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.

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 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 Report 2026. 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] >>>

Whether it is right or wrong, the current PLM landscape is entrenched.  The only way to make change happen is to make the required future scenario so clear and authoritative that providers have to react to it.

The PLM 2025-35 Project is forming a Steering Group that will work through and agree what the better future scenario ought to be, but 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.

You might like to see for yourself how all of this works.  PLM 2025-35 will host two identical Steering Group Overview sessions on Tuesday 30 June: one early, for Europe and India; and one late enough for the entire USA including the west coast.

Each session has the same 90-minute Agenda, and there are early and late timings that enable practitioners from almost anywhere in the world to participate.

These sessions are relaxed and entirely open: any PLM practitioner, in any type of role, from any country and from any part of the industry can request a joining link.  The Agenda is shown below, with the [UK] timings for the Early and Late Sessions.

This is a structured debate about where PLM is in the new technological age, and how the industry can respond.  The sessions include extensive discussion time so that you can add your views.  They are Open Forum sessions, but run as PLMIG workshops, so as always we will generate some new findings.

Participants need only choose a session, and request a Zoom invitation via either of the links below.

Request an Early Session Link >>>                      Request a Late Session Link >>>

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 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.  Download the Proposal, and if you can Register for one of the two Overview Sessions on 30 June you will see a presentation of the whole picture, and can add your input.

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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