Fortunately, Product Sight's vision was built around challenges experienced and observed during PLM implementation programs. Our innovations have been motivated by the need to eliminate such implementation headaches, and breaking down the barriers to PLM adoption. Realizing that a cost-effective and practical solution required further automation, we developed the data migraine pain-killer in the form of Product Sight's FindView Product Data Alchemist.

Product Sight's unique FindView search capabilities allow automated discovery and loading by extracting intelligent semantics from existing unstructured product content in various formats (CAD, Text, PDF, TIFF, databases, etc.), without any manual intervention, using existing processes. Product content from current locations is automatically aggregated, deciphered and indexed to reveal attributes, relationships, product structures based on Product Sight's unique FindView technology. Once revealed, this information is easily accessible for uses such as search, collaboration, relating such information to product, processes and projects as deployed by PLM systems, and to convert them to semantically meaningful "managed items" at the click of a button.

Customers who are deploying or have already deployed PLM systems can immediately benefit from this one-click data loading capability. After using FindView Product Data Alchemist to find and review their existing product content, they can generate load files based on their current PLM schema (e.g. part attributes, part-doc relationships, BOM relationships, process plan - operation relationships, etc.). Using standard loading mechanisms they are able to populate their PLM system with this structured information, thereby accelerating adoption by the user communities, who now have a direct motivation to use the system.

Through this approach, Product Sight's search-powered PLM approach dramatically reduces the implementation inertia associated with PLM projects, and simplifies transition processes to a change friendly pace, while fully leveraging past investments in product data. Users have the flexibility to discover and populate their PLM schemas automatically from unstructured content as and when needed, while retaining intelligent access to data that hasn’t yet been loaded, or is out of scope of their PLM deployment.

Successful enterprise implementations represent a significant IT investment with high stakes strategic returns at risk from any implementation delays. FindView Product Data Alchemist directly addresses the biggest hurdle to rapid PLM business value by discovering all existing product data assets and moving them into the enterprise system in the shortest time at the lowest cost, thereby slashing PLM implementation time to value, multiplying returns on investment, freeing up critical IT resources while managing risk from strategic deployment delay. And of course, kill the migraine.

On another note
On another note, some related items on the topic of PLM implementation inertia are noted in the following:

A Pre-Requisite to Business Process Optimization. http://www.asme.org/divisions/cie/newsletter/CIENewsletter-2004Summer.pdf

Also, I'd like to bring to the reader's attention the latest issue of ASME JCISE (a Special Issue on PLM).

http://scitation.aip.org/dbt/dbt.jsp?KEY=JCISB6&Volume=CURVOL&Issue=CURISS#MAJOR1