PLM platforms alone won't fix your problems. Design engineers treat PLM as optional, but collaborating with partners and operations requires clean data and clear processes. The hard part isn't the software: it's deciding what to track for each part type and converting messy old data into structured information.
The leading platforms bring a long list of great functionality, far more robust than they did even a couple years ago. But automation alone isn't going to solve the really hard problems that, that make up PLM. You know, I like to say that part of the problem with PLM is that it's really optional. Design engineers need CAD systems to do their jobs. They don't really need PLM to do their jobs. What they do need though is to work together efficiently, increasingly with external partners, always with, you know, operations or quality organizations. And to do that they need high-quality data and they need efficient business processes. And I think a lot of companies either underestimate that or recognize the importance but don't really know how to achieve it. PLM systems aren't as packaged as many other business applications. If you look at the design process, the exercise of deciding which attributes to track for which part classes and document types is really different than deciding whether you're gonna use 2 or 3 or 4-way matching in a financial implementation. So the design process just looks incredibly different, and that feels different to your, your user community. You know, beyond that, there's the whole data migration process, which is always hard, always important, but I think it's more so with PLM. Often you're creating structured data from unstructured, and that means you're actually doing as much data creation as data migration.
