Category

PLM

Mar 31
The Furniture Factory (Bumpei Usui, 1925)

Design Collaboration in the Age of Pandemic

By Manufacturing, PLM No Comments

The COVID-19 pandemic is bringing key business activities to a near absolute halt. If you work at a product organization, activities that used to be routine such as a team meeting for a critical design review or sending a team of experts to walk the plant floor to investigate a product manufacturing quality problem are no longer possible.

Overnight, overly lean single-source supply chain strategies and hyper-speed agile product development practices exposed the fragility of many organizations’ supply chain practices.

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Feb 15
Red Blue

Why I Don’t Do PLM

By PLM One Comment

A couple of months ago I gave a talk at an industry conference. During a break, a woman that, as it turned out, had heard me speak before and is a regular reader of my blog, commented, “It seems you don’t do PLM anymore.”

I guess she was right. It does appear that over the last several years I wrote and spoke about PLM topics much less than I used to a few years back.  And here is why.

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Apr 02
Planetary Folklore (Victor Vasarely, 1969)

Connected PLM: Making Better and Faster Product Lifecyle Decisions

By Internet of Things (IoT), PLM No Comments

The industrial Internet of Things is breathing a new life into product lifecycle (PLM) practices and PLM software itself.

From its early days, the mantra and promise of product lifecycle management was anchored in the ability to harmonize all product lifecycle activities and frontload complex design and manufacturing. The promised benefits centered on accelerating design and manufacturing ramp up and reducing associated cost by identifying mistakes and resolving conflicts early on, when the cost of design change is still low. Additionally, a centralized repository of reusable designs, best practices, compliance procedures and other objects fosters reuse of enterprise knowledge and experience. These, in turn, reduce the number of design iterations, lower the cost of engineering change orders (ECOs), improve product quality, reduce warranty costs and accelerate time to market.

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Mar 03
Clash of the Titans (Gustave Doré, 1866)

ABB and Dassault Systèmes Team Up

By Internet of Things (IoT), PLM No Comments

ABB and Dassault Announce a Global Software Partnership for Digital Industries

On February 28, ABB and Dassault Systèmes announced they have entered into an agreement to form a “global software partnership for digital industries”: an industry-spanning global partnership to offer customers a broad software and hardware portfolio of PLM, asset health monitoring and factory automation solutions.

This partnership signals yet another major power shift in the enterprise digital manufacturing leadership, preceded by the announcement last summer of a partnership between PTC and Rockwell Automation.

The proposed partnership between ABB and Dassault Systèmes is more than yet another tit-for-tat in the highly competitive and often difficult to differentiate PLM and digital manufacturing space, although I suspect some was of it influenced this recent move.

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Nov 30
Teamwork (Leon Zernitsky, 2014)

Democratizing CAD Data Using Advanced CAD Viewers

By PLM No Comments

Who Needs Yet Another CAD Viewer?

Every product engineering team needs the ability to quickly and easily communicate 3D design data and 2D drawings not only among core team members, but also with manufacturing, engineering, suppliers, service operations and other participants in the extended value chain. Effective information sharing streamlines and improves collaboration and facilitates better and faster decision making within the enterprise and through the extended supply chain.

We often discuss CAD viewers and similar data access tools in the context of “data democratization”: the need to “free” precious data locked in a product data management (PDM) system, a product lifecycle management (PLM) system, or another type of file system for which one needs a specialized, often complex and usually expensive software.

Although practically all CAD and PLM software packages include a free 3D viewer, these viewers are typically attached to and enterprise software license: only authorized users can use them. Consequently, 3D viewers are not available outside the engineering team because the full license is too expensive, and, besides, why would a non-engineer need CAD license anyway? Read More