The PLM Underground

The PLM Underground

From the CEO's perspective, "Everything is OK because I spent a lot of money on PLM."

But the reality is, there is a shadow PLM, a PLM black-ops system that is really powering development, manufacturing, quality and the supply chain.   It's OK until something happens.  Ask yourself, do you want to risk your company?  An FDA Letter?  RoHS Compliance delaying shipments?  Fatal accidents with unbounded liability?

In the press, you read about the phenomenal growth of Aras’s PLM market share, replacing TeamCenter, Windchill, and Enovia.  But are we really replacing these systems?   How do you replace something that was never fully deployed?  To be clear, all these systems were huge IT success stories.  Purchased.  Customized.  Deployed.  Several years of maintenance has been paid.  But when you dig one layer deeper, these expensive systems were never deployed.

The evidence is everywhere.  The PLM Underground is easily visible at the fringes.  Do you have any Excel spreadsheets with 40 tabs and hundreds of Macros?  That’s your PLM system.   Look at the network bandwidth between your site and DropBox.  Yup, there is your secure supply chain collaboration.  The PLM Underground is sending your corporate IP via email, FTP and DropBox to suppliers.   If we ignore the data security issues for a minute, where’s the control, are you sure that the shadow PLM is correctly delivering the right versioned files and BOM’s?    Let’s ask your Quality department what they are seeing at incoming.  Of course they have their own Shadow PLM - 2D drawings, Excel, and paper ECO documents.  This is what they compare incoming components against.  The blind leading the Blind.

So now we understand Aras’s tremendous growth rate.  We are not replacing TeamCenter, WindChill, and Enovia.  They were never deployed.  Aras is replacing the Shadow PLM underground, with cost effective, easy to deploy, easy to use solutions.  We power the Business of Engineering and it’s time to get back to business.


Posted Mon, Jan 18 2016 1:20 PM by Peter Schroer