CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
22 April 2005
CIMdata News
CIMdata in the News: "Smooth Ride to PLM"
Leading PLM vendors, such as UGS Corp. (Plano, TX), PTC and Agile Software Corp. (San Jose, CA), have leveraged the technology improvements to deliver scaled-down and hosted flavors of their PLM offerings that are right-sized for smaller manufacturers.
"These players are desperately seeking ways to attack small- and mid-size companies with offerings they can swallow," says Ed Miller, president of CIMdata Inc. (Ann Arbor, MI), a market research firm specializing in product development issues. "Many companies don't have the internal technology infrastructure to support PLM, or they won't allow themselves to spend money upfront. These offerings make it easier to get going."
Easier, maybe, but still not a piece of cake. Miller says that while the new breed of hosted applications let companies get up and running quickly on PLM without having to lay out big bucks, there are still tricky challenges to navigate. Take, for example, the issue of changing business processes to support the new ways of collaborating and sharing product-related data among different functional areas internally, and externally, with suppliers and partners.
Want to know more? Visit Smooth Ride to PLM , Managing Automation, April 22, 2005, by Beth Stackpole, Contributing Editor.
Become a member of the CIMdata PLM Community to receive your daily PLM news and much more.
Tell us what you think of the CIMdata Newsletter. Send your feedback.
CIMdata is committed to your privacy. Your personal information will never be sold or shared outside of CIMdata without your express permission.