The Changing Face of Product Lifecycle Management

By Tom Kevan

Figure 1: Powerful out-of-the-box PLM workflow templates provide global collaboration functionality. These can easily be customized for specific business practices. Image courtesy of Aras Corp.

Technologies, architectures, and business models that debuted in other computing applications are now transforming product lifecycle management (PLM). The major agents of change are software as a service,  service-oriented architecture, Web services, and the open-source business model. In addition, the scope of the tools that make up this software genre is expanding and incorporating new applications and functionality. The transition is still in its early stages. Like a game of musical chairs, the final resting place of these elements has yet to be decided.

  Accompanying these new players is a face that has become familiar in recent years: enterprises’ growing intolerance for large, expensive software packages that take years to deploy and that often don’t deliver on the soaring promises of their purveyors. The combination of the dynamic technical elements with the demand for quickly deployable, less costly software is reshaping PLM. And while its final form is unclear, it does seem safe to say that one of the chief beneficiaries will be small and medium-size businesses (SMBs).

Giving SMBs What They Need
SMBs confront a common set of core challenges. These include centralizing multidisciplinary information, working with hundreds of suppliers on a worldwide stage, and making sure the contract manufacturers that perform the bulk of their fabrication are on the same page. What SMBs need most are solutions that solve these core problems quickly. “A theme for us is making sure that we provide small businesses with a very rapid, almost tactical,  solution,” says Eric Larkin, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Arena Solutions.

  Vendors achieve this speed and agility by providing standard, preconfigured process, business rule, and best-practice templates that work right out of the box (see Figure 1, above). These allow SMBs to get up and running rapidly.

“There’s a level of functionality that should be available in the software to start with,” says Peter Schroer, President & Founder of Aras. “The nimbleness of our smaller customers is what’s making them competitive, especially in today’s economy. It’s the fact that they can innovate new products and processes faster. They can change the way they do business much faster than the larger companies. That’s their edge today.” 

Figure 2: Solid Edge with Synchronous Technology uses Live Rules to find and maintain critical geometric conditions, such as tangencies between a small face and large cylinder.  Image courtesy of Siemens  PLM Software

Streamlining user interfaces also enables SMB to realize the value of PLM quickly. “Process-oriented user interfaces for CAD, CAM, and CAE applications (see Figure 2) that lead the user through the steps minimize the amount of training required before companies can take advantage of the product and allow use by occasional users, as well as experts,” says Bruce Boes, Vice President of Velocity Series Global Marketing for Siemens PLM Software.

  Training and familiarization are also minimized by basing PLM software on Microsoft technology. “We are definitely learning that the Microsoft platform is very appealing to SMBs,” says Schroer. “They already know it. Their IT groups can support it. All this supports the companies’ need to be nimble.”

“They look for it to be Microsoft based because more often than not they’ve already implemented SQL, SharePoint, and Microsoft Office,”  says Boes. “Also, following a Microsoft user interface promotes ease of learning and helps people come up to speed on a learn-as-you-go basis.”

  A feature set that indirectly supports quick and easy deployment involves scalability and extensibility. This is the ability to start small, take on one problem, and then incrementally add functionality and users to the software as needed.

“SMBs are looking for a solution that they know will grow with them, as they go from an SMB to a large enterprise,” says Bill McClure,  Vice President of Velocity Series Product Development for Siemens PLM Software. “They want to be able to add more applications, or modules. Then they want to make sure there are no limitations in terms of the number of users the solution supports.”

  Finally, it’s essential to SMBs to gain control over their engineering information (see Figure 3). Companies face lots of challenges when managing complex data on network drives. One problem is finding the latest version because there is no version control on network drives. People may have a local copy and a network copy, so there’s a problem identifying the latest version. The problem is compounded when multiple people are involved. People also override each other’s work or are unable to search and find old designs.

“Companies need to manage different types of data, whether it be 3D CAD data, Office documents, images, and so forth,” says Siemens’  McClure. “Our core PDM system is designed to be able to manage those different types of data. But probably what’s more important is our software’s ability to define and manage relationships among those different types of data.”

Hosted PLM
Beginning around 2000, SMBs had a new venue from which to license their PLM—hosted systems, or software as a service (SaaS). Under this software deployment model, the vendor licenses an application as a service on demand, with the software residing either on the provider’s Web servers or in some way on the end users’ infrastructure. Proponents claim the chief benefit of this approach is reduced cost because it eliminates significant overhead for the end user.

  One of the primary vendors in the PLM space taking this tack is Arena Solutions. “We are a true multi-tenant software-as-a-service offering,” says Arena’s Larkin. “Our customers access the Arena application through a Web browser, so there is no client footprint, no software that they need to install on their side to make use of the solution. We do have target integrations that are built on Web services technologies, with SolidWorks and electronic design automation tools and lots of downstream enterprise software tools, typical tools used by the mid-market.”

  This approach has not experienced “explosive” growth because of the risk involved. Companies are reluctant to transfer valuable proprietary product development data over the Web and have it reside offsite, out of their control. Lee Garf, Vice President of Product Management at PTC, another vendor offering a hosted solution, responds to these concerns: “I think it’s a matter of perception. People will send their credit card number to buy something online, but they won’t send a CAD model?” 

Figure 3: Arena makes it easy for companies and their partners to simplify and standardize engineering change management processes and reduce engineering change order cycle times. By supporting best practices,  Arena helps ensure that product design changes are clearly communicated to the right people at the right time.  Image courtesy of Arena Solutions

Larkin addresses these concerns in this way: “We provide facilities for customers to maintain copies of information on their own servers, but the active copy resides in our infrastructure. We have a rigorous security regime, both from a confidentiality standpoint, maintaining servers,  and continually monitoring the vulnerabilities all the way through to integrity—making sure that we have weekly, daily, and hourly snapshots of the full production data set replicated. With our solution, the customer administers their own virtual private workspace and administers access to that information. There is a security element that is fundamentally customer driven and that depends upon customer practices.”

  But beyond the risk issue, others challenge the validity of the overall approach. “We fundamentally question whether or not the business model is right or not,” says Siemens’ Boes. “We don’t feel that it is necessary to go outside for software as a service because we solved the fundamental problems by building on Microsoft technology, implementing with short implementation plans and standard out-of-the-box processes, and all of the various other things we’ve done to build our solutions specifically for the needs of SMBs of mid-market. We’ve been able to create solutions that have a low total cost of ownership without going outside for shared resources. And we are able to get them implemented in such a way that people can implement them with their own resources. They don’t need to go to somebody else for that implementation.”

  The final judgment on this assertion will come from end users. But for many, hosted PLM software offers a way to test the waters without investing large sums of money and significant human resources. They also see the model as a way to inject an extra measure of honesty into the process and avoid falling behind the technology curve.

“One of the things I like about the software-as-a-service model is that it forces honesty on the vendor because you don’t collect a lot of money upfront and you don’t ask a lot of the customer upfront,” says Larkin. “So you have to be able to show very quickly that they made a good decision by installing this system or setting up this tool. Small businesses that are looking at putting in on-premise enterprise solutions in this day and age are just signing up for a declining and soon-to-be obsolete platform for their business.”

Open-Source SOA
In addition to SaaS, technologies such as service-oriented architecture (SOA) and the Red Hat open-source model also hold the potential to transform PLM. In the PLM space, it is primarily the relative newcomers that represent the majority of the companies that base their offerings 100% on these technologies and models. Perhaps the reason for this is the fact that the major PLM vendors, which have been around 20+ years, have a lot of legacy architecture that they continue to try and bring forward.

  A vendor whose products incorporate both elements is Aras. “We founded Aras in 2000 to leverage a new architecture,” says Aras founder Schroer. “It’s called a model-based SOA. The key here is the fact that rather than programming, the way the Aras PLM system works is you do modeling. In a sense,  you draw pictures of your workflow. You draw pictures of the forms and business rules you want. It’s very graphic, and the system implements the code under the covers for you. It takes a lot of complex programming out of customizing. That lets you customize rapidly without programmers. A typical IT department can do their own without having to buy a lot of consultants.”

  SOA is well suited for PLM applications because of the amount of integration required. “Our product supports integration in three ways,”  says Schroer. “One is its use of the open-source model. Another is its Microsoft grounding. The third is Aras’  standardization on SOA Web services. So the way we interact with all systems is XML SOAP messaging.”

  Aras differentiated itself even further in 2007 by adopting what it calls the enterprise open-source model. “What that means to the SMB is they can go to our website, download Aras Innovator, and install and use it—no time lock, no user limit,” says Schroer. “Basically, they have the whole application. There is no charge for the licenses of software. Aras charges for training, documentation, and support contracts. If they need our help, we offer a hotline, security patches, and security updates.”

The Future of PLM
For SMBs, the PLM of tomorrow will be different from what is available today. For example, in the past 18 to 24 months, the focus of the software has shifted from primarily managing CAD files to quality data management. This shift is accompanied by a consolidation that is bringing together the 20 to 40 different applications and including new types of applications,  such as product planning, innovation, and risk management.

  Also look for growing roles of Web 2.0 technologies. The future of PLM will be shaped by things such as FaceBook, LinkedIn, Presence Detection, and IM. These are things that have applicability to PLM.

  These changes will enhance the effectiveness of PLM. And that will increase PLM’s value to SMBs.

More Info:
Aras Corp.

Arena Solutions Inc.

Dassault Systèmes

PTC

Siemens PLM Software

Tom Kevan is a New Hampshire-based freelance writer specializing in technology. Send your comments about this article to [email protected].