Get Savvy about PLM

January 7, 2009

Today’s economy and the enterprise: Now or Never

Filed under: Cost and Benefits,Enabling Technology — Laila Hirr @ 11:57 am

I watched Charlie Rose last night as he met with Leo Apothekar, co-CEO of SAP AG, and Andrew Mcaffee of Harvard Business School as they discussed the state of affairs with the economy and IT. Mr. Apothekar at the end of the discussion stated that in today’s economy there are two behaviors in IT: Now or Never. That companies recognize that either they must invest now in the process factories (his description of the enterprise applications) for efficiencies or they risk not surviving.

Some of the key points they discussed that I found very pertinent are that:

1) the Lack of Integrations of systems has been an Achilles heel to the IT industry. This was most clearly brought out in the examination of the intelligence community after 9/11 and in today’s banking situation. Too many systems and too isolated systems have led to breakdowns in critical functions. The good news is that more and more of the enterprise applications have been making the access to the data structures simpler and thus easier to build integrations.

2) the need for flexibility to foster use. As Andrew Mcaffee stated it was once thought that to get a good outcome you had to tightly control the process, yet wiki and open source show us that the organic controls are working.

3) the connectivity inside, outside and across boundaries is through process. Leo Apothekar gave a very visual description of this environment. To add to his words I’d suggest you take a look at code swarm Code Swarm videos give a very good sense of the complexities and interactions of product development (for code) – after watching it – just imagine the interactions that include electrical and mechanical design, not just software – and you begin to get a sense of how crucial access, vaulting, and change management are across both the internal and external enterprise.

4) the emergence of “cloud” computing for the enterprise. The use of the internet or the “space out there” as the environment for the enterprise operations.

In their discussion they covered other topics such as the challenges of employee retention and the viability of open source for the enterprise. I’m pleased that Charlie Rose programming posts the replays on their website, since he is on so very late at night.

December 1, 2007

PLM challenges according to Dr. Grieves

Filed under: Enabling Technology,Mythbusting,PLM — Laila Hirr @ 7:16 pm

I attended an incredible meeting of some of the top minds in PLM at Purdue University’s PLM Center of Excellence last week and while there was far too much discussion to cover in detail, I found Dr. Grieve’s closing comments to be worth noting. With his permission, I am including just a few highlights – very paraphrased as he is an orator worth taking note of and I just can’t take notes that fast…

Some of the key points he raised were:

  • The need to understand that PLM involves a paradigm shift – from atoms to bits – as our technology allows for more and more simulation of the real world – we can do more “virtually” to pre-build our designs and even our manufacturing plants – without physical prototypes – a savings of time, material, energy and more.
  • People issues with PLM are bigger than the technical issues – to extract value from PLM means educating people about the possibilities that the PLM tool training alone does not provide (investing in the subject matter training is as important as the software training and perhaps more so).
  • The absence of PLM related metrics is concerning but we should not allow the absence of metrics to paralyze us.
  • The CXO’s who are investing in PLM KNOW it is NOT optional and they KNOW that business survival depends upon their execution of PLM.
  • Multicultural teams and virtual teams pose new challenges to business. Isolated groups of people are not equal to globalized teams where literally everyone is working on the same development work around the world. Dealing with the time zones for globalized team communication is a problem we haven’t even begun to address.
  • The vendors have been focused on PROCESS – yet innovation does not conform to processes. By definition process stifles innovation. PLM needs to enable PRACTICE – the creative side of product development. Innovation does not come from workflows and process maps.

I enjoyed meeting the folks at Purdue and the participants of their PLM Advisory Board. Keep your eyes open for good things in PLM from Purdue.

Copyright 2007, LHirr, All rights reserved.

January 18, 2007

Should your PLM system live on Oracle or MS SQL?

Filed under: Enabling Technology,PLM,System Selection — Laila Hirr @ 9:54 pm

I was preparing to set up the basic framework of a commercial PLM system at a customer site recently and ended up finding a engineering vs IT debate in progress. Engineering wanted the most pre-built quick to deploy system the selected vendor could provide so readily signed a PO with the vendor for a solution that required the use of MS SQL 2005. When I arrived to do the readiness check, I found that IT was adamantly opposed to MS SQL and would prefer the route of implementing the next tier PLM system (requiring more configuration work) in order to remain with their database environment – Oracle. Thus the age old debate renewed itself. Personally I don’t have a preferance – there are business decisions that warrant the use of either system. It was getting past the hyperbole that I realized was really the issue as this topic does come up often.

So first what are the top tier PLM Vendor trends with supporting the two environments.

Agile – Supported Oracle and MS SQL when they first launched, withdrew support for MS SQL 5 years later, and recently renewed support, September 2006(see http://www.agile.com/pressreleases/index.asp?view=566
Dessault – Supports MS SQL as of November 2005 (see http://www.3ds-microsoft.com/news/2005%2011%2007.pdf)
PTC – Hot off the press – announcing MS SQL support as of Jan. 17, 2007 (see http://www.tenlinks.com/NEWS/PR/PTC/011707_microsoft.htm)
UGS – Has supported MS SQL since October 2004 (see http://www.ugs.com/about_us/press/press.shtml?id=3856)

Why is it that these companies are willing to invest in the architectual changes required to add the support for MS SQL. Obviously this was not a decision to be taken lightly. The NUMBER ONE reason is that the buyers of PLM systems today are in the “mid-market” and the majority of mid-market companies struggle with Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). While many may argue that Oracle is very cost effective, it tends to be the long term costs of skilled Oracle DBA’s that drive the TCO up.

Yet the bias I hear “against” the use of MS SQL – is often based in the historical distrust of Microsoft and concerns about security holes – so I found the linked report by David Lichtfield, fascinating in that it really addresses the question of the security holes “myth”

As I said – I don’t really care which database server I setup customers PLM systems on. The ones I’ve deployed that use both – don’t seem much different from the adminstration of the PLM applications in and of themselves. The vast majority of the time the configuration does not involve even interacting with the database at the database server level after the initial database creation. So if the install scripts work, and the customer wants one over the other – I’ll make sure I understand the reasons, advise them on any issues and move on.

Copyright 2007, LR Hirr, All Rights Reserved

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