance of PLM, ALM or ERP activities is required.
Martin’s final point was about the need for standards support these architectures, bringing together OSLC, PCLS, etc.
Standards are necessary for fast and affordable integrations and data exchange.
My presentation: The Perfect Storm or a fatal Tsunami was partly summarizing topics from the conference and, in addition, touching on two topics.
The first topic is related to big data and analytics. Many are trying to get a grip on big data with analytics. However, the real benefit of big data comes when you are able to apply algorithms to it. Gartner just made an interesting statement related to big data (below) and Marc Halpern added to this quote that there is an intrinsic need for data standards in order to apply algorithms.
When algorithms can be used, classical processes like ECO, ECR or managers might become obsolete and even a jobs like an accountant is at risk. This as predicted in article in the Economist in February 2014 – the onrushing Wave
The second topic, where I believe we are still hesitating too long at management level, is making decisions, to anticipate the upcoming digital wave and all of its side effects. We see a huge wave coming. If we do not mobilize the people, this wave might be a tsunami for those still at the seaside
Conclusion: PDT2015 was an inspiring, well-balanced conference with excellent opportunity to network with all people attending. For those interested in the details of the PLM future and standards an ideal opportunity to get up to date. And next the challenge: Make it happen at your company!
.. if you reach this point, my compliments for your persistency to read it all. Too long for a blog post and even here I had to strip
Shaping the PLM platform of the Future
In this post my observations from the PDT 2014 Europe conference which was hosted in the Microsoft Conference center in Paris and organized by Eurostep and CIMdata.
It was the first time I attended this event. I was positively surprised about the audience and content. Where other PLM conferences were often more focusing on current business issues, here a smaller audience (130 persons) was looking into more details around the future of PLM. Themes like PLM platforms, the Circular Economy, Open Standards and longevity of data were presented and discussed here.
The emergence of the PLM platform
Pieter Bilello from CIMdata kicked off with his presentation: The emergence of the PLM platform. Peter explained we have to rethink our PLM strategy for two main reasons:
1. The product lifecycle will become more and more circular due to changing business models and in parallel the different usage/availability of materials will have an impact how we design and deliver products
2. The change towards digital platforms at the heart of our economy (The Digital Revolution as I wrote about also in previous posts) will impact organizations dramatically.
Can current processes and tools support today’s complexity. And what about tomorrow? According to a CIMdata survey there is a clear difference in profit and performance between leaders and followers, and the gap is increasing faster. “Can you afford yourself to be a follower ?” is a question companies should ask themselves.
Rethinking PLM platform does not bring the 2-3 % efficiency benefit but can bring benefits from 20 % and more.
Peter sees a federated platform as a must for companies to survive. I in particular likes his statement:
The new business platform paradigm is one in which solutions from multiple providers must be seamlessly deployed using a resilient architecture that can withstand rapid changes in business functions and delivery modalities
Industry voices on the Future PLM platform
Auto
Steven Vetterman from ProSTEP talked about PLM in the automotive industry. Steven started describing the change in the automotive industry, by quoting Heraclitus Τα πάντα ρεί – the only constant is change. Steven described two major changes in the automotive industry:
1. The effect of globalization, technology and laws & ecology
2. The change of the role of IT and the impact of culture & collaboration
Interesting observation is that the preferred automotive market will shift to the BRIC countries. In 2050 more than 50 % of the world population (estimate almost 10 billion people at that time) will be living in Asia, 25 percent in Africa. Europe and Japan are aging. They will not invest in new cars.
For Steven, it was clear that current automotive companies are not yet organized to support and integrate modern technologies (systems engineering / electrical / software) beyond mechanical designs. Neither are they open for a true global collaboration between all players in the industry. Some of the big automotive companies are still struggling with their rigid PLM implementation. There is a need for open PLM, not driven from a single PLM system, but based on a federated environment of information.
Aero
Yves Baudier spoke on behalf of the aerospace industry about the standardization effort at their Strategic Standardization Group around Airbus and some of its strategic suppliers, like Thales, Safran, BAE systems and more. If you look at the ASD Radar, you might get a feeling for the complexity of standards that exist and are relevant for the Airbus group.
It is a complex network of evolving standard all providing (future) benefits in some domains. Yves was talking about the through Lifecycle support which is striving for data creation once and reuse many times during the lifecycle. The conclusion from Yves, like all the previous speakers is that: The PLM Platform of the Future will be federative, and standards will enable PLM Interoperability
Energy and Marine
Shefali Arora from Wärtsilä spoke on behalf of the energy and marine sector and gave an overview of the current trends in their business and the role of PLM in Wärtsilä. With PLM, Wärtsilä wants to capitalize on its knowledge, drive costs down and above all improve business agility. As the future is in flexibility. Shefali gave an overview of their PLM roadmap covering the aspects of PDM (with Teamcenter), ERP (SAP) and a PLM backbone (Share-A-space). The PLM backbone providing connectivity of data between all lifecycle stages and external partners (customer / suppliers) based on the PLCS standard. Again another session demonstrating the future of PLM is in an open and federated environment
Intermediate conclusion:
The future PLM platform is a federated platform which adheres to standards provides openness of interfaces that permit the platform to be reliable over multiple upgrade cycles and being able to integrate third-parties (Peter Bilello)
Systems Engineering
The afternoon session I followed the Systems Engineering track. Peter Bilello gave an overview of Model-Based Systems engineering and illustrated based on a CIMdata survey that even though many companies have a systems engineering strategy in place it is not applied consistently. And indeed several companies I have been dealing with recently expressed their desire to integrate systems engineering into their overall product development strategy. Often this approach is confused by believing requirements management and product development equal systems engineering. Still a way to go.
Dieter Scheithauer presented his vision that Systems Engineering should be a part of PLM, and he gave a very decent, academic overview how all is related. Important for companies that want to go into that direction, you need to understand where you aiming at. I liked his comparison of a system product structure and a physical product structure, helping companies to grab the difference between a virtual, system view and a physical product view:
More Industry voices
Construction industry
The afternoon session started with Christophe Castaing, explaining BIM (Building Information Modeling) and the typical characteristics of the construction industry. Although many construction companies focus on the construction phase, for 100 pieces of information/exchange to be managed during the full life cycle only 5 will be managed during the initial design phase (BIM), 20 will be managed during the construction phase (BAM) and finally 75 will be managed during the operation phase (BOOM). I wrote about PLM and BIM last year: Will 2014 become the year the construction industry will discover PLM?
Christophe presented the themes from the French MINnD project, where the aim is starting from an Information Model to come to a platform, supporting and integrated with the particular civil and construction standards, like IFC. CityGml but also PLCS standard (isostep ISO 10303-239
Consumer Products
Amir Rashid described the need for PLM in the consumer product markets stating the circular economy as one of the main drivers. Especially in consumer markets, product waste can be extremely high due to the short lifetime of the product and everything is scrapped to land waste afterward. Interesting quote from Amir: Sustainability’s goal is to create possibilities not to limit options. He illustrated how Xerox already has sustainability as part of their product development since 1984. The diagram below demonstrates how the circular economy can impact all business today when well-orchestrated.
Marc Halpern closed the tracks with his presentation around Product Innovation Platforms, describing how Product Design and PLM might evolve in the upcoming digital era. Gartner believes that future PLM platforms will provide insight (understand and analyze Big Data), Adaptability (flexible to integrate and maintain through an open service oriented architecture), promoting reuse (identifying similarity based on metadata and geometry), discovery (the integration of search analysis and simulation) and finally community (using the social paradigm).
If you look to current PLM systems, most of them are far from this definition, and if you support Gartner’s vision, there is still a lot of work for PLM vendor to do.
Interesting Marc also identified five significant risks that could delay or prevent from implementing this vision:
- inadequate openness (pushing back open collaboration)
- incomplete standards (blocking implementation of openness)
- uncertain cloud performance (the future is in cloud services)
- the steep learning curve (it is a big mind shift for companies)
- Cyber-terrorism (where is your data safe?)
After Marc´s session there was an interesting panel discussion with some the speakers from that day, briefly answering discussing questions from the audience. As the presentations have been fairly technical, it was logical that the first question that came up was: What about change management?
A topic that could fill the rest of the week but the PDT dinner was waiting – a good place to network and digest the day.
DAY 2
Day 2 started with two interesting topics. The first presentation was a joined presentation from Max Fouache (IBM) and Jean-Bernard Hentz (Airbus – CAD/CAM/PDM R&T and IT Backbones). The topic was about the obsolescence of information systems: Hardware and PLM applications. As in the aerospace industry some data needs to be available for 75 years. You can imagine that during 75 years a lot can change to hardware and software systems. At Airbus, there are currently 2500 applications, provided by approximate 600 suppliers that need to be maintained. IBM and Airbus presented a Proof of Concept done with virtualization of different platforms supporting CATIA V4/V5 using Linux, Windows XP, W7, W8 which is just a small part of all the data.
The conclusion from this session was:
To benefit from PLM of the future, the PLM of the past has to be managed. Migration is not the only answer. Look for solutions that exist to mitigate risks and reduce costs of PLM Obsolescence. Usage and compliance to Standards is crucial.
Standards
Next Howard Mason, Corporate Information Standards Manager took us on a nice journey through the history of standards developed in his business. I loved his statement: Interoperability is a right, not a privilege
In the systems engineering track Kent Freeland talked about Nuclear Knowledge Management and CM in Systems Engineering. As this is one of my favorite domains, we had a good discussion on the need for pro-active Knowledge Management, which somehow implies a CM approach through the whole lifecycle of a plant. Knowledge management is not equal to store information in a central place. It is about building and providing data in context that it can be used.
Ontology for systems engineering
Leo van Ruijven provided a session for insiders: An ontology for Systems Engineering based on ISO 15926-11. His simplified approach compared to the ISO 15288 lead to several discussion between supporters and opponents during lunch time.
Master Data Management
After lunch time Marc Halpern gave his perspective on Master Data Management, a new buzz-word or discipline need to orchestrate enterprise collaboration.
Based on the type of information companies want to manage in relation to each other supported by various applications (PLM, ERP, MES, MRO, …) this can be a complex exercise and Marc ended with recommendations and an action plan for the MDM lead. In my customer engagements I also see more and more the digital transformation leads to MDM questions. Can we replace Excel files by mastered data in a database?
Almost at the end of the day I was speaking about the PDM platform of the people targeted for the people from the future. Here I highlighted the fundamental change in skills that’s upcoming. Where my generation was trained to own and capture information as much as possible information in your brain (or cabinet), future generations are trained and skilled in finding data and building information out of it. Owning (information) is not crucial for them. Perhaps as the world is moving fast. See this nice YouTube movie at the end.
Ella Jamsin ended the conference on behalf of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation explaining the need to move to a circular economy and the PLM should play a role in that. No longer is PLM from cradle-to-grave but PLM should support the lifecycle from cradle-to-cradle.
Unfortunate I could not attend all sessions as there were several parallel sessions. Neither have I written about all sessions I attended. The PDT Europe conference, a conference for people who mind about the details around the PLM future concepts and the usage of standards, is a must for future strategists.
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