Against my better judgment I have decided to write a holiday column. With Christmas coming in two days I thought it would be appropriate to share my wish list for Santa. I have some things I would like to receive but mostly I am asking on behalf of others. Hopefully, Santa has some technical elves that can help some of the companies in the PLM industry step up next year and bring some solid business solutions to market that will be truly innovative and make a significant impact on company productivity. This blog will highlight my wish list for Santa and who is on the nice list this year and who might find coal in their stockings.
Dear Santa,
We here at Zero Wait-State really appreciate all the great gifts you delivered this last Christmas. We really appreciated the 5 hour energy drinks and the Amazon gift cards were really useful. This year we are looking for even better improvements on remote technologies so our consultants can spend a little more time at home with their families and in the office. We really appreciated the VMWare. If you could send us over some extra time to optimize it this year that would be great. While I am in the asking mood feel free to send over some motivated versatile resources to help us continue to improve our service offerings for our clients. I could also use more inspiration next year to keep our blog articles going.
But enough about me let's talk about some of the industry leaders in Product Lifecycle Management (PLM). This year Santa I would really like it if you would bring the developers at the leading PLM vendors some new toolkits that allow them to open up their systems to allow their customers to easily share the information inside their PLM with other people and systems. We have all this great data in our PLM systems but sometimes it is really difficult to share it. I know the developers are trying really hard but I am sure with your help this aspect of PLM could be even better. Hopefully, by now everyone knows that locking up their systems and making them proprietary is a one way ticket to the naughty list.
Another thing I think would be really great is if you sent some technical writers and graphical user interface experts to help some of these companies better document their applications and improve their user interfaces. PLM software can be very frustrating to work with. Having complete and well written documentation would make everyone's life easier including the PLM vendors. If they had better docs customers wouldn't have to spend so much time on the phone with support. This is also true for the user interface. Some companies do better than others but if a system is hard to use it hinders adoption and can create support overhead that drains away value.
It might be tough on the reindeer but if you could bring us some industry standards for PLM that everyone could adopt so that there is some consistency between systems that would be really great. I know this is a lot to ask but you are Santa Claus and you can deliver toys all over the world in a 24 hour period so I figure you can handle it. I would also like it if you could bring the vendors some long term vision so that they can look beyond a three month period and start developing products that are more cohesive and deeper in capability. We seem to get a lot of modules in PLM that address new industries and functionality but don't really offer much capability.
My last request is for a new pricing model that actually captures that value of PLM and allows companies to fully utilize it across their entire enterprise. I know you like to stick to the tried and true methods in your industry but innovation is our lifeblood and hopefully you can find a way to price PLM to allow companies to share information and data from the PLM with their suppliers and customers in a way that makes sense financially for all parties. I hope you don't think my requests are unrealistic. Our industry is full of bright people and I am sure you can help them find a way to make PLM even more valuable in 2011. Thanks for listening and stay warm.
If anyone else has any ideas for Santa please feel free to chime in. I am sure I missed a bunch but my head is already filled with visions of sugar plums. (not really sure what a sugar plum is).
Have a merry holiday season and thanks to everyone for all the positive feedback on the blog this year. We are planning on adding more technical content next year with "how to" videos and information you will find more directly applicable to the day to day use and support of PLM. Thanks to all of Zero Wait-State's customers and partners who have helped make this a great year for us. We are looking forward to 2011 with hope and enthusiasm.