Building enterprise collaborative PLM just got easier

Big product lifecycle management (PLM) systems are slowly and quietly growing in popularity – and not just for their fundamental engineering and product management capabilities, but because of their enterprise business governance and auditing facilities and their collaborative information sharing environment. It’s happening, albeit not rapidly, way beyond the aerospace and defence sector, where PLM’s precursor, PDM (product data management), has its roots in massively complex systems aimed at tying together diverse engineering design, development and manufacturing departments. Sectors as different as consumer packaged goods (CPG), high tech, electronics and telecoms and general industry – those that have a high engineering content and/or are outsourcing their manufacturing to contractors – are slowly turning to what hitherto were specialised systems. And business functions as diverse as purchasing, sourcing, supply side, logistics and project management are becoming key users. It’s been long predicted, but very slow to come. Now, however, with understanding of the power of web technologies to provide the fundamentals for universal, low cost, easily managed information visibility, and IT engines providing the data management, workflow structure and the rest, with enterprise strength robustness, it seems it might be ready to take off. MatrixOne, hitherto a specialist PLM software developer trying to spread the PLM message around the middle market, says its revenues for the last quarter in the UK and Northern Europe just doubled year-on-year. And that came from Global 500 companies across industry. Indeed, so great was its apparent upturn from the big end, that the firm is now focusing entirely on large companies for its growth, while the middle manufacturing market is left to opportunity. It sees its competitors as SAP, in particular, on the business ERP side, and PTC and EDS coming from the engineering side, while IBM, despite its strong links to Dassault Systems and the Enovia and SmarTeam systems, is also an implementation and consulting partner. UK managing director John Bell says this is where the big enterprise PLM business currently is. “There’s a lot of pressure now to demonstrate corporate governance in light of the Enron experience. Companies know that traceability is now key. ‘I never got sight of it’ doesn’t quite hack it any more.” And he says that whereas PLM came from engineering R&D, now his systems are being seen as enterprise backbones ideally suited to spanning multiple departments, sites and even supply chains, and imposing management structure while providing a collaborative information sharing environment for essential efficiency and agility. “PDM systems always had the capability to become an enterprise play,” he says. But big general industry is now waking up to the fact. Big wins for MatrixOne include food packaging producer Weir Technology which, according to Bell, has already seen recalls prevented and is seeing improvements along its whole supply chain. He also refers to an as yet unnamed “manufacturer of supply side rail systems”. Other big clients include GE at one end of the spectrum and Pace at the other. And prices have come down: Bell says sensible entry level systems are around the £150,000 mark for a 60-user system comprising a collaborative working platform and enterprise applications – with hardware, implementation, consultancy and training on top. Compare that to a couple of years ago! Latest release from the company – claimed as “the industry’s most flexible, scalable, and interoperable PLM architecture” – tells the new look enterprise PLM story perfectly. Its eMatrix Adaptive Application Architecture supports an updated eMatrix Collaboration Platform and eMatrix ‘Value Chain Portfolio’ – the scaleable application modules that cover from secure collaborative product development to business and supply chain management applications with the emphasis on speeding innovations to market and providing corporate governance. It’s all developed on J2EE standards, with XML and Web Services connectivity and collaboration, there’s a dynamic business modeller to ease business process development and integration, and importantly also ongoing change. And it’s scaleable apparently from 500 users up and running within three months, to 10,000.