Carestream Health, a medical and dental imaging, molecular imaging and non-destructive testing product specialist, has selected Aras Innovator suite to replace an “outdated and highly customized implementation of Dassault’s Enovia MatrixOne and a collection of third party and internal legacy systems.” Aras, if you’re unfamiliar with the name, is one of the first vendors to base their business on an open source model in the PLM field.

The new system will provide Carestream Health with “advanced PLM functionality and a modern Microsoft-based platform for global product development and supply chain integration for improved collaboration.” According to the details due tomorrow, Carestream will be implementing Aras’s tools in a phased approach as it’s rolled out to support 3,000 global users and supporting suppliers spread across in the US, Canada, China, Israel and France. The press release which we got an early copy of, has two intriguing quotes from Carestream executives.

“We wanted a single enterprise PLM backbone for engineering, quality and regulatory compliance, tightly integrated with SAP,” said David Sherburne, Leader of Global R&D Effectiveness and champion for this initiative at Carestream Health. “Our legacy platform was built a long time ago and we knew we didn’t have the functionality required for the future; it was time to carefully look at our options. We required a rapidly deployable solution coupled with a sustainable cost model. When compared to other PLM suppliers, Aras offered a solution unique to the industry.”

“We’re a progressive company and we want to work with other forward-thinking companies who can help us eliminate organizational silos and increase collaborative development to achieve a competitive advantage in the marketplace,” said Bruce Leidal, CIO at Carestream Health.  “In switching to Aras we now have a highly capable, global PLM platform that will allow us to consolidate other systems at will, increasing reuse and improving collaboration without continual capital investment in PLM licenses.”

There’s an undercurrent here of a major medical device manufacturer looking at its current PLM system and staring into the distance and the future of its business and seeing that a highly proprietary PLM system that locks it’s user in isn’t in that crystal ball. I’m due to meet the guys from Aras at COFES in April and I’m going to dig into what Aras have to offer and to find out exactly what they mean by Open Source and how it differs from what else is out there on the market.

Just had an entertaining phone call* with Benny Shaviv of PLM+ who are trying to bring a fresh approach to the PLM world. PLMplus (or PLM+ if you can find the extra bit on your keyboard) has the goal of solving one of the longest standing barriers to PLM adoption - ease of use.

By Ease of use, I’m not talking about implementation, cost of adoption, but rather the plain simple fact that many PLM projects fail purely because the systems in place are to complex, to hard and often too bewildering for users to accept as part of their day to day working practices. It’s a common thing to find myself talking to PLM adoptees that have not got up and running with their system purely because buy-in of users has stalled the process.

The need is there, from both a process and organizational requirement, the software is all encompassing and highly functional, but you’ll often find one of the following reasons are prevalent:

“It’s too complex and I don’t have time to use it properly - so we don’t”

“It presents me with such an overwhelming amount of data, I don’t know where to start”

“I’m a designer/engineer - I’m not a database administrator - why should I bother?”

PLM+ are looking to solve this by creating a rich application that engages the user, provides ease of implementation and on going maintenance (by allowing the user/admin, rather than costly consultant) and can be delivered over the web, in an on-demand manner (which saves hardware and infrastructure cost). The on-demand aspects are interesting. Many have tried the on-demand the approach before. PTC have PLM OnDemand with Windchill, Arena Solutions have it’s own set of tools.

Can PLM+ achieve the level of success it’s expecting? Who knows, but the time is right for web-based applications to thrive and in the wider IT world, they already are. Can that level of success be transitioned to the professional, more data-heavy world of product development? Who knows, but there’s a change in the air. Or should that be, there’s a change in the cloud. With a well respected team that have been involved in both support and sales of PLM for years, with an interesting blend of investors, timing is right. But perhaps the most interesting thing is how the team is approaching this from the user experience point of view, rather than functionality. That’s something even I can get excited about.

PLM+ is currently in closed beta and we’ll eagerly await further product news sometime next year.

*One of the things I enjoy about something like about twitter is that you find people that you need to interact with on a professional basis, but get to know them through other means, through shared tidbits of information, of personal thoughts and personal views - so you have a much better understanding and personal relationship with them when the time comes for business talk. It’s nice. Give it a try. You’ll find me at twitter.com/alistardean.

Dassault Systemes just announced it has signed an agreement with Portland-based consultants, i-generator to “strengthen its position as an industry leader in the PLM market for retail, footwear and apparel industry.” Footwear? Retail? Dassault? Oh yes.

i-generator is a footwear creation services consultancy, specialising in applied research (ergonomics, biomechanics, and neurology), biomedical engineering, mechanical and industrial design, development and sourcing. They’ve worked with Timberland, Nike, Scott, Merrell and a little leftfield for them, Norton Motorbikes. i-generator will work with the Enovia team to deliver Enovia-based solutions to global footwear manufacturers. Dassault already has two commercially available, RFA related off-the-shelf, PLM products. Enovia Apparel Accelerator for Design & Development and the Enovia Apparel Accelerator for Sourcing and Production. This agreement should see these expanded upon.

While Dassault’s name might not be a name synonymous with the Retail, Footwear and Apparell (RFA) world, the acquisition of MatrixOne brought the company a raft of customers. RFA is something that many traditional PLM vendors are becoming interested in, as their traditional user based starts to mature. Dassault has MatrixOne (now merging into Enovia), PTC has FlexPLM which I assume is now being integrated into the Windchill product line. and there’s specialised PLM tools as well as well as those working up-in-the-cloud world, Zdesign and its Zweave system spring to mind.

The RFA is a pretty raw industry in terms of technology adoption, with data and workflows being highly fragmented, typically globally dispersed and working with large amount of data to manage. Consider a single training shoe. Between 10 to 12 different sizes for both men and women, regional variations, different colourways. Then consider component count. Different textiles, different suppliers, different components, soles, uppers, lowers, trim, stitching, assembly. It’s ripe for PLM and Dassault looks to be creating some very interesting partnerships to dive into it.

#1: I’m currently in a very chilly Boston, attending PTC‘s annual Media and Analyst event and the proceedings have kicked off with some new announcements, so I’ll cover those as details emerge. First off, PTC has just launched its Windchill ProductPoint product, first shown at the PTC/User event in Long Beach. This sees the core, underlying processes and workflows from Windchill, applied to the Microsoft SharePoint platform. Flagged as the Social Product Development platform, this sees a layer of technology built onto the pretty much ubiquitous SharePoint platform, that adapts it from a generic document management and sharing platform, for the purposes of product development. This extends it to handle the more complex interactions between parts, assemblies and drawings typical within any 3D design system and gives you the ability to “vault and share structured information.”

PTC ProductPoint brings product design technology to the widely avialable SharePoint platform, such as managing complex data structures inherent in design systems (such as Pro/Engineer) and data visualisation tools from PTC’s ProductView technology.

Looking at the product from a very early stage, its clear that this is pretty interesting. With all of the standard SharePoint tools, such as document sharing, forums and wikis, the ProductPoint adds a two layer stack on top. The first is based on Windchill that allows you to control all of your office documents, typically Pro/E design data, but adds an additional layer that adds ProductView-based (which is perhaps one of the best kept technology secrets in the 3D world because of its ability to handle huge datasets in a highly efficient manner) viewing and mark-up facilities for not only Pro/Engineer data, but Mathcad.

Complex structure and data interaction is something that vanilla SharePoint can’t handle - ProductPoint adds this capability

Things like “where used” and “used by” searches based on complex assembly structures is something that standard SharePoint can’t handle.

But what intrigues me is what do PTC mean by Social Product Development? Are they just jumping on the ‘social’ bandwagon? To some extent, yes, they are. They aren’t the first to do so, and I’m pretty sure they won’t be the last in the 3D design world. This is perhaps the next stage in this industry as vendors either try to truly accept what’s happening in the online world or just simply attempt to reposition their existing products as providing those types of interaction methods. What is clear is that there’s a ground swell behind PTC’s management solutions (see the EADS deal as a good example) and building a seemingly very capable solution, based on a data management platform that’s already installed in most organisations, has 100 million licenses, makes a huge amount of sense.

PTC CEO, Dick Harrison - never a man to mince his words.

As PTC CEO Dick Harrison commented at today’s event “There’s no such thing as standalone 3D CAD anymore,” and every vendor worth their salt, is looking to find new ways to integrate design and data Management and add real value to the complex interaction between both data and the people authoring or influencing a product’s development.

Next up: Pro/Engineer WIldfire 5 - More Soon.

As the time of year for surveys crashes upon us, some interesting figures are showing that only six per cent of PLM user group cooperation actually taking place.

Subsequently, 39 per cent of PLM user groups are now defunct, with fewer than 10% of the remainder having any activities planned. The survey from the Product Lifecycle Management Interest Group (PLMIG) offers reasons for the decline that include the workload placed on unpaid officers, and the lack of relevance and interest in the agenda.

A spokesperson for the PLMIG, said: “This represents a major lost opportunity for PLM implementers, because the more significant and intractable problems in PLM can be resolved only by effective exchange of ideas and methods between experienced users.”

In response to their findings the PLMIG are conducting a two-day user forum in Reading on 13-14 November, giving delegates the opportunity to present an overview of their own PLM environment as input to the discussions and generate the common material they need.

Siemens PLM Software came up with some interesting news, that it recieved a major order from Volkswagen Aktiengesellschaft for Teamcenter and its implementation. VW will use Teamcenter throughout its vehicle design and manufacturing process to “create transparency in its processes, so that obligatory information on product maturity, productivity and cost will be available at any and every point in the process.”

The product data management project (known as K-PDM ) at Volkswagen is laid out over several years and will include up to 45,000 users in the final implementation stage. According to the press release, the essential goals are to establish “efficient and consistent processes within the global development and planning network through the entire product development process – with K—PDM as central point for the product process within the Volkswagen group.”

Contributing to the success of the program are several elements – accurate data and a synchronous supply for all brands, locations, individual sectors and levels, including suppliers and development partners. The K—PDM project also encompasses the existing IT landscape, which will be consolidated and the costs optimized. The goals will be achieved through a specific Volkswagen change project that is based on a unified company wide product data management solution.

VW states that “The decision to standardize on the Teamcenter portfolio was based on the software’s ability to integrate and provide a consistent solution beyond PLM, the market maturity of the software and Siemens PLM Software’s experience in the market.”

The project will be executed over the next few years in committed car projects and different levels throughout the entire Volkswagen group. Following the successful completion of phase 0 and the “Go Live” decision in November 2007, Teamcenter will be used in production for future vehicle projects at Volkswagen and Audi.

This is an interesting insight into the work that organisations like VW and Audi are going through – while many still don’t understand the concept of PLM, this is changing and changing at a rapid rate. Call it PLM, call it PDM – what matters is that organisation are using the wealth of tools avialable (from Siemens and its competition) to drive out inefficiencies and costs from their processes, by working more intelligently – something we can all learn from.