The Deep Dive with Jacques Cousteau

When I was a kid I was always fascinated with the Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau. The technology they developed to go deep down in the ocean was amazing. I recently heard James Cameron speak at SolidWorks World and he discussed his innovations to allow for the exploration and salvage of the Titanic. He also spoke of new technology that will allow vehicles to fully explore the Mariana Trench, the deepest known part of the world's oceans. That will obviously be the deepest dive ever. The term deep dive has also become synonymous with a thorough review of technologies. We use it often to indicate a meticulous breakdown of a particular subject matter. Obviously in the context of the discussions I began previously on engineering based PLM and manufacturing based PLM a deep dive would indicate a breakdown of the characteristics of the two PLM technologies and the benefits and shortcomings of each approach. Before we embark on our voyage on our own virtual Calypso(Jacques' boat) I wanted to outline the approach we will take to analyze each PLM platform.

While there are a number of worthy candidates from a PLM perspective in order to keep this article series relatively concise we will need to tag specific PLM solutions to be representative of each approach. Based on our experience there seem to be two PLM solutions that effectively represent the engineering based PLM platform. PTC's Windchill PDMLink and Siemen's UG Team Center are widely adopted solutions particularly in the Aerospace and Defense segments as well as Heavy Equipment Industry both dominated by engineering concerns. We also have firsthand experience with both of these applications which helps in providing accurate analysis of the characteristics of these applications. PDMlink excels at managing data generated from their computer aided design (CAD) solution Pro/Engineer and Team Center leverages the Unigraphics NX CAD data equally well. These CAD integrations are the lynchpin for the value of these solutions and very rarely do customers adopt these applications without owning the CAD products associated with these PLM applications. For the manufacturing based PLM solutions we have identified Oracle's Agile PLM and Dassault's Matrix One. Both of these applications were stand alone PLM solutions at one time and have recently been acquired. As standalone PLM solutions they tended to concentrate on the bill of material creation and management aspects as well as downstream supply chain issues. Both of these products tend to minimize engineering's participation in the PLM process and concentrate more heavily on providing accurate information to companies enterprise resource planning(ERP) tools. While both PDMlink and TeamCenter have respectable market share in the high tech space certain types of companies in this sector tend to gravitate toward solutions like Agile and Matrix One. Again there are other solutions that compete with these products but for our purposes they represent the typical characteristics of the manufacturing based PLM due to their evolution as standalone PLM vendors and the markets they tend to serve.

There are a number of ways one could go about analyzing these solutions but to illustrate the points we are trying to highlight about the inherent strengths and weaknesses of these applications we will look at four specific areas. The first article will review the data models of each platform. There are consistent similarities between PDMlink and Team Center due to their origins and client base and also with Agile and Matrix. We first highlight how this model looks and what the implications behind the model are for clients. The second article will focus on user experience. Again because of the background of the solutions and how they are utilized the user interfaces are somewhat different for each platform. We will look at what this means for clients and highlight the different approaches. The third article will discuss work in process management. How each platform handles managing the CAD data generated by authoring tools like Pro/Engineer, UG NX, Solidworks, Mentor , Cadence, etc. As with the other articles there are clear differences in philosophy about this information and it affects  the overall architecture of the applications significantly which can be a real issue for potential clients. The final article of the deep dive will focus on modules and breadth. There are numerous aspects to PLM and again depending upon the focus of the solution some of these aspects are more thoroughly addressed in one platform versus another. We will look at things like quality, program management, compliance, product costing, and integration to ERP to try and indentify if there are any significant differences and what the implications of these might be to clients.

Once we complete this review we would like to include 4 interviews from advanced end users of each solution. We will prepare a list of identical questions for each of the applications to get first hand feedback from experienced users of the applications. If you feel like you have sufficient experience please contact me. We will provide a $100 gift certificate from Amazon to the four participants we select. The interview will take less than an hour. Please include your background and any relevant information about your exposure to PLM applications. We would prefer end users but are open to consultants that have previously used the applications in a production environment. After we publish the interviews we will wrap up the series with an article with final conclusions. As we go through this process we welcome feedback from users and consultants. Our knowledge is pretty strong but I suspect there are others out there who have valuable insight to contribute to the discussion. So far the comments on linked in have been very helpful and I encourage anyone with an opinion to chime in. So get ready, check your tanks we are off to explore the depths of PLM.