It’s taken about 12 years, but PLM, product lifecycle management, the software concept that promised the integration of every system to do with manufactured products, may finally be moving into the mainstream.
Your current view on PLM is likely to depend on where you sit in the industry supply chain, on which industries you’re involved in, and on your susceptibility to hype.
The idea of PLM may have been pretty much defined for a dozen years, but it still splits opinion like no other engineering software idea. Is it the ultimate in all-embracing, product-defining and controlling systems, or the ultimate in overblown three-letter-abbreviation management-speak? Is it real or just empty rhetoric? We may finally be about to find out.
Three of the big engineering software groups, each with a background in computer-aided design, are making significant PLM moves.
In one case, a company that’s been pretty scathing about others’ efforts in PLM is about to plunge itself into the market; in another, an established PLM player is trying to add new areas of functionality to existing systems, expanding the type and scale of information held within systems; and a third is revisiting its systems to raise the level of integration between different elements. In order, the three are Autodesk, PTC and Dassault Systèmes, which also owns SolidWorks.
The newcomer into PLM is Autodesk. One of the biggest names of them all in product design, definition and visualisation software, it’s taken up to now a trenchant view of PLM and it isn’t about to apologise for that.
Chief executive Carl Bass, announcing that Autodesk would start shipping its own version of PLM called Autodesk 360 Nexus from March, recalled that his last pronouncement on the subject had been to the effect that “the only people who have problems with PLM are the PLM vendors” – his rivals, who he saw as struggling to sell their concepts to their customers.
“PLM was too slow, too expensive, hard to use and didn’t provide enough value,” he said, and he still stands by that.
So what changed to make Autodesk come into the market? Essentially, the new factor is “the cloud”: the ability to run software systems externally as a “service” sitting on someone else’s server and accessed remotely from anywhere.
In Autodesk’s new vision of PLM, the cloud is a venue for hosting both programs and the collaborative transactions that are at the heart of PLM systems.
Cloud computing is a “disruptive technology,” says Autodesk’s European sales director Richard Tinsdeall and the disruption in the PLM market is to turn PLM from a monolithic, heavyweight concept into a flexible, modular, plug-and-play set of functions. Autodesk is referring to these functions as “apps” and is saying that around 100 different ones will be available from the launch date in March.
The difference, says European technical manager Lieven Grauls, is that where previous PLM architectures have built themselves off the back of heavy computer-aided design (CAD) and product data management (PDM) systems, and PLM applications have had to carry that heavyweight baggage along with them, the new systems don’t need to.
So although some of the demand that Autodesk says it is responding to comes from customers for its established Vault PDM system, and “PLM has traditionally grown out of PDM,” the idea of Nexus is that you leave the heavy stuff locked away in your own server behind your firewall and release on to the cloud only the material that’s subject to collaboration or transactions or that can be used to do new things. And you pull back into your proprietary systems new material that you develop in cloud apps.
“Customers say they want to do more than PDM, but they’re not necessarily doing it at present, or feeling with the current PLM systems in the market that they can,” Grauls says.
Some functions that might usefully link into the data that’s held in CAD and PDM systems, such as requirements, project management and regulatory compliance, aren’t as well used as they might be in current PLM systems.
But the range of Autodesk apps in its PLM package – details are a bit sketchy so far – will also include material that hasn’t hitherto been much associated with the design and manufacture focus of current PLM, to enable people from other disciplines, such as marketing or service functions, to access, use and augment product and project-related information.
Autodesk isn’t alone in having this ambition of broadening the usefulness of PLM out into other non-engineering areas, of course: it’s been a strong theme of Dassault’s CEO Bernard Charlès’ long-running drive towards “life-like” PLM. And Autodesk isn’t alone either in trying to open up a new PLM market in smaller firms by using an element of “pick’n’mix” do-it-yourself customisation: the free-download Aras PLM system that trades on its ease of installation and use, for example.
This isn’t the only development in terms of extending the reach of current PLM systems, though. PTC, often portrayed as very much an engineering-centred system, has been making significant changes over the past couple of years in terms of adding new functions to its Windchill PLM package. It’s bundled together a lot of these under the heading of “product analytics” and they include tasks like regulatory compliance that will be apps on Autodesk’s cloud.
Now, though, PTC is heading off in a slightly different direction. Where the analytics capabilities have in many cases added credibility to claims that PLM systems offer true “lifecycle” support, PTC is now going back to the basic product information, and the data that is held on that within PLM systems, and filling in some gaps there.
And there are big gaps, says Andrew Wertkin, chief technology officer in PTC’s Integrity division. Integrity is the new name within PTC for the systems and functions the group acquired when it bought Wertkin’s previous company, MKS, with the aim of integrating them within Windchill PLM.
The gaps are in terms of both the “products” PLM systems cover and the tasks that can be aggregated and managed through them, Wertkin says. The big area that tends to be missing in current CAD-derived PLM systems, he says, is the software content which, in products such as aeroengines and medical devices, can account for up to 80% of current development.
“Everyone says software is just another item on a bill of material, but actually it breaks most of the rules,” Wertkin says. “There’s no function or fit and it keeps changing, and it really doesn’t work with a hardware bill of materials.” In companies such as automotive firms which have been big users of PLM systems, managing the different lines of code in vehicles and ensuring their compatibility is a huge task.
Alongside this apparent gap in product data, PTC has identified gaps in the integration of other kinds of information with the basic design and manufacturing data held in current PLM systems: information such as requirements, configuration, system modelling, and the whole area of testing and test management.
Integrity is meant to tackle all of these areas, and will be rolled out over quite a long period, starting early this year with software management and requirements work: capturing and defining what the customer actually wants.
Is it PLM? Well, it’s meant to work alongside and within PLM, but PTC currently refers to it as ALM, which stands either for asset lifecycle management or application lifecycle management.
Dassault Systèmes, meanwhile, is also talking about new directions and new terminology in PLM. Charlès has long spoken about the “democratisation” of innovation that collaborative technologies such as PLM can help achieve and how that can be delivered by putting information and access to it on the cloud.
Now he’s taking this a stage further and talking not just about “product lifecycle” but about “products in life” – relating the innovation inside PLM systems to the wider context of where the products will be used and how people will interact with them.
The key to this, he says, is Dassault’s V6 architecture, which underpins and links all of the group’s software and is intended to be the basis for everything from heavyweight current systems such as those used in automotive and aerospace firms through to new lightweight app-style functions delivered on mobile phones or through social media. Dassault sees V6 as having a lifespan of its own probably extending over the next 15 to 20 years or so.
During that period, a lot of the questions about current PLM systems will be answered, with new functions brought into the system, and issues such as the practicality of running heavy CAD and PDM programs on the cloud resolved. A step towards that by Dassault is likely to be the formal announcement of what seems to be called SolidWorks Enfuse: V6, compatible with Dassault’s chunkier Catia design system and hence all the PLM kit, ready for the cloud, and easily accessible.
That may happen this month. Or maybe next.
Either way, it’s another event in what has suddenly become the rather fast-moving world of PLM.