Why PLM is killing the innovation in CAD/CAM

Hi!

This is our third post. I’d like to say thank you for the thousand visits I got in the last two days. I never thought we could get that much in such short period. Thanks!

Sit tight: Our today’s post is about the close relationship between CAD, CAM and PLM and how this sometimes may not be good for CAD/CAM users.

Since the CAMZone conception came to my mind a few weeks ago, I think that this was the first thing that crossed my mind as a subject to be discussed. In the last 15 years, PLM turned to be the best friend and the Mr. Nice Guy from the CAx industry. And for this very reason, I think my post is going to create a great deal of controversy specially among some people living from PLM. Ok, let’s start! 😀

 PLM is a very short acronym for a very complex matter. Differently than PDM (Which is a role often within PLM), PLM, according to Wikipedia, is ” the process of managing the entire lifecycle of a product from its conception, through design and manufacture, to service and disposal.” – Wow. I’ve never saw a such long description for a process. 😀

I won’t drill down into details about PLM here – I’d have to write three nights and days and I wouldn’t be even close to finish it. For me, PLM it’s like ERP systems – A overpromised solution, with an under delivered result. Let me tell you why I’m of this opinion.

I’m not crazy or stupid to say that PLM or ERP is not important or unnecessary. Both can play a decisive role in how fast and competitive a company is, specially if they are well-integrated with the business processes of a company.

With a well implemented ERP (Notice I didn’t say famous nor an expensive one, but rather, a well implemented one), the company management can have quick and accurate results to make decisions like hiring (or firing) people , buying more machines or better divide the workload among the existing ones,  sales forecasting and inventory optimization, order tracking, costing, aff… the list goes long… 😯

But I think a big fact about ERP is that most of the times, they demand a very cumbersome integration with the existing business processes, and this is where ERP providers make huge sums of money. Guess what: PLM suffers from the same disease. And this is my point today.

So essentially, the reason I think PLM is an overpromised solution, with an under delivered result is because seldom companies manage to deploy all functionality they offer because of many reasons, some shown below:

• Very time-consuming and stressful process
• Complex requirements to integrate with existing business processes/systems
• A real diarrhea of money

Today I read this on the profile of a LinkedIn connection:

“Anybody can buy technology, but can they make it work? “

Totally true!

I’ll use for my example today the PLM solution from PTC, Windchill, which is a tool I know and can talk about by experience. However, the core idea behind this post affects almost the entire CAD/CAM industry, specially big vendors who are also marketing PLM. Although I use here PTC as a clear example about how the PLM fever is slowly killing their flagship CAD/CAM product, Pro/Engineer, I recognize that this problem seems to be everywhere…

When PTC acquired Windchill Technology in 1998, Internet was in its early days and PTC envisioned what we have today: A web-based world. As soon as they realized the huge potential of that thing, they turned their focus towards it and ever since other products in their shelf were put aside to act merely as supporting actors. PLM is hard and time-consuming to be implemented, administrated and supported, and as no other product in CAx industry, it generates high revenues in every aspect of it. Implementation services, which were hard to sell in the CAx era, are a must for PLM. Customers don’t even consider not to buy it. Technical support and maintenance, are also a must. If one could read PTC financial files, he would see that a minority of their customers is off maintenance when it comes to PLM. Now go to the second file, where CAx numbers are stored: I’d say 40% of their customers off maintenance against 5% of PLM customers. PLM is the real deal gentleman. Stockholders, marketing dudes and sales engineers never had such great life… I’m not saying it’s easy money… but is not as hard as it used to be either… 🙂

Modern PLM can connect development teams across the globe and make the information available to each side in nearly no time. PTC is great in doing this. However, I can say from my experience that set up a multi-site solution like this is crazy. Replication servers, redundant hardware, data-servers, load balancers… to put all these things to work demands high skilled people and it’s almost impossible without 24×7 support from you PLM vendor. Nobody works for free, and this kind of service is very expensive.

In my humble opinion, PLM it’s like a vacuum cleaner dragging the money from your pocket… it’s not like selling a few seats of CAx… when they close a deal the amount of money involved is far higher than selling CAx…

Well, nearly the entire industry somehow followed PTC way (Although only a few gave up CAx as they did) what resulted in lack of money for R&D in CAx. If a product is not continuously re-engineered and streamlined, it quickly loses its capacity to add value to the user and the sales get flat. Bottom line: No sales, no R&D. Simple isn’t it?

Windchill alone already accounts for 50% of PTC’s revenues in U.S only.

Creo in its best days won’t get even close.

As many of you know, PTC recently announced that with Windchill 10.0 they will invest US$100 million in R&D. I bet my best beef that some Product Managers at PTC will never get 3% of this money to enhance some modules that are still using Sam’s Geisberg code. Unfortunately, that’s why PTC could not keep Pro/NC as a competitive product. Some long-time users may have noticed they dropped the fast paced development of many modules of Pro/E soon after acquiring Windchill.

This kind of unbalance is nearly eliminating real R&D in CAx, just because this approach results in bad or under-resourced programming teams, heavy and ineffective pressure in the working environment, low quality (buggy) products, and so on. For companies working under this philosophy, innovation is to make the ends meet. I won’t be shocked if a programmer post a comment here saying he’s got to take his own toilet paper to the office… or that they’re splitting the bills for the coffee break… You see my point now? 😉 – It’s not about whether PLM is good or not – Is about the unbalance it creates in the CAD/CAM/CAE R&D. Hopefully CAV is not being affected by this till now.

I don’t have anything against PLM and its sub-products or ERP systems or whatever does what these systems do. I want to make myself very clear that I’m not a PLM specialist and as such I don’t understand all layers in this big gearbox. But the fact is that manufacturing companies make money creating new products, and often this implies in making chips, and here, CAM takes place.

The potential of PLM to eliminate paper and comply with regulations and better processes is clear and must be exploited to its fullest, but it’s a mistake to believe that database tools, servers, reports, graphs and all the modern stuff these systems provide are more worth than manufacturing efficiency, optimal usage of cutting tools (What is provided by modern CAM algorithms), short lead times, etc… In the best case, they are equally important.

Siemens PLM is also putting efforts in their PLM package – Teamcenter. The nice thing about this piece of software is that it is better integrated with Unigraphics CAM modules than PTC’s Windchill with Pro/NC, as it can even manage tooling in a very similar way TDM (A high-end tooling manager) does. I saw a demo years ago while I was working in Germany and I got impressed with it. Not sure about Dassault Enovia in regards tooling management, but I know they’re also doing a good job with PLM. Why? The answer is: Follow the money! R&D and innovation will be where the money is, and right now, the money is not in CAx. As I said in the beginning, PLM is the Mr. Nice Guy now.

As Blake Courter from SpaceClaim and Evan Yares mentioned a few weeks ago on Twitter, you won’t find any CAD billionaires out there simply because they don’t exist. The ROI of CAD development has never matched what was possible in other realms, such as PLM.

In my humble opinion, PDM is more helpful to CAM, as long as it is properly sized and priced. PDM for NC program versioning control and to manage the files of your CAD/CAM solution can turn into a very cost-effective/attractive solution. People often do not realize the benefit of a small, properly sized/priced PDM solution. The productivity gains are clear, so is the smile of the auditor when your company is after ISO 9000 certification.

I think some systems will start to offer these bundles very soon as this is becoming a clear solution for small/mid-sized companies trying to fit into ISO requirements and get rid of paper. With, PLM however, the answer is never short.

It’s easy to say nice things and benefits of PLM. But my aim in this post was to share an opinion seen from a different perspective – One seen from the chip maker standpoint. 😉

I hope we can get a good discussion on this one. It will be great if PLM experts could share their opinions with us. This will make the post more interesting.

Thank you for getting here and to U2 for helping me while I was writing this…

See you,

Daniel