PLMIG Initiative

Internationally-agreed standards and qualifications for the PLM profession are much needed, and long overdue. They will never happen without some kind of coordinating initiative to bring people together to generate them.

The PLMIG launched this process in December 2009 and held the first PLM Standards Workshop in Oxford in March 2010.  The initiative has continued throughout 2011 with PLM Standardisation Workshops in Sweden, Germany, Italy, and London.

Oxford Workshop Result

The Workshop generated the PLM Concept Set, which is the set of definitions and principles that everyone needs to know in order to understand PLM correctly.  It also confirmed the first release of the Product Structure Standard, which is the cornerstone of any PDM architecture.

Gothenburg Workshop Result

The Workshop generated the core PLM Governance Standard material, which will provide an international and neutral framework for measuring and directing PLM implementation progress.

Munich Workshop Result

The participants in Munich reviewed the whole PLM standardisation structure, and laid the foundations for the PLM Best Practice Library.

Milan Workshop Result

As well as generating new insights into PLM for the process industries, the Milan Workshop generated the base material for a new PLM Handbook for SMEs.

London Workshop Result

The Workshop at the IMechE worked on ways of expanding the adoption of PLM within companies, as well as across industries, and added the final material needed for the PLM Governance Standard to be released.

The Power of Standards

Not only will PLM standards enable user companies to save the massive amounts of effort that are wasted in rationalising PLM across geographies, subsidiaries, and the customer/supply chain, but they can also clarify much of the current confusion about PLM.

The longer the PLM Standards initiative continues, the more it will clarify the "intractactable" or "unquantifiable" issues of PLM, and enable people to work together faster and more effectively.

The PLM Concept Set contains the formal definitions of 7 basic concepts of PLM.

The PLM Concept Set is a significant development because it formalises, in a very simple way, a standardised base point for PLM expertise. It embodies fundamental PLM ideas into an industry standard grouping, and encapsulates what experienced PLM people know but people new to the role may not.

The Product Structure Standard is a neutral, accurate and robust standard that follows the natural rules of PDM.  It is therefore easy for large corporations to align with their own in-house structures; and because it is simple and concise, it provides an effective template for SMEs to set up their PDM architecture.

Product Structure is an area of massive complexity for many companies, and it may be hard to imagine how a single standard could apply throughout PLM.

The key to finding a standard is to set aside the "product shape" or "product configuration" viewpoint and to focus instead on the fundamental rules that apply to products in an industrial or commercial environment.  These rules apply to every product type, in every industry.

The Product Structure Standard is described in full detail in the Q1 2010 issue of the PLM Journal.

The PLM Governance Standard looks further than the basics of metrics generation and provides a standard by which the PLM Team of any organisation can integrate PLM issues and initiatives into the Board's direction of the company.

This standard offers global corporations a method of establishing consistent PLM application across all of their global sites; can be used by smaller companies and new adopters to ensure PLM performance at a competitive level; and will be a reference point for vendors and service providers that provide a core, neutral understanding of how successful PLM should be developed.

Next Steps

The next part of the process will be the Standards Implementation Workshop hosted in partnership with the PLM Innovation Congress on 22-23 February in Munich. This will build on the new material generated in 2011 and formulate practical approaches to best practice adoption within real working implementations.

There will need to be international cooperation to take this forward and to align standards across countries and regions, and we may look to form a Steering Committee to guide progress and to act as the appraising authority.

More Details

More details about the background to the PLM Standards Initiative can be found via this link. The latest news about the Initiative is always to be found on the PLMIG front page.

How to Participate

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