The PLM Landscape

For me, the future of PLM, it involves a lot of expansion from where it's at today in scope as well as in depth. It's going to bring the people component in. You know, there'll be a PLM of people. Today, I think where a lot of PLM is constrained is it's usually being done around a product. And it hasn't— and it's picked up a lot of the product semantics. However, it hasn't been very visible in product analytics. It hasn't been very focused in terms of some of the things the business use cases that they have for it. It's been very much an operational data store. So I think there's a lot of expansion that has to do, especially in the automotive industry, which is where I come from. It's going to be really tied to a person sitting in a vehicle as compared to parts parts in a vehicle or features or whatever, or the manufacturability of it in that particular thing. But it's really going to be many different types of data, and it's going to be semi-structured, structured, as well as unstructured data when we get ready to mix all the data types around the person inside of it. I think it's going to be very much that. I think people want very, very strong products, and a service is a part of a product family, right? You know, in terms of the way that they're set up. So the whole enablement of products, I think you're going to see PLM be the primary focus that is going to be able to take that all the way through its lifecycle. Today I think it's data constrained in terms of what's going on, but I think that you're going to see a lot more expansion in that area. Personally, I think you need to be able to look at the problems you're trying to solve, and PLM may or may not be the right tool for it in terms of where it's going. I think that once you understand the problems you're trying to solve and the outcome of what you're trying to achieve, then I think that if it's product-oriented, I think it's a requirement to be able to look at some sort of product management tool. What I think it needs to be done is to be able to understand the complete and the totality of the process that's going to be looked at and the complete totality of the outcome it's going to be able to go through and look at, too. If data is just to be queryable, that's one thing, but if you're going to use it for a deep search kind of capability, look for patterns and trends, there's probably going to be more than one tool set that's available in there to be able to go through and do it. So, I think understanding exactly what you're trying to solve, the problem you're trying to solve, and the outcomes is the right way to do it. That comes first. That'll— that should decide the selection process for the platforms that you're going to be able to use. Well, I think first of all, you know, we know from research that people are really trying to be able to go and find a company that they're going to be comfortable with. And that comfortable is a lot of things. There's a technology component of being comfortable. If it's something that's against your technology direction, that'll create uncomfort in the organization. If the people match doesn't seem to make in the culture and where you're at and that sort of thing, I think it's a different thing. I think the way that you engage the company, whether it's through a VAR, whether it's through an integrator, whether it's directly with the company, I think that's another thing that a person needs to look at. But first and foremost, I think that you need to be under— uh, comfortable with the company, the leadership team, the methods of engagement, and the product strategy that they have. I think the next thing that you need to be able to do is to understand the product and the capability of the company and if it's lined up in terms of where you're going to be able to go. I think that, you know, there's a series of things that you go through to set up filters, but I personally do believe it's the quality of the company and the quality of the relationship that is the top gating factor in my period. Obviously, that's followed very closely by functionality. And what I call the ILT's, you know, availability, reliability, availability, those kind of things which are coming in there too because many different companies have a lot of different uptime requirements and maintainability whether it's local or remote and those kind of things. PLM is so misunderstood in the market. I've never, well I'm sure there's other examples, but there's a lot of examples where the intent and what the reality of it is are pretty separated. I think that's very much the case in the PLM marketplace. Most people, the practical reality is they're doing pretty tightly constrained data management, probably in engineering and manufacturing are the most uses in terms of where it is. But the promise of PLM is much, much broader than that. It should be, if implemented properly, It's capturing all the innovation. It's capturing all the ideas. It's capturing the planning function. It's got the outcomes that are going to be desired because a good PLM system, which I think there are several out there, what they end up doing is that they can manage all those kind of things and manage all the way down the tree structure in terms of the way that, however the data is laid out in their system. They can do that, but I think that Understanding, you know, what you really want to be able to go through and do with it is going to be important, but that should be a broad context, not a narrow context. I was told this morning that, you know, when we pick a PLM vendor, you pick someone for life. And there's a lot of truth to that because once you get so much data and so much process and so much knowledge base, and if you're doing KBE, for example, it's hard to get off that. So making that decision is very important, but it should be on your future needs as well as your immediate needs. It needs. I've seen quite a few of those. Almost all the biggest failures I've seen and the biggest struggles is where top leadership does not know what the desired outcome is going to be. They don't have a very clear story on that and so they're hesitant to go in and put their career, or their weight behind it or whatever, especially if they have questions about it themselves. So there's this whole thing of education track that, you know, they've got to be able to understand, but it needs to be very clear crystal terms in terms of what you're going to be able to achieve. If it looks like you're in a science experiment, you know, in terms of, you know, a new whiz-bang technology or something like that, that's probably not the best place to go. But if it's fundamental to the core in terms of what you're trying to build, getting your organization to build things that are going to create value and they get behind it and they see a really strong place for it, then that's a key component. Second, I think that PLM systems are oversold a lot. And by oversold, I'm not necessarily talking about so much as the tool, but I'm talking about the whole ecosystem. People, they don't understand the user interface and how hard it is going to be for users to accept the tool. It's going to be the training that's necessary to be able to bring it around. It's the hardness of being able to go and change the culture around the way they've been doing it because PLM by definition is very tight integration in today's usages. [FOREIGN LANGUAGE] Yes, I very strongly believe that PLM has a role to play in that. We heard a talk this morning here at the conference that talked about the same impact that the internet had on before there was an internet and what that actually did through the Netscape example. The creator was talking about that. He's saying that the internet of things is going to have the same exact kind of impact, which will be very, very strong impact, especially in the business areas. So what we haven't gotten around is the modeling is going to be able— necessary, whether it's vertical kind of structures, whether it's horizontally, whether it's maze kind of structures, whether the data, you know, whether we can put temperament in the data items, for example, sympathy, those kind of things. There's feelings and stuff that's going to be coming in when we bring the people component in, but that's what people get. You know, they get emotional about, you know, a lot of things that they want to invest in, and So today, those kind of things are typically left out of PLM in terms of where it's going. It's sort of very much A, B, C, D, or very much on/off kind of things. But it's going to bring in a whole lot of new kind of capabilities. The simplest things like the refrigerators, the thermostats, and, you know, all those various different sensors out there, that is the black and white, but we still don't have the data models that show how that integrates with the person to be able to go through and bring those solutions in. But I think that those kind of things will, over time, will work those data models and people will be implementing them because I think that when we talk about product, product has a very, very strong people component in it and that is the part that's going to bring in the Internet of Things. I think we have several things. One, clearly we have a leading-edge business model that, you know, has been shown if you look to the IT industries that have the same business model what we have. For example, Red Hat has a similar business model. There are others out there that have a path of which we're very much following. We found those business models to be very successful. We understand also that traditional people that didn't start out that way haven't made the decisions to be able to go to that particular kind of model, it's going to be very hard for them to do. So, that's one thing I think it's quite a bit different. Two, I think we have very, very broad scalability in terms of what we do. We've got people who use us for very small implementations and we've got people that, you know, our latest scalable client in terms of scalability is in the, you know, plus 10,000 users. But our tool is highly scalable. But when I actually talk about this with customers, I really go to the Lego sets, you know, because people really relate to Lego sets and these Lego building blocks. And so what we end up doing is talking about, you know, how all these things fit together. And if we do our business right, we'll know exactly what attaches to what and what the relationship between those particular items are, whether it's a parent and child or whether it's between two governing kind of item types in our particular case. So, those flexibilities, that scalability, a leading-edge business model, I think are things that really set us apart. Yes, very much there's a value. If you think of PLM as a part, you know, you run into problems, right, in terms of that. But if you think about it in terms of change management, recipe management, this whole thing of sensors and options of how it's going to be able to feedback on quality in terms of what you're making. If you're talking about this whole thing of the supply chain integration because process industries manufacturing have the same identical supply chain kind of things. They've got to get their own part, quote parts, in there. They've got constant innovation that's going on. They've got all these things around quality. There's a lot of different elements that are identically the same in terms of what you're going to be able to go through and do. So yes, there is a very valid part for them to be able to engage. It's just the product specification itself, I think, in terms of where it's at. That part that people may have problems understanding. Have you done the right homework to be able to go through and to determine exactly what you need to, what business outcomes that you're really looking for, what the actual user groups of this, what the real intent of what they're trying to do. With intent comes expectations. You need to be able to meet those expectations. To be able to do that. I know a lot of people put that in terms of ROI, in terms of that. To me, ROI is a very important factor, but it comes along after you really understand what you're trying to do. So, and I know these are soft terms when you say intent, when you're talking about expectations, and we're talking about management buy-in because all of that, you know, when you add it up, it's kind of murky, but I do know that that's the heart and soul of what you've got to solve. In terms of that. So obviously those kind of things, they break down into much finer detail whenever you start to be able to look at, you know, when you get into things like product structures and you're looking at quality gates and you're looking at a lot of that kind of stuff, which is what PLM really moves into and does with great ease. But the thing is, is that satisfying all that stuff of why you're bringing it into the company needs to be very clear. If you haven't done a good job of that, It will probably slow you down much more than what you actually thought it would. HP Fellow is, and just to make things completely accurate, I'm a Fellow Emeritus, but I'm an HP Fellow for life. It does, but in HP and as well as other companies, there's a designation given to those people who achieve dramatic business results. And this is an honor that's usually given from the very highest part of the company, in our case the CEO and the Vice Chairman, who, they come and they sit with you, they throw very tough problems at you, you get a lot of random requests to be able to do stuff. But in my own particular case, I was always looking at business improvement and if it wasn't in the 75 or 80% business improvement, no matter what the measure, I wasn't interested. And that's a very honest statement to be able to do that. The incremental stuff is many, many people can do 5, 10, 15, 20, but I think doing that thing, if you look at the levels of innovation from 1 to 7, 6 is doing something entirely different. Like for example, when Google came in, they did it an entirely different way in several different fronts. For example, on the way the revenue stream is generated, the way their infrastructure is designed and stuff. They did something entirely different. And I think those levels are very important. Obviously a level 7 is the moonshot where you're going to go for it all. You know, it's the Hail Marys of anything that you want to be able to do. I think true fellows in their heart, they are geared right toward that 6, 7 level to be able to do it. And there are people I think that have great insight based upon experience, based upon maybe a lot of different factors that they come into it, but that's where you set your sights. So those are HP Fellows in a case, and I served with a very elite group of people which I call very close friends to this day.