What I learned this week ... from Aberdeen's Product Innovation Summit is that the number of companies leveraging lean concepts in product development is much greater than I believed. Maybe I shouldn't be so surprised, but I am. I have seen the results of our research at Aberdeen Group indicating both the value and the rising adoption of lean. I have also been fortunate enough to hear some great presentations on the application of lean in product development and even R&D. But what made me take notice this time around was that lean seemed to come at us from all angles. The lean presentations talked about lean, of co...Read More

I had the chance to talk with ... Phil Cohen of ADAPX at COFES earlier this month about their unique pen-based solution that allows physical markups on drawings or notebooks to be transfered back to the original drawing electronically. Phil, along with industry veteran Jeff Drust, were quite a hit showing off this innovative solution.

What do they Do?
ADAPX leverages technology from Anoto and Rite in the Rain to offer a novel form of design coll...Read More

A quick peek into some research on ... using configuration solutions to customize products comes from Aberdeen's Michelle Boucher as a follow up to her Tailoring Products to Customer Preference benchmark. The follow up research shows that the use of configuration solutions helps to improve profit margins. I'll provide a bit of the research here, but then pose a question. Should configurators be a part of PLM? ERP? Or in some cases, CRM? You will see, I have an opinion.

Different Types of Configurators
The Aberdeen report seg...Read More

I had the chance to talk with... Hardeep Gulati at Oracle the other day about their integration strategy for PLM. Now that Agile is a part of Oracle, integration to the rest of the enterprise systems (whether they are Oracle or 3rd party solutions) is a very important issue. As you might imagine, the Oracle solution is not a one-off but a structured approach with applicability beyond PLM.



What do they Do?
I probably don't need to explain who Oracle is to most people, but a few key points to c...Read More

What I learned this week ... is that despite the maturity of CAD there are still new frontiers of product design - namely nano technologies - that will require a fundamentally new generation of CAD solutions. I had the opportunity to hear about Nanorex is doing to develop a fundamentally new set of CAD tools for the nano world. Mark Sims presented at COFES last week on some very interesting work he and the team at Nanorex are doing that I felt I had to share in relation the maturity of the CAD market.

MarkIII(k), a nanosc...Read More

I had the chance to talk with ... Dassault Systems this week about their SOA strategy and their soon-to-be-released V6 architecture and product suite . I have to be honest, this was the second time I talked to them about this and I am getting a much better impression. Maybe I am jaded by seeing too many vendor presentations that I know "stretch" reality, reminding me of one vendor that in the "B2B" days was accused of having a "P2P" problem - converting "PowerPoint" to "Product." V6 is not yet released, but based on what I can see this is not a case where there is a lot of presentation material without subs...Read More

A quick peek into some research on ... the future of technology to support PLM and product profitability from Aberdeen Group highlights the leading growth areas for PLM-related technology adoption between now and 2010. 

The list provides a few surprises in it's projections:

• The use of Digital Rights Management (DRM) to protect IP will grow 269%, a huge leap resulting from globalization
• Integration of PLM with Enterprise Applications will grow 88%, an indication that PLM has come of age in the enterprise
• Recipe and Formula Management (yes, the core of process and CPG PLM) will grow 81%

What I learned this week ... I have to thank my friends at Theorem Solutions for this time around, which is that companies are increasingly looking to convert "visualizations" of CAD models into editable 3D CAD models.

What I Expected to Hear
I have been overwhelmed recently with great examples of how companies are creating 3D representations of their CAD data in neutral or lightweight formats to share outside of Engineering. More companies are leveraging their 3D design data for greater value by extending it outside of the design environment. One common use is for design collaboration or design review by customers or partners. Often times the people that need to review the design are not engineers and may not have a 3D CAD tool. Or...Read More

What I learned this week ... is that the Lawson Software acquired the PLM division of Freeborders to enter the already confusing Apparel PLM vendor landscape. One of the vendors I have followed for some time in the apparel PLM market is now a part of an ERP company. This is just one of a series of recent changes in this market driven by a flury of interest in PLM from apparel, fashion, and footwear companies. For an industry that is not known for being "cutting edge" on technology, this is a big change. Aberdeen's report on the topic shows that the demand is driven by common PLM pressures - globalization and supply c...Read More

I had the chance to talk with Siemens executive Ralf-Michael Franke this week about Siemens' vision for PLM and MES, known as the "Digital Factory" and consisting of "totally integrated manufacturing."

What do they Do?
What don't they do? Siemens offers products for a broad range of industries, just a part of which includes software. Major segments are Industry, Energy, Healthcare, and Consumer Products. For some that don't know Siemens, compare GE's tagline of "we bring good things to life" to Siemens' self-description of "a global powerhouse in electronics and electrical engineering." Both are so broad they can ...Read More

What I learned this week ... is that midsize companies have gained significant ground in PLM over the last two years. I was reviewing some data for an upcoming "sector insight" to follow up the "Product Innovation Agenda 2010" benchmark report and I was shocked to see how far midsize companies have come. This is the great testament to the power of a blog, I haven't even had the chance to write a formal research document about this but you get to hear it first.

Gaining Ground 2005-2007
I compared Aberdeen benchmarks from 2005 with a benchmark that published in December. Both asked companies whether they had centralized product data (you can read this as PDM) and whether they had extended their centralized data with integrated business processes (you can read this...Read More