PLM Interest Group

PLMIG Initiative

In 2010 the PLMIG addressed the issue of the lack of internationally-agreed standards and qualifications for PLM, and started an initiative to bring people together to generate them.

The process was launched by holding the first PLM Standards Workshop in Oxford, UK.  The emphasis then expanded to PLM Standardisation, with the aim of formalising best practice and embedding it throughout the enterprise-wide implementation.

The PLM Standardisation Initiative continued with further workshops in Gothenburg, Munich, Milan and London, and has generated a new methodology for effective PLM standardisation that can be applied in any company or PLM implementation.

The Oxford Standards Workshop generated the PLM Concept Set, which is the set of high-level definitions and principles that everyone needs to know in order to understand PLM correctly. The Workshop also highlighted the need for a wider approach to PLM Standardisation, backed by a structured programme to make it happen.

The PLMIG therefore set up an interlinked series of PLM Standardisation Workshops that would run through Sweden, Germany, Italy and the UK.

The 2011 programme was launched with a workshop for the Nordic Region held at the Novotel Gothenburg on 24-25 May. One of its primary results was to generate the core of a standardised framework for PLM Governance.

The Workshop took the ideas in the CEO Briefing Document and developed them into an enterprise-wide framework that would eventually become the PLM Governance Standard.

The second event was hosted by the Universität der Bundeswehr München on 07-08 June.  The Munich Workshop built on the results from Gothenburg, and extended the standardisation concepts into skills, provisioning, and through-life support.

Focal points included PLM in the military and defence industries, and the full-lifecycle impact of MRO.  The participants in Munich also reviewed the whole PLM standardisation structure, and laid the foundations for the PLM Best Practice Library.

The Milan Workshop was held in partnership with Holonix and hosted by the industrial user company Nearchimica on 27-28 September. The group developed new techniques for PDM in the process industries; and a completely new methodology for SMEs to adopt PLM.

The PLM Handbook for SMEs is now a stand-alone manual that enables small and medium-sized companies to position themselves and adopt PLM accurately.

The Institution of Mechanical Engineers hosted the fourth event at their headquarters at 1 Birdcage Walk on 01-02 December.  The London Workshop used the role of the IMechE as a learned society to focus on PLM Governance and improving the adoption of PLM.

The Workshop at the IMechE worked on ways of expanding the adoption of PLM within companies, as well as across industries, and added the final material that enabled the PLM Governance Standard to be published as a finished document.

To bring together all of the results from the 2011 series, the PLMIG ran a Standards Implementation Workshop in February 2012 to show how to apply PLM Standards and PLM Best Practices in real commercial environments.

This was held in synergy with the PLM Innovation Congress in Munich, giving delegates the opportunity to "cross-fertilise" between the two events.  The primary focus of this event was to enable PLM Teams from user organisations to understand, adopt, and use the new standardised and best-practice material that was generated by the 2011 programme.

The Workshop not only produced a clear picture of how standardisation can be applied within PLM implementations to best effect, but also established a straightforward methodology for achieving it.

The Workshop Series showed that there is no standard structure for a PLM implementation.  Every organisation's PLM environment is different; and so the elements that it standardises will also be different.  In that respect, it is a bespoke activity.

However, the Series also showed that there is a standardised methodology for actioning this bespoke activity - in other words, though each company's internal PLM standardisation is specific to itself, the method of applying the standardisation is general best practice.

This optimal approach is based around the de-facto PLM Standardisation Manual and is covered in detail on the main PLM Standardisation page.

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