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 Project is also the home of the Future PLM Steering Group, which aims to re-envisage PLM for the modern manufacturing age.

By integrating these elements into one holistic project framework we can rethink the horizons of PLM, establish the best practices and professional techniques of right-first-time PLM, and embody them in the participants' implementations.  As the Project name implies, the aim is to set the direction of successful PLM over the next decade.

The reason behind this whole PLM 2025-35 Project is that PLM has not evolved at all over the past ten years, and is not likely to change in the next decade unless we do something about it.  Meanwhile the rest of the world has moved on.

At the State of PLM Debate on 02 June, industry veteran Doug Macdonald made the case that PLM is no longer fit for purpose in a hard-hitting Keynote.  You can see his slides here.

The ensuing discussion endorsed the premise. The evidence is everywhere to be seen, from industry-wide lack of progress to the problems experienced by the companies that registered for the event. This has far-reaching implications for current and future implementations.  It used to be thought that PLM was incomplete because the tools had not yet been fully applied. Now it is clear that PLM will never be complete unless the toolset is re-imagined, and this has massive implications for the future.

You can read the whole story in the State of PLM 2026 Report. This is a milestone in the history of PLM, because it is the first independent and interactive appraisal of how far PLM has progressed, and how it should be re-formed.

Download the Report [Word] >>>                              Download the Report [PDF] >>>

Further discussions on 30 June worked through the conclusions of the Report and generated a Position Statement as a starting point for improvement.

The Position Statement itself is very concise.  Because of the shortfalls in PLM evolution compared to the general advances in modern manufacturing, even the most advanced User companies are not able to implement PLM to meet the needs of the present day.  PLM is indispensable for engineering and manufacturing companies in every type of industry, and shortfalls in PLM capability have a direct impact on product management and performance.

If PLM had been developed in with modern technology and with modern manufacturing ideas the solutions would be more comprehensive, more integrated, more effective and easier to apply.  The PLM industry therefore needs to rethink the aims, scope and features of PLM in order to recalibrate for the future; and to publish this redefinition as a global reference point for practitioners to act on.

The 11-page document expands on this by returning to the fundamental aims and scope of PLM to remind ourselves why the world is doing it. And PLM is something that engineering and manufacturing companies have to do. Before any computers or software or applications ever enter the picture, PLM starts with a need - the need to manage product data, all the way across the lifecycle and along the Value Chain. So we have to move from PLM as the problem, to PLM as the solution.

The document therefore moves seamlessly from the source of PLM through to the problem itself, ways to approach the thought process, and how the Steering Group will lead the industry through the re-appraisal.

Download the Position Statement [Word] >>>            Download the Position Statement [PDF] >>>

The vehicle for change is the Future PLM Steering Group, which will carry out an open and structured review of where PLM is, and where it ought to be.  The Steering Group provides a platform for organisations from all parts of the industry to combine their expertise and decide the new scope and parameters of PLM. Users, vendors, integrators and consultancies all have a stake in this and should all have an influence on the way that it changes.

The Future PLM Steering Group will do exactly what its name suggests - give guidance and direction to the industry that will actually steer the future - and as its Members collaborate over 12 months they get a host of direct benefits: high-level cross-fertilisation of ideas and methods; a re-appraisal of PLM aims and strategy; visibility of the current and 'successor' vendor marketplace; and a stream of ongoing findings from the Body of Knowledge.

The current PLM landscape is complex and entrenched, and no longer meets the needs of manufacturing in 2026.  Implementations cannot succeed on the current platform, and PLM needs to re-evolve or rebuild. This needs collaborative thinking and a well-defined outcome.

However, the world won't change just because a Steering Group says so.  It will change because of the deliverable.

Over its 12-month lifespan the Steering Group will produce a written PLM Blueprint - a comprehensive document incorporating all of the new thinking, and spelling out the advanced scenario that will meet the needs of modern manufacturing into the mid-term future.

At the end of the Project the Blueprint will be globally available, and thus will be on the table at every major PLM selection.  It is only natural that User companies will use it as part of the process.  So, along with the specific requirements, a question for every vendor that responds to the Tender will be:-

              "How does what you are proposing support or differ from the Blueprint?".

Over time the Supply Side will adapt, and PLM will become what Users want.

The Future PLM Steering Group is forming now because we want to be mobilised and running at the start of September, when the summer break ends.

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

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.

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.

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.

The AI Working Group has become a project in its own right, with its own Mobilisation, Generation and Consolidation phases. Anyone who is part of the two streams in PLM 2025-35 (User Collaboration and Knowledge Development) 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.

See the AI Working Group >>>

The PLM 2025-35 Proposal explains everything in detail, and has been up-issued to Version 5.0 to highlight the Future PLM Steering Group.  All three streams are shown in parallel, with a full description, benefits and deliverables.  It shows the synchronisation and two-way exchange between User Collaboration and Knowledge Development, and expands on the PLM Benchmarking and Value Chain Integration aspects.

The Future PLM Steering Group will carry out a collaborative review of how the PLM industry has progressed, and where it needs to improve to match modern manufacturing, and produce a PLM Blueprint for the future. The Body of Knowledge stream will blend User collaboration with industry expertise to generate the definitive reference model for PLM best practice. The AI Working Group will combine technical skills with engineering development techniques to produce the real, working PLM solution.

The Proposal expands to 29 pages precisely because it does contain all the detail, but it is well structured and easy to read.  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 to have 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 PLM 2025-35 Project has 3 clear objectives:-

• To define the future of PLM over the next 10 years
• To create an internationally-agreed Body of Knowledge
• To establish and prove the best way of implementing AI

Organisations may take part in any or all of these streams.  Read the State of PLM 2026 Report and Position Statement to see the background, and Download the Proposal to see how the Project would work for your organisation.

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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