The Evolution of Product Development

Shifting workforce demographics, global teams and major advances in Web 2.0 technologies have converged, creating a need for social computing tools in product development – a phenomenon we call Social Product Development. We have been busy blogging about Social Product Development and you can read our latest thinking on this important topic right here.

How will PLM get Social?

Today we welcome Jim Brown as a guest blogger. Jim is the founder and President of Tech-Clarity, an independent research and consulting firm that specializes in analyzing the true business value of software technology and services. Jim has 20 years of experience in application software, management consulting and research focused on the manufacturing industries. He is a recognized expert in software solutions for manufacturers and has broad knowledge of applying Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), Supply Chain Management (SCM), ERP, quality, service management, and other enterprise applications to improve business performance. I have posted here and on my Clarity on PLM blog (see Going Social with Product Development ) that I believe there is significant business value to be gained from the intersection of social computing in PLM. Why? Because product development is inherently a team activity. Getting a product right requires contributions and feedback from people from all corporate walks of....

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Enterprise 2.0 – a novelty or necessity?

At the speed of the internet, the debate seems to be moving away from whether Web 2. 0 has a place in the enterprise, and squarely towards where it fits. My hunch is that this shift in the perception of social from a gimmick to a given is driven, at least in part, by the stunning adoption curve of Microsoft SharePoint – as evidenced by a recent SharePoint conference that drew more than double the attendance Microsoft expected, and more than a few rockstar engineers (bonus points if you can find me in the photos). Microsoft just seems to have that knack for moving things into the “widely accepted” category. When “being innovative” is the problem…But whether or not the perception is moved, there’s still a real risk of social enterprise applications going the way of the Laserdisc if we as vendors get too caught up in the cool and not enough ....

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"Da BOM is Da Bomb" Or Unlocking The Value in Your Bill of Materials

Ok, I know. ..too much slang? But I couldn't pass up the alliteration or the homonym. I’ve been thinking about the BOM (bill of materials) a lot lately. There is practically a religious war going on about the BOM, and it’s been going on for a long time, most notably, when PLM really started to take off. The question on the minds of most CIOs is “Should the BOM be owned by PLM or ERP?” After all, they likely spent significant time and resources deploying ERP…. and then came PLM to muck it all up. There are many types of BOMs; the engineering BOM (eBOM), manufacturing BOM (mBOM), and service BOM (sBOM), just to name a few. My colleague, Tom Shoemaker, wrote about this in a recently posted article in Time Compression. Best practices suggest that the best way to create these BOMs is through an associative transformation. Transforming the eBOM into the ....

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Time… The One Thing You Can’t Make More Of.

Make it better. Make it cheaper. MAKE IT FASTER. The pressures on product designers and engineers to crank out high quality, less expensive products are ever increasing. And no one is giving them more time to do it. In fact, they’re being asked (or told) to do it FASTER. Yesterday, I talked with the Lead Design Manager from the Oracle America’s Cup racing team. Together with a group of very talented engineers and sailors, he and his design team just completed an incredible feat of engineering. They built one of the world’s fastest sailboats ever to win the America’s Cup sailing contest. They studied the complex rule system, conceived of the design, prototyped, analysed, and built the boat. And they did it in six months. Flat. If you haven’t been following the America’s lately, here’s a short lesson on how to win ....

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