PLM leads collaborative charge
'Trust is in, and adversarial contingencies are out.'
By Jim Strothman
At most all manufacturing industry conferences this year, the message has been the same: The "collaborative era" has dawned, and the manufacturing landscape is certain to forever change.
Coping with fast-evolving collaborative software technology will be hard enough. Dealing with cultural changes may be even more challenging.
It's "the era when trust is in, and adversarial contingencies are out," said McClellan, a 30-year manufacturing industry veteran, author of a book on collaborative manufacturing, and president of MES Solutions Inc., a Vancouver, Wash.-based consulting firm specializing in that subject. Doomed are the days of beating down suppliers' prices and caring little whether the suppliers survive, he said.
An outgrowth of product data management (PDM) software, "PLM takes PDM to a new level," McClellan told MESA conference attendees. For many early adopters, PLM's payback has been rapid, he said. "It's so obvious. Why wouldn't you do PLM?" the collaboration expert challenged his listeners.
When a manufacturing firm commits to PLM as a business strategy, "it's a change in the way they do business but not that disruptive," Baker said. Basically, PLM is a glue that provides "deep, bidirectional, and seamless integration" of islands of software ranging from Microsoft Word servers to ERP and an enterprise's entire supply chain. Using that integrated data, PLM systems overlay their applications layer.
Read the entire ISA article “PLM leads collaborative charge".
