I had mentioned in a previous blog how much planning I like to do when I go on vacation. Unfortunately, when you're out on the road there are a lot of variables that can wreck even the best laid plans. On our way from Santa Fe, New Mexico to Durango, Colorado I experienced a small insurrection from my crew. It wasn't quite a mutiny but there definitely was some insubordination. Apparently, we had eaten breakfast too late and none of them wanted to partake of lunch at my carefully selected lunch destination, "The Shed". They weren't very hungry and were eager to get on the road to our ultimate objective, Durango. So I found myself several hours later in Cuba, New Mexico with a car full of hungry people trying to figure out where to eat. Fortunately, I had recently downloaded the application"Yelp" to my Blackberry. It is a review tool that keys off of your GPS location and suggests restaurants in whatever area you find yourself. Even better it offers user reviews so you can evaluate how likely it is that you will contract food poisoning in certain obscure establishments. "Yelp" recommended El Bruno's which surprisingly had several reviews. One was so over the top positive I suspect it was from an employee but we went ahead and gave it a shot and we all survived it without major illness. This blog will analyze how we can leverage technology like "Yelp" in the PLM space to help make smarter decisions about the software we use and companies we work with to optimize product development.

Technology is pretty cool when you can use your cell phone to find an obscure restaurant in the middle of nowhere and it got me thinking about.. what else? Product Lifecycle Management. There are review sites for everything. Sites like Amazon, Best Buy, and Cnet help you evaluate consumer electronics. Angie's List is a very helpful site for service providers like painters, plumber, roofers even veterinarians. Sites like TripAdvisor and YahooTravel can help you find the best hotels and restaurants and even give you tips on activities while you travel. To my knowledge there is nothing out there that provides user reviews for PLM software and service providers. That is until now. Zero Wait-State issued a press release yesterday announcing our new website PLMState. This site will be a vendor neutral destination for companies interested in learning more about PLM software and service vendors. The site will also allow companies to post their experiences with various PLM and service providers so others can learn from these experiences. This site will give clients a more balanced perspective on PLM technology and the companies that help to support these solutions.

Currently, the site is populated with the four major PLM vendors, Oracle, PTC, Siemens, and Dassault. Other vendors are welcome to submit their products to the site for inclusion and at least for now we will list all companies that request a listing. The same policy will be in effect for service providers. Currently, service providers for each of the major PLM solutions are listed but we will accommodate anyone requesting inclusion. We formatted the page to include relevant information about each company and are open to feedback about what type of information would be useful to include in the profiles. Companies who are listed on the page are more than welcome to request modifications if they are unhappy with our descriptions. We tried to limit the information to facts and minimize the sales speak but since we leverage web content some marketing information is inevitable. We are also planning to add other resources to the page including blog sites and other sites that provide useful PLM information.

The key to this site is user participation. If the community does not share their experience with PLM technology and solution providers then it will minimize the value of the site. Publishing opinions about software and consultants can be a little intimidating for some but I am fairly confident that there are knowledgeable people out there who can share their thoughts on the solutions they use and the partners they work with. Hopefully, this site can provide constructive feedback to vendors and partners about what they are doing right and what they need to address with their products and services and this will improve the quality of both. By using this site to express your thoughts on PLM you are helping the entire industry with an unfiltered view of how these tools really work and starting a dialogue with both vendors and partners. We will closely monitor the site to make sure that companies are being fairly depicted and that feedback is coming from legitimate sources. If we determine that anyone is abusing the site they will be removed. So far the response has been very encouraging and we are hopeful the site will become a valuable resource for the PLM community.

Given how critical PLM technology is to new product development it is surprising how little research is really available for the technology and partners that service this industry. References are rarely checked and benchmarks and demonstrations can leave gaps that are only revealed after using systems in production. Technology allows us to find restaurants in the middle of nowhere and to plan trips and even screen our dog's doctors. It is time to take advantage of this technology in the PLM industry and leverage each other experience. I hope you enjoy the site and that it benefits companies using PLM software.