Page 1 - Welcome Page 2 - Update Page 3 - News Page 4 - Brief lines |
* Welcome * Welcome to 2PLM, an e-zine distributed about every two weeks. This issue includes :
by Roger Tempest With a little thought, it is quite possible to predict what next year's PLM news will be. There will be a small number of trade shows, and the vendors will each host high-profile events where their users can meet. Some white papers will be published, conveying advice on various aspects of PLM. Short case studies will appear, explaining how a customer has reduced their product lead time by using a vendor product. Vendors will release details of their software alliances and financial results. Webcasts and webinars will be staged. In other words, pretty much the same as this year, apart from the worsening economic news. Alternatively, the year begins with the announcement that some of the major PLM vendors and service providers are supporting an industry-wide initiative to improve the adoption and effectiveness of PLM throughout the marketplace. There are obviously many different views about this, so news articles appear describing the debate and the subsequent aligning of opinion. Users are interested in this, and become even more so when they are involved as respondents and receive on-site briefings about the issues the initiative will cover. Their detailed views become part of the planning, and create new publicity as they are published to the community at large. This creates a real-world picture which will help new adopters understand PLM and orient their ideas and aims. Because the initiative will run in the USA and Europe for the whole year, it will have the power to achieve a great deal. Such a large collaborative investment needs to be focused on results, and meet specific goals and targets. Publication of these makes fresh news, and for the first time gives clarity to the direction that the industry as a whole is taking. The initiative will involve user input and collaboration at several levels, each of which creates new PLM knowledge. A comparatively small group of 'core' companies working together on their ongoing implementations will develop very detailed tools and material. The detailed IP belongs to them, but the extracted knowledge becomes part of the initiative material. A continuing series of user-only Forum events maintains the user viewpoint. Themed workshops involving all PLM players (users, vendors, consultancies, integrators) formalise the approaches to issues such as quantifying the commercial impact of PLM, and produce a level of interaction that has not existed before. Each event makes more news and draws more companies to follow progress or participate themselves. By mid-year this has become a cross-continental industry collaboration that is being reported in the management sections of the major newspapers, industry magazines, and by direct dissemination. It has raised the profile of PLM and has enabled the PLM managers of many companies to kick-start or reinforce their own implementation plans in the face of internal competition from other projects. As the initiative proceeds it generates metrics and values for the three reference models launched by the PLMIG, for PLM Benefits, PLM Maturity and PLM Best Practice. The process of doing this draws in standards bodies and starts the first agreed formalisation of PLM. Not only does this make news, it is of direct value to everyone. With users and vendors together as a 'steering committee' for the initiative, the PLM industry will have the power to be proactive and to launch new programmes in specific areas. One of these may be an academic working group to establish the current state of the art in PLM research - a prerequisite for new research bids, and one which could lead to the world's most eminent professors carrying out headline research into PLM for the future. In its own way, the PLM User Initiative is newsworthy already, because it has been generated by the user community and is now being considered by the major vendors. For updates on progress - read the news. Roger Tempest is co-founder of the PLMIG. You can find out more about taking part in the User Initiative at userinitiative@plmig.com. 
* Logitech's Billionth Mouse * Logitech announced that it has shipped its billionth mouse. Details Billion Product, Billion Customer The unit of measure for use of consumer products is now the billion. There are more than a billion PCs in use. There are billions of mobile phones in use. There are more than a billion Internet connections. In 2006, the world's airlines carried more than 2 billion passengers. Billions of items of clothing and footwear are sold each year. There are more than a billion vehicles (cars, trucks, buses, motorcycles, and bicycles) on the world's roads. More than a billion people wear a watch. There are more than a billion copies of word processing software. (From Global Product: Strategy, Product Lifecycle Management and the Billion Customer Question.) Details Global Products Global Products provide huge opportunities. They allow billions of people to benefit from products to which they previously had no access. They allow companies to offer products to a global market of more than 6 billion customers and users. The resulting opportunities for sales and profits are enormous. So are the potential risks. Good News and Bad News The Good News about Global Products is that they offer companies the opportunity to address larger markets, to develop a great product, sell it to billions of customers and users, and rack up huge profits. The Bad News about Global Products is that they are not easy to develop, sell and maintain. There are a lot of questions to be answered, a lot of choices to be made, and a lot of decisions to be taken. Once these decisions have been taken, all sorts of problems can occur. Products can take a lot longer to develop than planned. The wrong product can be developed. Problems can occur during manufacturing. When the product is in the market, a competitor may bring out a better product that will eat into sales. And problems can occur during use, all the way through until the product's end-of-life, where there can be even more problems waiting. (From Global Product: Strategy, Product Lifecycle Management and the Billion Customer Question.) Details 
|
