The PLM Evolution of the Metal Benders

One might argue that the Metal Benders
(Automotive, A&D, Industrial Equipment and other heavy
industrial manufacturing companies have a heavy engineering
component to their product development process) invented PLM. OK,
the acronym probably came from an industry analyst or a vendor,
although it was not me. I have heard multiple people lay claim to
it, and I am not planning to get myself into an acronym
war.

Where it All Started
In
truth, automation in these industries start by using mathematics to
improve drafting and engineering in the form of computer aided
design (CAD). Where did it go from there? Maybe you could
characterize it as from CAD to PDM to cPDM to PLM (to PLM
2.0?)

Many of you know the story from their:

1. Take CAD, add a healthy portion of data
   management because you have so many CAD files running around you
   don’t know what to do with them.
2. Then add design collaboration because more than
   one person needs to participate in the development and validation
   of the design.
3. Then add a process view, because activities like
   change management are a natural extension of the information in
   your (now collaborative) product data management system
   (PDM)
4. From their, add the context of a project because
   the processes and data are all tied back to a timeline and
   coordinating all of the activities just makes sense
5. Next, add project collaboration to extend the
   design collaboration capabilities to all of the “other things” that
   happen in a program that aren’t CAD
6. Integrate the whole thing, extend it to more
   aspects of the product (commercial information, regulatory,
   documentation, etc.) - add more people and departments - mix in
   cross-departmental and cross-enterprise processes
7. Stir, do not shake - and an engineering tool has
   now become an enterprise application with broad
   applicability

Dassault Systems has placed a label on their new
release that calls this PLM 2.0, which includes the transition of
PLM towards web services and SOA. Bernard Charles at Dassault
would explain this much more eloquently than I can, of course, but
that seems to be the crux of it. These are very exciting times in
product innovation and engineering software.

The last step is to integrate that solution to the rest of the
solutions that help run a manufacturing business - because
product development and engineering is only part of the process -
someone needs to sell it, manufacture it, support it, and so on…
That is the next area that I will be researching -
Integrating the PLM Ecosystem. Stay
tuned.

We’ll look at how other industries have adopted
PLM next, to see who are following the Metal Benders (or setting
their own path). In the meantime, what do you think?