THE PLM STATE

The PLM State: Oracle’s Modern Supply Chain Experience 2017 - A rookie’s perspective into the future of Agile PLM

I was excited to learn I would be attending the Oracle Modern Supply Chain Experience (MSCE) 2017 at the San Jose Convention Center.  Though I’ve been in the product lifecycle management (PLM) industry for a number of years, I’ve always been on the “other side of the tracks”, usually competing against Oracle and Agile. Having lived in Campbell, CA in 2005, it was also a chance to visit my old stomping grounds. This blog will cover my "rookie" perspective from attending the event, through the lens of my job here at ZWS as our Regional Sales Manager.

The San Jose Convention Center is a great place for Oracle MSCE.  Downtown San Jose puts you right in the heart of Silicon Valley with easy access to all the great things the Bay Area offers - high-tech start-ups, superb restaurants and the San Jose Sharks.  I stayed at the Hilton, which is attached to the convention center and it was just a short walk to the various sessions. 


As a Silver Partner, Zero Wait-State (ZWS) had the opportunity to hold a training session on the first day.  We recently introduced our RestState product, a PLM lightweight application programming interface (API) for Oracle Agile PLM that uses the REST architecture.  With RestState, developers can easily develop integrations to third-party applications, including those on the cloud and user interfaces to Agile.  We thought having a training session on RestState and integrations to Agile would be of interest.  The title of the session was: “Supercharge Your PLM: Keeping Agile relevant while carving a path to the cloud.”  Not only was our training session well attended, it struck a re-sounding chord throughout the conference - the ability to interface to Agile PLM.  Many companies came to our booth to inquire on ways to integrate to third-party applications, both on-premise and in the cloud.  From my perspective, it appears many Agile PLM users are looking to take advantage of point solutions in the cloud - Jira being a favorite - to optimize their PLM process.  These companies want to leverage their investment in Agile with an eye towards the cloud.

Most of my time was manning the ZWS booth, which, alongside other PLM partners, was in
the back of the exhibit hall.  I hope our location was not representative of PLM's importance in Oracle’s product portfolio.  There was really no new Agile product releases and the current
PD product is not ready for primetime.  Current Agile customers are realizing the only way to enhance their current Agile systems will be through third-parties,  and my conversations with Oracle as of late support this.  Our rally cry for the event was “Supercharge your PLM” and many booth visitors said this theme peaked their curiosity. Dries at MSCE.pngEven though we were in the back, fortunately, we were near one of the Solution Pavilions where various Oracle partners would present. My colleague, Dries D’hooghe who is our VP of Products and Services, delivered a presentation on “Unlock the Full Value of Agile PLM”.  The topic was of great interest as
evidenced by the standing room only crowd as shown in the picture.  Optimizing Agile without affecting on-going maintenance and operations
was another common theme for which Agile users are looking for options.  For these reasons, there was great interest in our DocState (PLM report generation) product and again, our RestState product.

Tuesday evening, I was invited as part of the ZWS team to a dinner hosted by Carol Munroe of Oracle.  It was a who’s who of the Agile PLM world with companies like Qualcomm, Facebook, Seagate and Dell.  Being Valentine’s Day, Carol opened the dinner with a comment that she knows we were all there because “PLM is our true love”.  It was a wonderful time to network and meet new people involved in PLM.

On Wednesday, ZWS started the day by hosting a breakfast with one of our partners, Perception Software.  In between bites of “build your own” breakfast tacos, we discussed some of the challenges the attendees were tackling with optimizing their PLM systems.  We continued with a joint presentation with Perception in the afternoon titled “Smashing Through the Wall: the Barriers Between Design and PLM”.  To stay with the ZWS theme of “Supercharge your PLM”, this presentation addressed the disconnect between design engineering, both mechanical and electrical, and PLM.  This topic resonated as well since integration between mechanical CAD (MCAD), electrical CAD (ECAD) and PLM is uncommon and difficult to achieve.  Anthony Burton of Cisco participated and provided customer insight on the challenges his company faced as they tried, and continue to try, to achieve better data access and process flow between the various disciplines.

I was able to sneak away from the booth and listen to some other customer presentations.  It was disappointing to hear how long it was taking some customers to implement Agile, in some cases up to 18 months. This presenter thought this was actually quite a feat.  In my experience, this seems like an inordinate amount of time and does nothing more than instill fear into prospective clients that Agile is difficult to implement.  With the right expertise and partner, successful implementations should take a fraction of this time.

Luckily, my booth duty was over at 3PM Wednesday and I could attend one of our client’s presentation.  Greg Yow of Teleflex presented how his team was able to create regional bills of materials (BOMs) in a corporate cost-cutting effort without the complexity of Sites.  By using ZWS’ AttributeState, DocState and RestState products, Greg was able to save Teleflex over $800K per month.  Now this is the kind of story that demonstrates a way to supercharge your PLM!  If you weren’t able to attend MSCE, Greg is going to make his presentation again on March 23rd.  You can register for the webinar HERE.

In conclusion, it was a great experience.  Clients are searching for ways to optimize their PLM processes without adding complexity that would hinder on-going support and operations.  A common approach many clients are implementing is to integrate to point solutions in the cloud like JIRA.  For others, it’s to automate cumbersome and time-consuming tasks like report generation.  It’s fascinating to learn of the innovative ways clients are constantly improving their PLM processes.  I look forward to learning more next year.

Teleflex Planting Seeds HP & Lrg CTA.png

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