Today, many assets are designed and manufactured with the help of product lifecycle management (PLM) tools and systems, which contain highly valuable product definition information for enterprise asset management (EAM) and computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) operations.

That being said, if there is a way to tie the two systems (EAM and PLM) together, the result will be beneficial to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), asset owners, and third-party maintenance service providers. However, this isn’t an easy job. The following are a few barriers between EAM and PLM as I see it. Read the rest of this entry »

Part 1 of this blog series depicted the rise and fall of of erstwhile public software company Click Commerce based in Chicago, Illinois, United States (US). At the end, the article mentioned the July 2009 merger of Servigistics and Click Commerce’s Service Network Services (SNS) division.

The private equity firm Marlin Equity Partners acquired both entities recently with the idea of forming a new combined company to solve the planning, optimization, execution, and analytics challenges associated with delivering post-sale service. The new company, with estimated combined revenue of nearly $100 million (USD), will be headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia (US) and retain the Servigistics name and its chief executive officer (CEO). Read the rest of this entry »

The old adage “he who lives by the sword will die by the sword” might have been best witnessed in the life and demise of erstwhile public software company Click Commerce based in Chicago, Illinois (US). With its roots in the partner relationship management (PRM) or demand channel (chain) management (DCM) space, the company had first gobbled up a number of struggling PRM/DCM peers in the early 2000s. These mergers coincided with a time when there was a growing realization that the niche PRM market was not sustainable on its own.

Namely, the pundits saw the possible PRM future only as a part of a broader customer relationship management (CRM) suite or an even broader enterprise resource planning (ERP) suite. Following up on these PRM acquisitions and some internal development of the quote-to-order (Q2O), content management, and master data management (MDM)/product information management (PIM) capabilities, Click Commerce eventually rounded out its Channel Management division sometime in 2005.   Read the rest of this entry »

The title of this blog post might sound like a no-brainer: as clear and indisputable as the “motherhood and apple pie” adage. Yet how many times have you dealt with a seemingly not-really-knowledgeable call center person over the phone or a clueless technician that showed up at your door? To be fair, maybe those folks were knowledgeable in principle, but were still ill-informed about your particular problem, previously explained at a great length to someone else within their company.

Why on earth then did the call center agent ask you to repeat all those personal and problem-related details, or why did you have to explain yet again the problem and symptoms to the field technician, who then had to go back to the office to bring the (hopefully) correct part? In the do-it-yourself (DIY) self-service scenario, how many times have you had to plow through numerous pages, pesky hyperlinks, and/or an abundance of annoying questions (that endlessly branch into more questions)?

And all those attempts only to eventually give up on the self-service diagnostic adventure, and to yet again be put on a lengthy hold (with “sleepy elevator” Kenny G’s music being periodically interrupted with the annoying “please hold the line, as your call is important to us” mantra) in order to talk to a human being? And as Murphy’s Law would have it, the solution often turns out to be as asinine as you just needing to plug the machine into the wall or removing a lost sock from the filter. Read the rest of this entry »