Practice makes good what the process is lacking

Rix Kramlich is a company VP at Right Hemisphere, a vendor of “product communication and collaboration” solutions. His recent visit to MBT's Chicagoland offices highlighted issues concerning manufacturing systems.

When product data management (PDM)—as a computerized means for managing design information—first hit the street in the mid-1990s, proponents spoke of it as an “uber”-system in relation to enterprise resources planning (ERP), the transactional system of record. But, perhaps because the enterprise rejected rule by a system emanating from engineering, PDM never attained such vaunted status.

Instead, PDM's peer-to-peer relationship with ERP has never been completely reconciled, leaving gaps or overlaps that lead to disparities between actual business practice and a business process, as defined by its IT infrastructure.

One glaring disparity involves bills of material (BM), the most fundamental of manufacturing documents, which may be found in both systems. This of course violates the most basic rule of document management: “There should be only one right version.”

In fact, emerging PLM vendor Omnify was in MBT's offices just days before Kramlich's visit, and cited resolution of BM conflicts as one of its solution's strengths as well.

Persistence of ERP/PLM functional overlaps and gaps may explain why, despite a mature PLM market dominated by less than a half-dozen major players, emerging vendors continue to appear. (Product life-cycle management, or PLM, is today's Internet-driven take on PDM.)

Now Kramlich is one sharp guy, having joined Right Hemisphere from Solidcore Systems, where he was co-founder and executive VP, and having held senior positions at Supplybase.inc, i2 Technologies, and Macromedia. He began his career as an architectural designer, transitioning to the software industry via specialization in CAD and visualization.

It is interesting then that when Kramlich reentered the manufacturing and supply chain space—something he hadn't anticipated doing—he signed on with Right Hemisphere, whose solutions complement those of Adobe Systems. Right Hemisphere also is an Adobe 3D technology provider.

Everyone knows about Microsoft desktop and plant-floor ubiquity. And this editor recently told someone, “If I had a dime for every manufacturing software vendor basing its success on marketing to the SAP installed base, we'd be on our way to Starbucks.”

Less recognized is Adobe's emerging layer of solutions that reconcile business practice, how things really get done, with the business process—as automated by enterprise systems.

Adobe PDF, Adobe Acrobat, and Acrobat 3D allow secure sharing of information—including live data taken from diverse systems—in an information packet. Adobe LiveCycle builds structure around collaboration practices.

Right Hemisphere complements Adobe LiveCycle, for which it is a reseller. Its own software plugs into and extends Acrobat 3D for 1) collaborative design & sourcing; 2) technical publications & training; 3) service & support; and 4) sales & marketing. Customers include Lockheed Martin, Pratt & Whitney, DaimlerChrysler, and more than a half-dozen other multi-billion, name-brand global manufacturers.

Visualization is hot, and Right Hemisphere is one of about a dozen Windows Vista Premier Launch Partners, no coincidence given visualization capabilities in what has been called Microsoft's first “3D” operating system.