My CAD Hurts: Growing Pains in PLM

Businessmen and customers have one guaranteed difference in perspective. Businessmen are usually more worried about where the next customer is coming from than the state of their last customer. It’s just the way things are. Businessmen have to worry about the future, and it’s a good thing they do, otherwise products would stagnate. But as users, we are also naturally and rightfully concerned about our own needs. As users, we also have to be concerned about the future, but we’re mostly concerned about right now, or the more immediate future. Conflicts like this are natural in life. The big trick is to find a way to balance conflicting needs.

For whatever reason, there are only a couple parts of the product development cycle that tend to capture people’s imagination. Industrial design in its various forms is an obvious member of the club, and gets a lot of attention. CAD is maybe a little less sexy than ID,  but still has its share of people who are very passionate about their work. Marketing, maybe in particular marketing imagery similarly uses software tools that people find inspiring. I’m sure there are others.

Those of us involved in design don’t seem to be here by accident. I don’t know a lot of designers who didn’t actively seek out this kind of work. The activity is fun. The end product can be inspiring. Creation is always engaging. Personally I was drawn to engineering and product development by the thrill of seeing ideas in my head be visualized with the help of a computer, and then realized with the aid of machinery. A great CAD representation of a great product is truly exciting.

Maybe there are people out there who feel the same way about accounting, procurement, logistics, or scheduling work to be done on the shop floor. These jobs are necessary, and can be very fulfilling, but you don’t hear about the tools for these jobs getting a lot of passionate adherents.

All of that just to say that product development encompasses a lot of different tools, but some of us focus on a very small range of these tools. If you look at product development as a whole, you see that it is composed of a lot of smaller moving parts. No one just came out one day and said “Let’s make cool product development software”. It’s bigger than that. All the smaller parts had to be in place before you could see what it had become. Sure, people developed products before the advent of software, and most of the same pieces were in play, and maybe the same pieces were sexy then as well. The development of dedicated tools just made each little bit a little more distinct.

When I started, and this is probably true for a lot of you as well, CAD was it’s own thing. The design activity was still in a lot of cases still part of product development, but I tended not to see that, especially when I first started. I just saw that CAD was a great visualization tool, and visualizing ideas from inside my head was wildly addictive.  I know a lot of other people feel like this as well. We just take our little corner of product development and focus on it as if it were a stand alone idea. We developed in the time when CAD was looked at as if it were a stand alone tool, and now CAD is competing for attention with the rest of the disciplines in the wider product development world like a first-born child feeling a bit jealous of all the attention a new sibling gets.

When I look at the CAD companies of days gone by that are still around in one form or another, I sometimes get a little nostalgic for the times when they really just dealt with CAD. No one or almost no one does that any more. They have all evolved into “PLM” companies, embracing the entire lifecycle of products rather than just the cool stuff. After all, bigger is better, right? If you can’t get bigger by just selling more of what you make, you’d better acquire something else. Anyway, in some cases this adds up to less direct attention paid to CAD tools and users, when the company has one big team of developers who might work on any project, and in other cases, the developers have maintained their focus. From the CAD user point of view, it can feel like your tools are being forgotten and diluted with stuff from other disciplines. So now instead of being CAD or design specialists, we have to also get involved in the bean counting, the purchasing, the selling, and whatnot.

One of the reasons I like working with Solid Edge is that they are a group that has been allowed to focus on what they are good at and to develop what their customers are asking for. Solid Edge is itself a division of a larger PLM conglomerate, but the group exists in its own building, and maintains its own development. This is a group of people who are still focused on CAD, in spite of all the upheaval around them, they have kept their focus, while still being able to offer all the direct attention that a passionate group of users demands. I think this is why you don’t see Solid Edge getting as distracted as some of the other PLM developers.

The software is not isolated, it still has access to the range of PLM tools, but they have been allowed to maintain their specialization, which is one of the reasons I think Solid Edge users are going to emerge from this crazy time in the CAD industry with great loyalty to a company that has in turn shown them great loyalty.