PLM Interest Group

The PLM 2025-35 Project provides a global collaboration framework for implementors to share and apply best practices, and for advisors and educators to model them into a single source of truth.

It combines the twin drives towards Professional PLM and the PLM Body of Knowledge in a constructive and completely open way that benefits participants directly while generating industry-wide solutions.

			The aim is not just to establish the advanced knowledge and professional techniques of right-first-time PLM, but to embody them in real implementations.

By integrating the two programmes, everyone who participates learns from both streams and can make use of the combined knowledge set.

Global corporations have developed very complex, structured solutions for PLM, generating their own methodologies based on what they have found to work best.

This represents many man-years of experience and learning that have never been shared or re-used. Thousands of different implementations around the world with locked-in knowledge.

The solution is very simple.  Take a number of user implementations that have each developed in their own random way, in response to their different business drivers and technical competences.  Array them in parallel, and we find that their strengths and weaknesses are in different areas.  Where one implementation has a weakness, others will have strengths - so the 'weaker' implementation gets a problem solution for free, immediately.  And that same implementation will have strengths that the others will use.

PLM 2025-35 not only facilitates this knowledge-sharing, but also provides new tools for areas which do not have existing solutions.

The PLM 2025-35 Project will run for a year initially, aligned with the natural pace of actual PLM implementations and consisting of two streams:-

PLMIG experience with user groups shows that users come up with much more detailed and practical ideas when working amongst themselves than they do when vendors or advisors are present.  Keeping the separation provides a double benefit, because in order to derive common, neutral conclusions from the Users' work, the findings must be distilled and rationalised - which is exactly what is needed for a Body of Knowledge.

During the first 4 months the User participants liaise and calibrate with each other in order to fully understand each other's implementation approach and techniques.  This is not a loose conversation but a structured benchmark, designed to generate detailed and factual findings that everyone can learn from.

This methodology is embedded in the PLM 2025-35 Project, which makes it concise and easy to follow.  The Project provides the liaison material in increasing levels of detail, and the participant responses build naturally into the results framework.

The results provide high-level evidence of "What other people are doing", and break out into an array of comparisons that each PLM Team can review and apply within their own implementation.

By far the most important problem raised in the Solution Map discussions is the lack of C-level commitment to PLM, and the impact this has on PLM progress.

Solving this is a difficult problem for everyone.  It needs time and resources to convince the Board of the value of PLM, but the Board will not fund this because they are not convinced (the C-Level PLM Paradox). You have to get the implementation itself in good shape before approaching them, and you have to keep getting the message across for a long period of time.

PLM 2025-35 provides a structured and effective way of doing this, known as the Senior Management System. It utilises the collaboration of companies who all have the same aim to generate specific tools for upward management; and supports participants as they interact with the Board and get questions or pushbacks.

A key element of this is Value Chain Integration, generated by the Knowledge Development stream using the insights and expertise of the vendor and advisor participants.  The aim is not just to extol the benefits of PLM in general terms, but to show clearly, in the context of a particular business, how PLM supports and improves the Value Chain in ways that the Board will want to endorse.

Value Chain Integration is a structured framework that not only declares the top-level benefits but also shows how the web of detailed PLM projects and initiatives fit together to achieve them.  Over the course of the 12-month Project it will embed high-level commitment to PLM into the respective implementations so that the Board becomes a driver rather than a barrier.

Current AI is woefully inadequate for PLM, and will stay that way unless we reconsider how it should work.
If you are interested in this, there is an opportunity for you to define the new, productive AI environment that we all need.

PLM 2025-35 will generate the core Body of Knowledge over the forthcoming twelve months.  Somehow, AI will be a necessary part of it - not in creating the Knowledge, but as a sort of "tour guide" or instructor that shows practitioners where to find the material they need and how to apply it in their live, day-to-day environment.

We need to develop the answer to this, and so the Project includes a Working Group to produce a definitive AI tool for PLM - if such a thing is possible.

There are two streams in PLM 2025-35 (User Collaboration and Knowledge Development) and members of the AI Working Group can come from either of them.  Anyone who is part of the Project can opt in. This allows participants to learn about serious AI as the Project unfolds, and also enables the advanced AI practitioners to build the model using the structured framework as a testbed.

The Proposal explains everything in detail, and has been up-issed to Version 4.0 to include the recent feedback from the Senior Management System briefing sessions.  It shows how the User Collaboration stream passes expertise and solutions between PLM Teams, and how the Knowledge Development stream refines the new material into the Body of Knowledge structure.

The new Version shows the synchronisation and two-way exchange between User Collaboration and Knowledge Development, and expands on the PLM Benchmarking and Value Chain Integration aspects. It also introduces the 'Excellence Challenge' - a Project-wide review calibrated against theoretical best practice that will be used to guide potential future progress. The total picture shows how an industry-wide Body of Knowledge can be created while providing direct benefits to those who take part in its creation.

The Proposal expands to 14 pages precisely because it does contain all the detail.  The Project runs for 12 months, which is one of its strengths, but that does require attention and input.  Participating organisations need to know what they will be doing, how their part of the Project works, and how everything fits together - as well as confidence that the results are likely to be as planned.

Download the Proposal [Word] >>>                              Download the Proposal [PDF] >>>

This is an international project - you can take part no matter where in the world you are based.  PLM is a global discipline, and the principles and methods of PLM are the same everywhere.

It is also highly interactive, and everyone who takes part will have their own aims, issues that they want to see resolved, new knowledge and techniques that they want to see generated.

The Proposal explains the entire Project, but most participants will want to know about the parts that are most relevant to them.  This is best done via a specific discussion, and if you would like to see how it works in detail, just send in an Expression of Interest Form.  There is no obligation, and it may show how the Project may be of direct benefit to you.

Download the Expression of Interest Form >>>

In the meantime, if you would like any other information about the Initiative, you can request it via
plm2025-35@plmig.com.

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