Infosys-Oracle Blog : Is my CAD vendor the natural choice for PLM?

As a head of Product Engineering team, you finally convinced the management for a PLM tool for your organization. The next big question will be which tool should you implement? All CAD vendors have PLM tools & few ERP vendors also offer PLM as a module.

You got to know about PLM either from CAD vendor or ERP vendor. Most SMEs without big ERP footprints, get to know about the advantages of PLM from their CAD vendor & the vendor obviously pushes his product saying that since your CAD is ours, implementing our PLM will help in having seamless management of your design data – sounds logical right? Not exactly…contrary to perception among SMEs that PLM is mainly to manage product design data, PLM’s gambit is more, PLM focuses on managing product through its various stages of maturity and help companies to maximize returns from their product portfolio. This means PLM should effectively interact with various departments like manufacturing, marketing, service & even with vendors. Most of the PLM vendors manage all design data within their PLM environment – they have plug-ins to integrate to all major CAx (CAD/CAM/CAE) tools. So decision on choosing a PLM vendor is not based ONLY on your CAD platform. Though major CAD vendors provide good PLM tools, your decision should be built on the tool that has a best-fit to your organizational needs. Following are the brief guidelines for choosing a PLM Vendor:

Expertise in PLM domain
Exposure and number of success stories in your industry
Capacity & Flexibility to adopt best practices in Industry
User friendly interface.
Ability to integrate with your legacy systems – mainly with CAD & ERP
Vendor’s focus & strategic vision to meet challenges that face your industry.
Ability to handle various compliances
Ability of the tool’s capability in managing new product introduction, change management & Bills of Material management effectively.
Vendor’s licensing policy and ability to give ‘View and Mark-up’ only access to any authorized using a browser.
Role-based security & access control.

Of the above, all vendors will have comparable features & capabilities in most of the aspects & key to select the best fit for you lies in the vendor’s exposure to your industry & number of success stories in your industry. This will help you to narrow down your choice to a greater extent & final decision may depend on the vendor who could fit-in most of your organization specific requirements.

Comments

One important aspect in this is that the CAD software is the first one that is implemented in most organizations.

A critical factor as described by you revolves around the fact whether the new PLM system is able to integrate or interface with the CAD software.

But as you rightly mentioned PLM software goes much beyond just integration with CAD software and one should critically evaluate the benefits the company is looking for from the PLM software and then decide after due deliberations.

Posted by: K N Harilal | February 6, 2009 8:05 AM

Thanks Harilal for your comments. As you rightly pointed out most of the organizations have CAD tools implemented first & looks to PLM to manage their design data,as they grow. From my previous experience I could see that most of the companies (typically SMEs) go with the PLM offered by their CAD vendor without evaluating options for the fear of other PLM tools' ability to seamlessly integrate with their CAD tool. PLM vendors & implementers need to address this genuine concern of the companies by doing a PoC.

Posted by: Krithivasan | February 9, 2009 4:20 AM