The Role of Enterprise Search within Product Lifecycle Management
December 15, 2011
PLMInnovation 2011 was held in London in January 2011. The conference examined current trends in product lifecycle management (PLM) and anticipated future trends. The article, PLM and Innovation @ PLMINNOVATION 2011, on Jos Voskuil’s Weblog gives an overview of the conference as well as highlights some of what the author believes are trends to watch in the future.
While the article gives the appropriate nods to the big-wigs in the industry and recognizes the dualism between engineering goals and IT goals, there was one point in particular that caught our attention:
…it is the fact that the PLM world is changing from databases towards networks. It is not about capturing all data inside one single system, but to be able to find the right information through a network of information carriers. This suits also very well with the new generation of workers (generation-Y) who also learned to live in this type of environments and collect information through their social networks.
This leads to a very important problem facing the engineering industry which was not given due importance in the article – the cost friction poor findability creates. Enterprise search is changing and the engineering industry must change with it. As more and more unstructured data and meta data (from social media, app usage and mobile phones) are being stored by used by all involved in the PLM cycle, adequate and relevant search must be obtained.
Inforbix, a company specializing in enterprise search and data management within the engineering industry, provides its clients with the capability to access and extract information from CAD files located anywhere within a company’s data.
Catherine Lamsfuss, December 12, 2011
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One Response to “The Role of Enterprise Search within Product Lifecycle Management”
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Ref Catherine;s comments “As more and more unstructured data and meta data (from social media, app usage and mobile phones) are being stored by used by all involved in the PLM cycle, adequate and relevant search must be obtained”
I have to say I am not sure of the meta data examples you list here, but I do think we should be searching and disseminating data from inside and outside Engineering from CAD , ERP , MRP, Excel……. Data is an internal asset and we should be finding it and using it, whilst avoiding hefty Power User Licenses and associated skills training. If we do this correctly, information will be readily available for decisionmakers to make informed decisions much more quickly
David Chisholm Jan 18, 2012