Shorter time-to-market, higher product development efficiency, better product quality, and lower product costs are often associated with the benefits of adopting product lifecycle management (PLM) systems. When there is an economic downturn, these benefits seem to be more desirable. However, a recent poll (CIMdata Online Polls, presented near the end of CIMdata PLM Industry Summary, 28 May 2010) shows that ten percent of poll participants thought that PLM couldn’t really help tackle economic downturns. I totally agree with CIMdata that this result indicated an awareness issue—current and potential PLM users are not always on the same page with PLM vendors and advocators. Besides this, I felt that some of the ten percent who responded might speak about the real experiences they had with PLM. With the economic downturn in mind, below are a few points I can think of: Read the rest of this entry »

A little while ago, in her post Beware Supply Chain Excel Users—YOU are DOOMED!!!!, my colleague Khudsiya Quadri warned Microsoft Excel users that Excel is not a good option when enterprise applications are expected to be used. Reading her post and the comments that followed is a good exercise in learning different perspectives from different people. However, in my post, I’ll refrain from agreeing or disagreeing, but rather I’ll open another discussion that is also related to Excel—the user interface (UI). Read the rest of this entry »

A recent press release from Dassault Systèmes about its newly signed strategic relationship with BMW in the area of sustainable innovation caught my attention and made me think of its meaning. As usual, I went to Wikipedia but found that this term didn’t exist. The closest term I could find was eco-innovation, which is related to sustainable innovation but not the same in my opinion. So here’s my own definition: sustainable innovation refers to the methodology and practices that lead to the increased capacity to endure within the environmental, societal, and economic surroundings that an organization operates through optimized and valuable changes that…okay, okay, I have to stop here since confusing you is not my objective. Let me simplify it: sustainable innovation means: 1) innovating toward sustainability; and 2) sustainable process for innovation. If this is still not clear, bear with me. I’ll provide a little more explanation. Read the rest of this entry »

Last year, I met an analyst from another firm, and asked him what he thought about quote-to-order (Q2O) solutions, given the relevance between Q2O and the conference that I was attending. Not quite surprisingly, the answer I got was, “this kind of application doesn’t have a future.” The conversation didn’t go any further due to limited time but I could imagine that his reasoning might have sounded like this: even though activities from quoting to ordering may be taken care of by multiple systems, there’s no need to have another system (if there’s good integration in place), which makes the already complicated enterprise information landscape even more complicated. Certainly, this statement can be true if there is good integration in place. However, the truth is that today’s integration amongst various information systems is far from perfection. Let’s take a look at the reality of many companies’ Q2O process. Read the rest of this entry »

A little heads-up: We’re going to start having videos on TEC’s Web site. We’ll produce videos in the future but the first step we’ll start with is a library of links to freely available ones from YouTube. Although YouTube mainly serves as a source of entertainment, there are videos for other purposes as well. After a little searching and watching, here is my playlist of YouTube videos related to product lifecycle management (PLM). Read the rest of this entry »

Recently, Rob Barry summarized some important points on the topic of delivering business process management (BPM) through the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model (see Choosing Business Process Management: SaaS BPM or On-premise BPM? According to this article, although managing business process in the cloud is in an early stage, this delivery model is becoming more noticeable. After reading this, I felt that it would be interesting to know business users’ attitudes toward the SaaS model while selecting BPM solutions. Luckily, I was able to look into BPM selection projects recorded in our BPM Evaluation Center and found that over 16 percent of BPM seekers, in 2009, were willing to acquire BPM capabilities through subscription or leasing agreements.

Read the rest of this entry »

Without a doubt, software-as-a-service (SaaS) as a software delivery model has become a hot topic in the enterprise software field and has gained some noticeable shares in sectors such as customer relationship management (CRM). On the other hand, the product lifecycle management (PLM) industry has seen increasing awareness of SaaS. Oleg Shilovitsky, the most active PLM blogger, has talked about SaaS and cloud computing in some of his recent blog posts on Daily PLM Think Tank Blog. Mark Burhop form Siemens PLM Software also initiated a discussion on cloud computing in a recent blog post. However, SaaS remains as a limited option for PLM users as I see it. Read the rest of this entry »

If you have followed my previous posts of this blog series (Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3), I guess you may have an idea about who will be the third vendor I’m going to discuss concerning the relevance between its product lifecycle management (PLM) offerings and the lean product development (LPD) concept. Yes, it is PTC. Like Dassault Systèmes and Siemens PLM Software, PTC is also located in the CAD-PLM camp (read this article if you want to know more about how I categorized major PLM vendors into two categories) that provides both PLM tools and PLM as the management platform. Read the rest of this entry »

Half a year ago, I wrote about the need to include customer input in the design process in What Brings Customers Closer to Your Product Development? Recently, two pieces of Web content caught my attention and made me revisit this topic.

The first one, The Path to Successful New Products, from the recent issue of McKinsey Quarterly, outlined three principles of making product development more successful, amongst which the degree of “[talking] to the customer” is one of the differentiators that separate top performers from the rest. The second one, a press release from First Insight on January 10, 2010, announced the availability of a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution that allows retailers and brands to have better visibility of consumers’ voices through social media marketing and sales channels. Read the rest of this entry »

After talking about Dassault Systèmes in Part 2 of this blog series, I’d like to move to another prominent player in the product lifecycle management (PLM) field—Siemens PLM Software. In this blog post, I will give my personal interpretations about the major relevancies between Siemens PLM’s offerings and lean product development (LPD).

My first impression of Siemens PLM is the comprehensiveness of its product offerings. The company provides both PLM tools (e.g., computer-aided design [CAD], digital manufacturing, and simulation) and PLM (i.e., collaborative Product Definition management [cPDm]). Also, Teamcenter is one of the few PLM solutions that provide the broadest functionality coverage I have seen. In addition, Some Teamcenter capabilities (such as sourcing and maintenance) show the company’s attempt to expand support to a wider range of business processes. A broader functional coverage of a PLM system allows more parties in an organization to be involved within one system thus provides a possibility to increase the efficiency of the product development processes. Besides this general impression, the following two elements are the most significant ones that relate Siemens PLM to LPD. Read the rest of this entry »

If you haven’t read the blog post ERP Vendors, Are You Green Enough? that I wrote a little over a year ago, I recommend you read it first. After you’ve checked it out, I assume you’ll understand that I used a flawed and extremely simplified approach to “confirm” my impression of the correlation between the size of enterprise resource planning (ERP) vendors and the greenness of their offerings (see below for further explanation). About a year later, I used the same method to go through the same seven ERP vendors I had looked into the last time, and this time my focus was the growth of the green counts. My “conclusion” is that, on average, these ERP vendors have become 71 percent “greener” over the time span of roughly one year. Let me show you some data:

Read the rest of this entry »

Part 1 of this blog post series discussed in general the relationship between product lifecycle management (PLM) and lean product development (LPD), and pointed out that various PLM vendors may have different interpretations of PLM functionality, as well as different levels of support for users’ LPD initiatives. In this and a few future blog posts, I will choose some PLM vendors and talk about the relationship between each vendor’s offerings and LPD, based on my personal interpretation. I will pick one vendor at a time; today’s is Dassault Systèmes (DS). Read the rest of this entry »

The joke “If … Made Toasters” (here is one of many variations) has been circulating and evolving on the Web for quite a long time. The first time I read it was at least 10 years ago, but once in a while I still receive it in my inbox. Since we’re always looking for something different, I’m taking the initiative and starting a new topic in a similar pattern—how do people in different regions select software? Read the rest of this entry »

There are two reasons which led me to write this blog. Firstly, I recently had briefings with vendors such as Learn.com and Xyleme that made me realize that the learning management system (LMS) industry is building up more and more connections with other technologies and enterprise applications. Secondly, a recent article (see Trends in LMS by Don McIntosh) explains how LMS is evolving with Web 2.0, talent management, mobile learning, software as a service (SaaS), and open-source software. Having worked mainly in the product development area in manufacturing, one question popped into my mind—does LMS have anything to do with product lifecycle management (PLM)? Read the rest of this entry »

“Basically, lean is [focused on] creating more value with less work.” – Wikipedia, Lean Manufacturing

No matter who can be credited with making this statement, I have to thank him or her. This statement allows people to apply lean principles in broader circumstances than manufacturing. Following this idea, I’d like to define lean product development (LPD) as this: LPD is focused on developing more products better and with use of fewer resources. To be more specific, LPD contains the following three major elements, in my view: Read the rest of this entry »