PLM Interest Group : PLM User Forum - Building on Experience

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PLM User Forum

Building on User Experience

During a conversation about the User Forum events, the Global PDM Manager of a $600m US corporation asked an interesting question. He wanted to know how PLM collaboration would work in the more technical areas of PDM, master data, commonisation and interfaces with other enterprise systems such as ERP and CRM.

This is an extremely complex area, and the real subject matter experts are within the PLM teams of user companies. To make progress with these issues, those with the technical expertise should do the collaboration - which means that the PLM teams of major user companies need a platform or framework to be able to collaborate in detail and over an extended period of time.

The PLMIG aims to provide this framework in 2009 by managing a User Initiative in which companies' PLM teams collaborate with each other on features of their ongoing implementations. The technical expertise will be shared directly between those who have it (the PLM experts on each team). The PLMIG will provide the documentation and support mechanism that enables them to work together.

By enabling users to share their experience directly, it will be possible to build a much greater PLM understanding than by working separately. New methods and tools can be developed which, in turn, can be used within the implementations to generate even better results.

This was the underlying rationale for setting up the two User Forum events. They are working meetings in their own right, and they may also be a stepping-stone for more integrated co-operation in the future.

The principle of building on experience applies to the two User Forum meetings themselves. Participants at the European event have a mode average sales value of more than $3bn, so they will bring the full range of PLM issues to the Reading meeting. Their discussions will go forward to form the basis of the Cleveland meeting on 18-19 November, so US delegates will have the benefit of their ideas as starting material. This means that the US event will take the debate further forward, and their results in turn will be fed back to the Reading delegates.

The User Forums therefore offer a self-contained, productive environment for working on your current, real PLM problems, and also provide an opportunity to get to know other PLM managers who might take part in longer-term collaboration over the course of the coming year.

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