What PLM World taught me

When you step out of your usual range of experience, you tend to learn. The last couple of days have been a huge learning experience for me.

First, I’ve got to get the disclaimers out of the way. I asked to be included in PLM World. I didn’t expect to be invited because I don’t really fit with the scheme, but I’m glad I went. Siemens paid for my hotel, and for some meals during the event, and didn’t charge me a conference fee, but I paid my own travel to get there. At SolidWorks events, SW typically picks up the entire tab for travel and all for press. I can’t draw any direct conclusions from that, but there were several press-type faces you might have expected to see, that were missing atPLM World.

The first thing I learned is that PLM World is not SolidWorks World. My shorts-and-sandals wardrobe was not commented on by anyone else at least to me directly, but the difference was clear when others were wearing suits and ties. Even the attendees weren’t wearing shorts (in Vegas, in nice weather).

The people who attend PLM World are not like typical SW World attendees. There were few 20-somethings. The registration area had signs promoting a sys admin survey. Not a CAD end user survey.

The events in the PLM World main hall were not drowned with too-loud rock-and-roll. There was no light show spectacle. You didn’t get the feeling you were at a rehearsed political convention. There were no pop-geek stars on stage.

The panel of folks answering questions for the press was mainly “old white guys”. Of the 10 person panel, there was 1 woman, and 1 non-white person. Again, I don’t know what kind of conclusion to draw from that, but it was something that stood out to me.

CAD is not the main part of the discussion any more. Even some of the Siemens people noted that CAD and non-CAD (Teamcenter) revenue were roughly even. That took this event squarely out of the standard CAD conference realm, and gave it a push toward the IT and management side of things.

PLM is real. There is a range of huge companies that use huge teams to develop huge products. You cannot develop a cargo ship with the same tools you use to develop a toaster. The people who design wiper blades do not communicate exactly like the people who develop the entire automobile.

On the other hand, PLM is not a one-size-fits-all sort of arrangement. Custom implementations are literally what you make of them. There is a lot of custom programming, and workflow modeling, and infrastructure integration, and whatever involved and it is all different for each case. Smaller companies with smaller projects benefit less from this.

Mid-range CAD and high end CAD are not interchangeable. This probably seems obvious to most people, but for whatever reason, I was under the impression that some people thought you could replace something like NX with something like SolidWorks. Well, you can’t. There is a reason why Dassault maintains both Catia and SolidWorks. There is a reason why UGS maintains NX (but dissolved I-deas) and Solid Edge. The difference isn’t just Class A surfaces. It’s a whole range of stuff. Geometry is a small part of developing a product, large or small, but somehow, there are people (like me) who have carved out a niche just developing geometry. You might be surprised by how many similarities there are between high and low end geometry, but you might also be surprised by the types of specialized design work the high end software is capable of.

SolidWorks (the company and the product) is more about “show” than any segment of Siemens PLM. I’m really not sure what to make of this, but after working with products and people from both companies, meeting lots of folks on both sides, and seeing events sponsored by both companies, this is clearly observable. These differences are easily shown in the software and the conferences. SolidWorks is more like a consumer product itself, and Solid Edge is more like an engineering workbench.

Also, I have to admit it was nice being able to go to a conference like this and not have every other person in the hall stop me and tell some story or expect me to remember some 4 seconds of my life from 8 years ago. Not that I’m ungrateful for the support of people who read my blog or buy my books, just that I’m not exactly an outgoing type, and acting like I am takes a lot out of me.

Maybe the biggest thing I learned is that CAD companies are not all the same. I don’t mean to say that one company is “bad” and the other is “good”, but just that you’ve got an option, and various aspects of one company might fit your needs better than the other. If you don’t like the direction one company is taking you might have a look at another.

As always at events of this sort, the biggest advantage is getting to meet folks face to face. I have only heard of Tony Affuso before, and now I’ve seen him speak. I got to talk to Karsten Newbury at length, he’s the guy in charge of Velocity products. I met folks like Jim Phelan and Branco Liu who as PR people are instrumental in making other connections and gaining access to information. I met Brad Holtz, and discovered we live in neighboring states. I spoke with other influential folks I’ve met before such as Dan Staples and Roopinder Tara. The people are the real value in all of this.

In the end, there’s not a moral to the story. I just felt I needed to summarize the value I got from taking a couple of days away from paying customers. Thanks again to everyone at Siemens PLM who made it possible for me to attend this event.

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