PLM and Competitive Intelligence

Data is the new oil: The importance of data is growing, it is all around us and is produced by individuals, companies and smart products. To stick with the oil analogy: Data is just like crude. It is very valuable, but when unrefined, cannot be put to good use. Crude has to be changed into gasoline, chemicals, plastic, etc., to become useful. The same is true of data; it must be analyzed, cleaned, linked and refined to be useful for decision making and to bring value to organizations.

Data generation is skyrocketing. In the past, a manufacturing company was creating documents and manufacturing products ultimately shipped to customers. But, things are changing: Design, manufacturing, operations and customers all generate data that we want to retain and use. Indeed, data is one of an organization’s most valuable assets. The next big wave is to leverage the unlimited connectivity and storage available to collect, aggregate, correlate and interpret all sources of information to improve our lives and enable enterprise to operate more efficiently.

In the past, software vendors were thinking about how to create an application and sell it to users. PLM (product lifecycle management) was no different. There’s nothing wrong with that; selling CAD, PDM and PLM applications is still a profitable business. However, from the standpoint of PLM applications and sales, the elements of this process require some rethinking.

Delivering the Data

The process of solution selling is changing, too. Once upon a time, a company might succeed in business by building a product—one that was better, faster or cheaper than a competitor’s. It was also important to create a better network of customers. Today, you need to do both and also somehow generate revenue in a world where customers expect products for free.

How is that related? Two ways: cloud and data. The first one allows for the creation of a unique product capable of operating at an unprecedented level of data integrity. This is not as simple as placing a PLM server in the Amazon Web Services cloud—this is a different level and involves much more than that. The second one, data, is about making all processes in engineering and manufacturing data driven.

Think about future global manufacturing intelligence and the opportunity to bring a giant manufacturing system that can connect global system records about components, bill of materials, supply chain, manufacturing resources, inventories and work orders. The storage is cheap and the ability to collect information and place it separate from an application is now here.

Building Intelligent Platforms

So, how it can the idea of manufacturing intelligence be applied in the CAD, PDM and PLM realm? Although many CAD and PLM vendors are still looking at how to sell a specific number of seats to a customer, a transformation is underway. The shift is toward building platforms capable of capturing manufacturing competitive intelligence.

Data ownership by applications also brings a significant problem setting a boundary for data. For example, files, databases, tenants, etc. Most of these boundaries are artificial and caused by existing technologies.

Extracting data out of applications and allowing data access in ways engineers and applications can use poses a tremendous challenge. Facilitating engineering data hand-off and making data independent can help improve communication and the effectiveness of engineering organizations.

Engineering and manufacturing organizations must be able to share data seamlessly. Designers, manufacturing engineers, supply chain managers and contractors should all have access to information. Locking them into a specific data management systems or applications is not an option. The existing diverse set of applications will not be replaced, and for the next decade we will live in mixed heterogeneous cloud and desktop engineering applications.

The future of manufacturing competitive intelligence will directly depend on the ability of manufacturing companies to use data. The era of local file management systems is coming to an end and the vendors that provide a platform capable of handling a diversity of easily sharable product data and who collaborate and gather intelligence will win. No company can afford to work in a disconnected mode. Future manufacturing platforms will be dependent on the ability to integrate all systems of records to drive product data intelligence.