Name: What’s Next for PLM? A 3DEXPERIENCE Dialogue with CIMdata
Uploaded: 2025-05-21T20:30:38.790Z
Duration: 59 min 22 s
Description: What’s Next for PLM? A 3DEXPERIENCE Dialogue with CIMdata

Transcript for "What’s Next for PLM? A 3DEXPERIENCE Dialogue with CIMdata": Alright. Perfect. we're really excited to have you all here for this dialogue with, CIMdata and, us at GoEngineer. So without further ado, I am Cody Salyer. I'm a product manager at GoEngineer, specializing in PLM and, data management and manufacturing. It's really my background and and focus overall. And I'm joined by Stan. I'm not gonna I'm I I know we rehearsed it. I can't say it. He asked me how to pronounce my name, but he he punted. Hi. My name is Stan Przybylinski. I'm vice president of CIMdata. If you haven't heard of us, we are a global strategic management consulting and market research firm that focuses on product lifecycle management and digital transformation. So and we've been doing this actually. I joke we've been doing this so long. We were formed in response to industry three point zero in 1983 to investigate the, the monetary rewards coming from the applications of digital technologies of the product life cycle. So, we've been in this a long time, and it's my pleasure to join Cody, and to work with his team. Perfect. Now we're gonna talk about a number of, you know, big topics here. None of these should be a surprise to anyone. Essentially starting out with what is PLM. Right? There's a lot of misconceptions about that. What what does it mean? What what do I control? Digital twin, that is the hot buzzword off the press. Everyone cares about digital twin suddenly. Suddenly, we're cool at parties when we talk about this, which is weird for me because no one cared about this five years ago when we were talking about it. Cloud versus on premise, you know, hey. A lot of these tools I install, they're on cloud. What's right for me? I wanna get Stan's take on this. Right? There's I have some stuff put together, but, you know, Stan is an expert in this. So what is you know, what are we talking about? And then some things that we normally don't think about always. Right? PLM and supply chain. How do I get data to my partners? How do I get data back from my partners? What does that exchange look like? And this is something that a lot of people have a blind spot to. And lastly, of course, like, how do I find the right PLM partner? You know, we're so grateful that you're joining us in this webinar today. Obviously, this is something we really heavily focus on, but, that is a challenge for a lot of companies. And so I'd like to get Stan's thoughts on, you know, who do you to work with. Like, what are some things I should watch out for as a as a customer looking to invest in in PLM as a organization? So without further ado, let's start with what is PLM today? So, Stan, let me just crack off kind of from the very beginning to be like, what is PLM? Right? Everyone says PLM and they say, like, a hundred different things. When the same data says what is PLM, is there a succinct answer? For us, there is. I mean, the the phrase has been around there's some question as to whether IBM or SAP coined it around the turn of the century. It's been around for that long. And it it was an attempt to to come up with another three letter acronym to describe how data and process management had evolved. Right? So, part of the reason that we some people brand their products PLM and we don't agree with that because people were managing the life cycle of products before computers existed. Right? They they had manual means to do that. But to us, product life cycle management is not necessarily something you buy, but it's a strategic business approach that's enabled by an appropriate set of technologies to the problem that you're trying to solve. Right? Now the things that people brand PLM, a data and process, management engine to to manage all your IP and support collaboration and visualization, all those things, Those things are often at the heart of what someone would call a PLM implementation. Right? Because you need to have you know, when I talk about PLM to, grandmothers say, I always joke that, you know, you need to have that grandmother speech. You know, human we're humans. We mostly like to work together. We create stuff. We need to share it. We need to to be sure that what we have is right. Right? That that that's a lot of what PLM does. Right? You have you have, people that are allowed certain types of access to to IP, to participate, right, in in workflows and things of that nature. So so PLM to us, like I said, is a strategic business approach and people buy solutions to help them implement it. Now the focus here is more on discrete manufacturing. Right? Because a lot of people, are are doing, CAD, mechanical CAD and and other things like that. But formulation people have to do it too. Yeah. But they they care about different things. Something you said that struck me is, like, PLM is a business approach, and you you use software to support that. And I I think we see a lot of people showing up saying, like, give me PLM. And it's like, I I can't give that to you. That's not something I just hand you. Like, I can hand you software to support PLM, and and we, funny enough, have software branded as PLM. However, the idea being is, like, if you're not willing to do the process, right, if you're not willing to to decide how you wanna manage your product, I can't give that to you. It doesn't matter how many software tools I I provide. Yep. Yeah. The grandmother the grandmother approach to that is you you have to teach the computer what you wanna do and how you wanna do it and who you're gonna do it with. Right? Right. So I have on premise whether it's on premise or on the cloud, those are things that you have to do. Right? Who's who's invited to the party? What do they get to do when they go there? Who do they who do they play with? Right? Who who are their work groups? Who are the collaboration partners on workflows? You know, what things do they have access to? What things can they put in? You know? So there there's things that you have to do whether you're on premise or on cloud, and that's that's the thing that I try to get people to to think about is that, yes, going to the cloud, and we'll get to this later, going to cloud does change a lot of things, but you still have to teach the computer those things. It has to you have to and a partner like the engineer or, you know, partner that you choose has to help you do that to set up your PLM environment so you can actually do product life cycle management and support the use cases that that you wanna support. Perfect. So something we've talked about a lot is that customers, when they get started and they're like, hey. I'm really I'm in I'm in PLM. Really, what they're talking about isn't quite PLM. It's more just like PDM. So something that we we run into a lot is this question of what is PDM versus PLM. And so I'd love to just you know, I'm gonna add some supporting graphics as we go through this. But, like, what is, by definition, PDM versus PLM? Right? I'd say it's a subset of it, but what does that mean? Like, what is that subset? Well, I mean, PDM, you know, so there are acronyms that go back. Right? So so, when data management first started, right, there there were things like TDMs, team data managers, because they that were linked specifically to the mechanical CAD system. Right? We have all this data. How are we gonna manage? And then as things evolved, you know, people didn't wanna just manage a file. They want to manage a product. Right? So they needed a product structure. Right? They needed the the the material and then they needed a way to describe all the things and how they were interlinked. And that's really when things started to evolve into PDM was when you started managing, products. Right? The p. Mhmm. When you start managing products as opposed to files. And and and even PDM originally was just really that and then it things that got added to it were like, you know, collaboration and visualization and the other things that most PDM systems today have. Right? So, but what what PLM is, PLM is more about the life cycle and and in the life cycle, there are more actors. Right? If you have if if your product if you're doing design collaboration with, some of your suppliers, you're gonna have to figure out how do you share IP back and forth. That that's more PLM ish. Cody has something in his agenda about supply chain, getting your supply chain others other suppliers involved. How are you gonna share that information with them? Some people, use Sneakernet. Right? Some people email files or drop box or stuff like that. And, you know, that that can work in in some very limited cases, but the risk of failure is much higher. Right? So it basically it it basically enables you to keep keep things organized and to to move them through that life cycle, right, to evolve them from ideas to initial engineering models to things that you're gonna pass to manufacturing and eventually depending on your business model, you might care about service of it. Right? And that's that's with the with the movement toward product as a service and enabled by things like IoT, people are caring a lot more about that as well. Because if you're gonna do that, you need to know what the as maintained bill of material is for the thing that's in the field. So when you send the tech out, he's got the right spares, he's got the right tools, he's got the right instructions on what to do. So that's really PLM is is much more of a life cycle view, not just core data management. Okay. The fun part for me here is you haven't seen this deck, this presentation. And as we're going through it, this is lining up really, really well for me because the next thing I really talk about is what is PLM. Right? So, this is not an all encompassing view by any means. But the idea was I I kinda threw this graphic together yesterday and was like, hey. I've seen graphics like this on the Internet. And kind of the idea is the center of the graphic represents kind of the core disciplines or activities that are involved. Right? So getting market inputs, you know, concept you know, conceptualization of my design, prototyping, testing, sourcing, manufacturing, and sales. These are, you know, the thing I and then service, to your point, is in there Mhmm. Is like Yep. You know, that is the life cycle. Right? And then I I exclude in these. I typically get rid of, like, end of life activities because those are in the states not heavily regulated, those are more regulated in Europe. And if we were talking to a European audience, I'd probably have a slightly different graphic. Yeah. I would probably I I put requirement instead of market inputs, but just because that's the formal term associated with the functionality in, systems, the ones, that you guys get involved with, particularly the system's three d experience platform. Yeah. So but anyway yeah. No. It's it's I have one because the other and and I'll show this to you later maybe offline. I have one that I use that sort of because some people when they're looking at the life cycle, let me BOM centric, and there's some solutions that are BOM centric. And there's lots of things that you can do that are great with BOM centric systems, not necessarily managing your CAD data, but lots of other life cycle processes like quality and product information management and and other things like that. But when I was used that chart with the investment firm that was looking at either buying a BOM centric system or or more of a traditional PLM system that manages engineering work in process. I said all the action is in the engineering side of that life cycle. Right? That that, you know, people wanna be able to go from requirements through life. They wanna apply IoT. They wanna use simulation both to help determine the product. But a lot of people that are doing products and service wanna be able to do simulation of the as maintained bill of materials so they can run a virtual copy of the machine as it ends in the field and runs it works against that to to better do predictive and preventative maintenance. Alright. So in this whoop. Let's see if I make sure I don't jump ahead. Alright. There's some things I did wanna to kinda denote on my graph here for everyone that's watching. So we're talking about PLM versus PDM. When we talk about PDM, at least from GoEngineer perspective, right, I like to, like, delineate, like, PDM is like this quadrant. This is our concept design quadrant. This is where I even introduced a little change management in there because most PDMs at this point have a formal or informal approval process. And this is our core engineering zone. Right? This is where we are building stuff. We're testing stuff. This is typically where we think of classic analysis, like our physical analysis, FEA fluids. All the fun stuff happens right there. So for a company that started here, right, and I wanna start adopting technologies, Stan, do I just look at the rest of the circle and just say, like, I want it all? Like, what is my approach as a as a company to start adopting some of these other types of processes or get a hold on these processes, both as a business and maybe in software? What what do you kinda run into? What's your thoughts on that? Sure. Yeah. No. We actually have a survey. I I think the webinar might have been already, but the recording might be a little. We do a survey every spring, where we we pull end user organizations about, you know, sort of their PLM status and an update on what they're doing in terms of are they increasing their investment, decreasing their investment, what types of use cases they're looking to support, what's ones they have now. And that's part of the reason that we differentiate because most of the people that answer that survey are doing PDM. So they're exactly in the place where you're asking me to to, describe what happens. And what happens really, what we try to do is is what problems are you facing that if you're doing this stuff well or not addressing? Right? Because there's nothing in real here really about communication with your value chain partners. Right? There's that that's yeah. So that if if that's a problem, right, that that the IP isn't necessarily it's perfectly controlled within your four walls, but then when you have to get people outside using it, how do you do that? Right? Some people, allow their partners into the system that the company uses. Some people create, special buffer zones that people can interact. Some people set up their PM system to automatically create technical data packages of three d PDFs and other associated information that they share. Right? So we have time to focus on the problems. If your problems are getting to the people on the outside, then maybe you wanna add that. The other thing that, you know, you have some of the the buzzwords in your in your list of topics. The other buzz phrase that's out there is model based. Right? Yeah. Right? So if if you wanna get to if you wanna do model based systems engineering to help support your concept development. Right? Most of the most of the leading systems out there can help you do that. At a minimum, they can manage the files of the tools. Some of them have more stuff built in there than others. Right? So if if that's if you wanna go after that. And then the thing about model based definition, which is is on the model based enterprise maturity framework, model based definition, you need to be sharing annotated models with your value chain. Right? And that's a big change for people. Yeah. Right? That that's sort of the the definition. If you look at the maturity framework, model based definition, you need to be doing that. Right? So if you don't have control of it yourself, you're not gonna be able to do it with others. So Absolutely. Like I said, we we typically look at what problems they're facing. You know, if if it's a manufacturing problem, then then maybe we look more at the the EBOM to MBOM transition. And then how that gets how that gets passed through down from ERP and to MES and stuff like that. I mean, and it also depends on what your organization is going through. Just because you're only doing PDM now, that doesn't mean that you might not be in an organization that wants to do digital transformation. Right? You may have a digital transformation initiative since that seems to be maybe that's the pass eight, but we're not on the between digital thread. The problem is if you wanted if you're a manufacturing company and you want a new digital transformation, then you're gonna need to care about digital thread and digital twins, because that's gonna be your path. Well, I always say, if you're if you're trying to do digital transformation for a manufacturing company, you better have your PLM game in hand. Because in some ways, PLM as a as a market instead of solute enabled solutions has been waiting for the rest of the organization to digitalize for, like, digitize or digitalize for, like, twenty years. Right. Right. A lot of the core things that we have have been around that long, but we really we, the the product community, really needed the other parts of the business to, to get that that digital digital, activity on. So Alright. So if I You have you have you have you have you put some other stuff up there. Right? So, if if you're having manufacturing problems, well, how how are those how is that MBOM being defined, to be built using your existing humans and and machines? Yeah. What things go into building it? Yes. What the things go into it? What what processes and and, and capabilities that you have on your shop floors are being used in it down to down to, simulating the humans on the shop floor. So Perfect. So this is kind of the overview of PLM, right, in in initially. And that's something that you said, Stan Przybylinski, that stuck out to me really was if I wanna do digital transformation, right, that's my goal. You know, tomorrow the CEO walks in, we're digitally transforming. I better have this unlock. Right? At least the parts that are, you know, relevant to us. But if I don't have my product data in, you know, good condition, how can I ever have my manufacturing data in good condition? Yeah. You need you need to do that. You need to do the PDM piece. That needs to be that needs to be there. The other stuff can be added. And and the good thing is if if the organization is doing doing digital transformation, then you might have better partners in other functions in your company to help you do this. Right? So it used to be the engineers would go to the to the purchasing people and, you know, maybe they didn't they didn't get the amount of support that they wanted. Now if the big bosses are saying we're gonna do this, people may be a little bit more motivated to to do the collaboration that that helps make all this stuff work. Perfect. Alright. So I'm going to skip ahead because, we are not going through these nearly as fast as I thought we would, which is good. I think this has been a great dialogue. But I'm gonna skip ahead to just since we're on topic, the need for digital twin and digital thread. This is, I mean, to me, one of my favorite topics because Mhmm. I think, from my perspective, whenever I see this, the first thing that pops in my head and most of the people I talk to, this is the first thing that pops in their head is like, oh, yeah. It's like I see it in VR. Like, I see it. Right? Because that's what all the marketing material I see is. Right? You see, like, Apple Vision Pro. You walk around your factory. Everyone, like, oh, yeah. That thing. That's so cool. I want that. But if I wanna get here first of all, is this what digital twin is when we talk about that abstractly? Like, for the for everyone here, like, when I say digital twin, what does that really mean? Well, there's some argument. Right? Because some people, some people talk about virtual twin. But the the formal definition of digital twin, you don't really have a digital twin until there's a physical entity for which you have a virtual representation. Right? So if you're still in concept phase and you're creating your initial three d and you're running simulations on all that, that's gonna be an input to to what becomes the digital twin. But the digital twin is, okay, I'm I built it. Now give me the data, the virtual you know, the three d data, etcetera, that represents that thing. So you're gonna need that data for for, to support or or you can use that data to support planning your manufacturing. Right? Planning your your service. Right? That's what a lot of people are doing is making sure that, we we talked for years about design for, you know, design for manufacturing, design for service. It's some data we just started talking about DFX. Right? But Mhmm. Underneath that x is all this intellectual property that needs to be linked. Now the digital thread takes a little further and says, okay. What other information that's being created from the initial idea through the life of this thing, might I care about? Right? One of the things that you talked you showed in your your oval was about product knowledge. Right? Digital thread has has at least two promises. One of the things is I have all the information that that shows me how I got to the product that I'm gonna make and how to make it. But the the other main bigger promise is I have all that information so I can use that to improve what I did. Right? And that that's that's the thing that people haven't really done is the the back the backward flow. And the thing I I worked on several projects, now these were, like, eight or nine years ago now. But, if you're in in the medical device field, right, there's a a notion called CAPA, corrective active action, preventative action. So if I put a pacemaker in someone and they have an adverse outcome, the producer of that pacemaker has to figure out, okay, why did it happen? Essentially, what they've had to do even though they didn't have the digital thread and they were working on document based processes, they essentially had to work that whole digital thread backwards usually by talking to humans. Right? Hey, Joe. You worked on that. They just they had to walk it all the way back to find out where that issue arose. Was it was it that it happened when it was installed? That it happened when it was shipped? That it happened when it was made? That it happened when it was designed? Was the original concept that? Right? Yeah. And so what what some of these leading, medical device companies decide to do is let's do model based systems engineering in the front and build a digital thread. Right? Because because they always struggle because it was always, you know, Joe did this and Mary did that and go talk to them and do this. And it's like, no. We need we need all that information and to be able to draw upon it. And and the thing that excites me and I've been talking about this for a few years is those digital threads are gonna have so much information that humans can't interpret. You think you're gonna learn from it? But there's so much information there. How do how do humans process all that? Well, ChatGPT would love to do for do it for us or generative AI or general. Right? So that that's that's that would that's what I think is is needs to happen and people are already working in that direction. Oh, yeah. So something we we jumped a little ahead, but one thing that I thought was really interesting for users is just this isn't just stuff, you know, Stan and I care deeply about. Right? Every big enterprise is focused on these types of technologies. Right? Again, this is the to Stan's point, right, this is the virtual representation of a thing, of not just the thing, but how I built that, the maybe the facilities that are requirements that went into building that thing. Yeah. And so I have a a physical and, you know, a virtual, kind of item. For me, doing some research for this webinar, the interesting thing I found is the origin of virtual twin or what is widely credited as the origin of the virtual twin was NASA back in the sixties. Yep. Because this stuff's not new, I guess. Right. They have the you guys picture on my slide when I talk about it. They have the physical twin, which I call it a physical twin because they have the spacecraft with software here, and then they have the spacecraft in space. And when there were problems, they could check it against their copy of the spacecraft. Right? If you saw a power 13 or the Martian, you saw that stuff in action. Right? Not a problem. The guy was using a a a physical copy of the thing sent to space to test on how to use less power so those guys could get home. And, Matt Damon survived because JPL still had the physical copy of of something that was sent out in space, you know, twenty years or so before, so that they could communicate with. And so They were the one they were the ones that came up with the idea because they they have the the worst environment. Right? You can't it's not like you're gonna send a technician to Mars to to get the to to fix the thing. So. Perfect. And then the other thing that you kinda I kinda mentioned is, like, so there's some key aspects here as we talk about this. Right? Digital plan is the representation of my product. Right? That's sometimes that that could be the design of the product, you know, tying in the simulation. Now simulation, we talked about it again, isn't just classical, you know, simulation when you talk to us. You talked about, like, well, stresses, you know, fluids. No. Simulation could be operation simulation. It could be of your own models that you developed to to analyze performance. It could be, you know, a lot of other things that you might simulate. Mhmm. And then, of course, the actual operations. Well, not just to build it, but actually use it, test it, validate it, maintain it. Those operations are all part of that virtual twin. And I need to hang on to all this stuff. Right? And I forgot who I didn't put the tag of who I misquoted someone here. But, essentially, the connected flow of data across its entire life cycle from inception to disposal, essentially hanging on to all the pieces and to Stan's point. These things are getting more and more detailed. Right? It's not just physical CAD documents or, you know you know, Word documents in a drawer now, we're starting to see these digital threads get more and more elaborate, as companies are adopting some of these cool technologies. Yeah. No. I'm working I'm working on a project right now about enterprise integration and PLM and having connectors to all this stuff because people wanna people wanna have connectors depending on what they do to their quality management systems or their product information management systems or their, you know, service life cycle management broader than than asset management, to supply chain documentation, you know, anything anything that influenced the the creation and evolution of the thing that you care about could be valuable. When I've done surveys in the last five years, people put all kinds of things. Now they don't pay attention to the question. They they often put things that I already had asked them. But, when I asked the same question of vendors a few years ago, I I created slides from it. I think I had four pages of two columns of bullets for all the things that they thought people could benefit having connected to their digital thread. So, you know, this this is this is a little bit more advanced, but you what I tell people though is you need to be planning for this because everybody is on someone else's digital thread. And and the mental model I use for this is is, in Jurassic Park when they talk about how they they did the gene splicing to to make the dinosaurs. That's the way I think about it. They showed a little image of, like, some DNA snapping in, and that that's what I think about is all the all the people that are involved with this, their data snaps into that as the the DNA of that evolving product through its life. So you're you're part of unless you are the biggest OEM in the world, you're part of part of, or or, you know, even if you are. Right? Because you're part of the value chain for all of your suppliers. Right. And and I did I did a study recently on model based definition, And some of the companies I talked to were hoping their suppliers were more advanced on model based definition and they were hoping their suppliers would pull them forward. Right? So, the digital is is the coin of the realm and more and more people are gonna be asking for it, and you need to provide it, in a timely manner. That's correct. And and these types of solutions implemented properly are gonna help you do that. Alright. So I'm gonna pivot here. It would be very easy to go into PLM and supply chain at this point, but I think we're gonna take a break and we're gonna pivot to alright. I need a tool. Right? Yep. I I decide I need some technology to support this initiative that I'm gonna adopt product life cycle management or I'm gonna adopt a a digital twin initiative at my company. You know, I see solutions on cloud. I see solutions on prem. What do you tell customers when you're talking to them, like, do I pick what like, what's the better one? Is there a better one? And what are some criteria that you advise customers on in picking a solution there? Well, I mean, the the the sad thing, there's a phrase out there called technical debt. Mhmm. And basically, that means all the investment that you've made and all the technologies that you have. When I got my MBA in finance, they used to refer to that as a sunk cost. Right? That you shouldn't shouldn't worry about that necessarily in decision making, how much you spend, just focus on what you're doing going forward. If you're starting fresh, right, if you if you if you don't, you know, if you if you don't even have a a local data management, I would go to the cloud. Right? That that it doesn't your your expertise as a company is not necessarily in IT. And cloud offers you lots of benefits, because before, you know, if you wanted to install something on premise, you have to buy all the hardware. You have to install it on, get it tested and working, and then you have to maintain it over its life. Whereas cloud, generally subscription based, they house all the hardware. They update the hardware. They update the software. Yes, you do have to pay the subscription price versus versus, the upfront license and maintenance. But, for a lot of people, it's worth it because it the other thing too, it's it's good for accounting reasons because it's easier for you to expense it if you do it that way. A lot of people like it for that reason. So if you're starting fresh, I would I would definitely start looking at the cloud. If you're already on premise, if if your on premise solution provider has cloud, you know, it makes sense to talk to them. But if if you're on premise and and you think you're ready for the cloud, which is really what's happened over the last seven or eight years. It used to be you would have you would you would go into a meeting with the company's management, and the people would have to defend why they want cloud. Right? Used to be all why why are we doing cloud on premises what we're used to? And now it's like people have to defend why they're not offering cloud. It's totally flipped. So, you know, going on prem to cloud, it's gonna be a migration like any other. So if you're gonna be looking for the right partner there, you wanna make sure that they can support the migration, as quickly as possible. There are a lot of different implementation. I don't think you necessarily need to get into that, but there are a lot of implementation implications, when you do make that change. But there he is. He's got all the hardware that you don't have to buy. Yep. And, you get your cloud option. You know, what's funny is, again, you haven't seen this. Right? So, like, as I was putting this together to you jumped from on from the cloud pretty quick, but something that I run into that I thought was super interesting though is, like, is the idea of with control comes cost. Right? And the idea is if you really need and this is for on premise, like, this really, have, like, a really custom environment. Maybe you're in, like, a really one off industry or, you know, you really have to customize the the snot out of this thing, and on prem probably is the right solution. Right? I have control over everything, the environment, the the infrastructure, but now I have to pay for all that things, all those things that I own, that technical debt as you mentioned. Yes. Yeah. No. It's it's, that is one thing that that, you know, the one thing that I I talk about when I talk about this is that your ability to modify what you're purchasing on the cloud is defined by what the provider allows you to do. You know, that that used to be an on premise, particularly for big companies, an on premise, there was a codependent relationship between the client, the vendor, and the SI. Right? Because the client wanted what they wanted. The vendor would create the software that would let them do anything they wanted, and the SI was plenty happy to take their money to customize it to do it. So but all of those people are still involved. Right? It's a some to some extent. Unless you're really small, you know, you're gonna you're gonna have a services partner to help you do this. The other thing that that often comes up and and people say, oh, what about security? You know, and I always joke that, you know, every time a bunch of credit card numbers get stolen, PLM on the cloud takes a small step backwards. Right? Because people just they get it in their head. But the point we always make is think about security. Right? Okay. You say you have a secure environment. Do you let people use Dropbox or send attachments and email, particularly of your intellectual property? Do you close-up the ports on all of your computers so that nobody can get access to them? You know? And and the the vendors that provide these things, both the software and the the the cloud infrastructure, you know, they have teams working on this stuff. What do you have? Plus, your your stuff is gonna be at some server farm, god knows where. Right? Not like not like if it's in your building where people that want your data know how to target you. So it's if you're if it's done right, it's way more secure than you can do yourself. But you still password hygiene, password changes, two factor authentication, you still need to do all that stuff. But if you do all that stuff, the cloud is way more secure. A %. The the other thing that was really, I think, something that people overlook is updates. Right? Oh, I'm gonna get this PLM solution on premise. It's gonna be awesome. It takes me a little while to get started, you know, whatever. I, you know, roll out three or six months. Well, some updates have come out. Are you gonna do those updates? Probably not. And then you don't do those updates and then probably six months later, oh, okay. We got some new stuff done. Now you're a year behind or now you're two years behind. And suddenly upgrading becomes, like, a pretty daunting activity. I've seen some of these accounts that are, like, six years, seven years behind. Yeah. They get some security patches, but, like, you know, the software hasn't been in it. Like, there's been no changes to their software in seven years. There haven't been any updates, enhancements, quality of life stuff because, you know, I brought all that burden in house, and I don't wanna pay the technical debt to do the upgrades now. Whereas, to your point, they have whole teams at these cloud providers that do all of that work for you. The downside It's not gonna be any any work to done to be done. But if you No. If you think about the total cost of ownership curve, right, total cost of ownership curve has little bumps in it every time every time you have to do an update. Right? A a bunch of that bump is gonna be taken away, but you you still have to make sure all your processes still work the same way. Right? So there there is still gonna be work to be done on the cloud, but it's much more circumscribed. Right? It's not like, oh, damn. I need new hardware because they just change the feature and I need another server as part of my implementation or, you know, it's not stuff like that. It's it's more training, user expectation. And also depending on your industry, you know, one of the things I always harp on in MedDevices is, carb providers are releasing generally about every quarter, and people that are in med devices don't like to change their implementation once it gets blessed by the by the f, the, Putin drug or mention the FDA. So if you're in a regulated industry, it can be a little more complicated. But again, the right services so if you're looking for services partners to go to this later topic, then you need to make sure you pick the partners that understand that. I totally agree. I'm gonna pivot to we're running a little low on FON, so we're gonna pivot to PLM and supply chain. Now something you said earlier piqued my interest, which was the idea that you are in someone else's digital thread. I had never thought of that. Right? If I make pumps and people use my pumps in their product, I am one of those threads. And that thread isn't just internal now, but that thread's now external. Right? That thread comes to my company. I build this thing. Yeah. Is there how do companies keep track of this? Because suddenly, this went from, like, oh, okay. Like, all engineers make all these models. We make all these documents. I can keep all that together. And you introduced something just now that's totally outside of that. Right? I have suppliers, and I get stuff from them. And how do I get the right stuff? How do companies typically, you know, really tackle that if they don't have a PLM solution, or is that one of the drivers for a PLM solution? Yeah. It can be if you're if you're because it it it also depends on, you know, the sharing of detailed models is a touchy subject in value chains. Right? Because particularly, you know, the carmakers were were terrible. They said terrible precedent. Right? Because whenever they got information about what their suppliers did, they would just beat them over the head with it to get a cheaper price. Right? So there's a lot of sensitivity in that about protecting it. So if you're if you're gonna be interacting with supply chain, you have to figure out what information so let's your suppliers. You have to figure out what information you want those suppliers to know or what they need to know. They may not need to know every every piece of attached, information on that model annotations. They may might not need that. Similarly, the other direction. Right? If you're supplying to someone, your model could be defeatured or have information removed so they get what they need. So there's gonna have to be some communication about sort of that digital exchange and what what are the the requirements, the minimal requirements for meeting it. Right? So, there is gonna require some activity on your part proactive both to your suppliers and to the people you supply to. As far as managing it, I mentioned that earlier. Some people allow their suppliers into their core system, managing their PLM environment. Some people create a buffer zone where stuff is under configuration management pushed into a a a neutral zone between. Right? So some type of portal or something, where people can get stuff, but you're sure they're getting the right stuff. Right? Because that's that's the thing. When you start exchanging that, you know, drawings, it it's a physical thing. And it may not be right, but that's what you have. Now you have the ability to to have people take that stuff on demand. I know working with people like Procter and Gamble, you know, if one of their specifications goes out thirty seconds late, they just made, you know, thousands of products that are no longer within spec. I don't know if your customers are are facing that, but but there is some synchronization of that information to to make sure that everybody's doing the right thing with the right information. Right. Like, if something changes, like, especially if I'm in I always worry about things like, you know, food and drug or, you know, areas like that where, like, you know, I need to have all this information maintained really well on my side, especially, like, if I'm consuming this, especially because if I get notified that I got a bad batch of x y z, right, it just didn't get caught before it left. I need to know where I'm using that in my supply chain. Right? I can't just be like, well, some product's bad. Like, that's not the fly. I need to know exactly what things might be affected. And and a lot of those companies, you think I I would have imagined how locked down they all are. But so many companies that I've met with are just winging it. And it's Oh, yeah. It's a little frightening, especially in the even, like, industries like this. And so this is something that companies really need to focus on in this PLM digital transformation spaces. Mhmm. You're not just your own digital thread, but you're the summation of all the things you get from everyone behind you. And what you provide, everyone passed you in that digital thread. Right? It's supply it spans suppliers and everyone. Yeah. So this was, a number of years ago now, but we're we were talking to a a CEO of a consumer products company whose products probably are in the homes of many people, on the call. And they were using con they were not a contract manufacturer. So they gave the IP to the contract manufacturer. Their business relationship did not require the contract manufacturer to share any changes to that IP that they made to make the manufacturing work. And we tried to explain that CEO I was like, okay. Say you you were using contract manufacturer a, now you wanna have another contract manufacturer. What are you gonna give them? Because what you have is not what's being made. So No. That the other thing is you need to make sure your business practices match with your IP distribution practices in both directions. Right. I need to know what's what's ending up in the hands of consumers circling all the way back to it's like service bombs. Right? I need to know exactly what actually ended up in the field. And if I don't have a good handle on my supply chain, especially in this case where there's a middleman, a contract manufacturer, if I didn't plan for that, I might not know what ended up in the hands of my consumers or installed in the field. Right? And that could be scary. Mhmm. Yep. Alright. Our last topic, finding the right PLM partner. And I'm just gonna say the answers. GoEngineer, thank you for joining. Have a good rest of your day. No. But in all seriousness, you know, Stan, from your perspective, you know, I'd I'd obviously, we're putting this on, but, you know, we don't serve all industries, all softwares, all niches. Right? So if you were talking to a customer and saying, hey, you are trying to do this digital transformation or you're trying to adopt PLM. What are the things you should be aware of when you're working with or looking at a partner to help you make through that transition? Yep. Yeah. So I mean, so let's just have the conversation assuming you've decided you're gonna go with someone for your core system. Right? So if you're gonna pick a piece of software, then you have to figure out, alright, how am I gonna take the access to that software and then initiate that the way I want it in my organization? Some companies that offer the software offer services, some also rely on people right? So you need to make sure that whoever's provided the services is very familiar with your industry and very familiar with the product that they're implementing. That seems kind of basic, but, it's it's not tested enough in in our experience, by people looking at that. So those those are two of the key things. You need to make sure that the that they have, the available bandwidth and expertise to support you. You know, very often in our experience when we work with industrial clients trying to adopt the stuff, people bid with the a team and deliver the b team. And you just need to be, you know, you just need to be aware of that, that that you need to think about, okay. Yeah. They look great, but, you know, it's not gonna be Cody who impressed me, when he was here. It's gonna be somebody else that we haven't met. Right? So, look for coach look for we we always we have a a big multi attribute decision model we use with clients where there are all these qualitative factors that they try to rate and, we talk about partnership potential. You know, what's how does the vibe fit between your company and their company? Are are are you sort of on the same wavelength in terms of of how you're gonna work together, how, how issues are gonna be resolved? That that's very important. And then, you know, obviously, references, that you can actually talk to, and and understand what was actually done and and what you have to look forward to. So, getting those and and actually acting upon them is another big one for us. So so I put, I there's a typo at the bottom of this one. It should, you know, who has shown success in the past. But a lot of the same things that you mentioned are things that, you know, we talk to people about. Right? Are they experienced in your market or your industry? Have they, you know if you're gonna build a jet, they sure as heck better probably talk to some other companies that also build airplanes. There's just things about that industry that are gonna be unique. If you're in med device and you call them up and say, hey. I need compliance advice because, like, you know, how do other people track this? My answer probably better not be, so and then also, have they deployed this in production before? Right? Have they you know, anyone can build demos and whatnot, but, like, have they done this? Right? That's the hard part. It's I would say a lot of companies will even get through concept evaluation, you know, pilot projects, but, like, have they been able to take customers through into production where this is now their their, you know, cornerstone of the business. Right? PLM and ERP are probably the two most valuable solutions as far as infrastructure software for a manufacturer, and it takes a lot to get those things across the finish line. So we should probably have one I I thought of one while you were talking. That that is really important. Well, no. It's it's well, no. It's the fact that it it and this goes to who you pick in terms of the actual solution. Uh-huh. Yes. You have a problem that you're solving today. But where is your company where is your company going? And does that partner have the the, technology and ability to support where you want your company to go. Right? Because a lot of people wanna go wider on Cody's oval chart. Right? Because there are some providers that are really good at p PDM and some PLM related functions. But if your if your vision is broader than that, then you need a software partner and a services partner that can help you do that. That is a great point. Just to wrap up, you know, there's a few things. So we have question we're gonna have some question and answer here if you guys have questions. I'm gonna skip to the end here. If there's any questions from the audience, this has been Stan from CIMdata joining me to talk a little bit about PLM, picking the right partner, implications in, you know, your supply chain for digital thread, and then also, of course, digital twin, and then just what is PLM in general. I hope this has been a good afternoon for most of you. And if you have any questions, feel free to drop them into the chat or the q and a, and we'll be happy to answer them for you. Pretty lucky to have Stan here. He's a busy guy. And so, if you do have questions for him, please let us know. I'll be happy to answer. I felt like I rushed you there at the end, Stan. But you've ended up finishing right about on time, and, it worked out pretty. Right? Oh, a question from the audience is where do you draw the line in support between the emitter and the PLM software? I don't know. For me, you know, the it's it's the provider of the software that's gonna have to deal with any anything related to that. So they need to provide, support around the actual functioning of the software. So unless your implementer is also your your infrastructure as a service provider, then, the implementer is gonna have to deal with whatever else comes, you know, from changes in that software, I think. I don't know. That's my thought. What do you what do you think, Cody? Yeah. I mean, most of the times, I see the implementer as your your your tier one. Right? Is this a software problem or is this a configuration issue? Because most of the time, this presents itself as I have a problem. I click this button. It didn't do what I expected it to do. And that can be configuration related, in which case, that's your service partner. Right? That's their job to help you adjust the parameters to allow that thing to occur, or that's a software issue. And at that point, your service provider's unable to to solve that issue, and, hopefully, your service partner has a good relationship with your, provider, the actual software manufacturer to, you know, get that documented or noted, to be, you know, resolved in a a future update of the software? Because, you know, bugs happen in software. Doesn't matter what industry you're in. There will be bugs. You know, does your service partner have a support team able to support you in this? And then, what's the relationship between your service partner and the OEM? Yeah. Well, thank you, Chris. Mhmm. I didn't realize it was gonna give us names. I like this platform. Yeah. I I you know, there's lots of things we could talk about. This is a this is a big topic. A lot of what what your questions might be are a function of sort of where your where your journey is starting. Right? Because you're you're coming to, you know, if you already have a system then maybe your your questions are, well, what about this cloud thing? Right? Whereas if you're if you're someone that's a SolidWorks user and you're not using, their PDM solution, you just have a shared network drive, that that's a very different starting point. Then and and that's gonna require some respects, it's gonna require a little more finesse. Right? Because, if somebody's already doing PDM, then they're already used to the controls and and things that you have to do to participate on a system like that. Whereas if you're used to sort of a free for all, there can be be some pushback. But that the other key thing, like, we we talk about, it's it's people process and technology, and any of those things can fail. And if you neglect any of them, you're gonna fail. Right? Because the the bottom line is most of these technologies can do a lot of the same things. So it's usually it it might be the way that they implemented that's a problem, but it's not the fact that they can do something that's a problem. It's it's the ability of the organization to absorb the changes that result from trying to adopt the stuff. You know, humans I I I when I worked for Dassault Systemes, I I said that, the p and PLM was not product, it's politics. And, once you start getting into PLM, it's it's a it's a cross functional thing where, you know, budget or and all that stuff comes then and anything can happen. But as long as you're aware of it, you can deal with it. Right? So, if it's if you're starting with PDM, you're gonna have to deal with that. If you're you're already there, then there's still gonna be that. It's just gonna be different. And you need a partner that can help you navigate that. Perfect. Thank you, Stan. Well, I haven't seen any other questions pop in here. So, Stan, thanks for joining me on this webinar. I really appreciate the time and look forward to chatting with you in the future. And, any of you, out there have any other questions, feel free to let us know. I actually very didn't think ahead and didn't put my contact information on this slide, which is an oversight. You can find it in the chat. It's just cody@goengineer.com. It's very easy. You can just email me there, and, I'd be happy to either sit down with you or or talk through the any of the content we've covered in this webinar. If you have other questions about PLM in general, don't hesitate to reach out. I'm a nerd, and I love this stuff. So I'm I'm always happy to to have these types of conversations. And similarly, I I am stan@simdata.com. So alright. Well, thank you very much.