CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
6 March 2009
CIMdata News
CIMdata Announces the Results of its Opinion Poll on What is Most Important to Your PLM Initiative in These Stressful Economic Times
Over the past several months, many of our industrial clients have asked us how the current economic climate has impacted the status of PLM implementation initiatives. In order to better understand the current situation, CIMdata is in the process of analyzing, releasing, and reporting the results of a set of CIMdata Polls concerned with this topic. January’s CIMdata Poll asked participants how the current stressful economic times have impacted their PLM programs. As reported last month, 63% of the participants reported that their PLM program has been negatively impacted in some manner. Last month’s CIMdata Poll asked poll participants what was most important regarding their PLM initiative. In this poll, CIMdata sought to understand the main concerns held by PLM technologists during the current stressful business climate. The results proved to be rather interesting.
As illustrated in the graph of the poll results, just over half of the participants indicated that they were concerned that management wouldn’t, or perhaps doesn’t, view their PLM initiative as strategic to the business during these stressful economic times. One could easily argue that if a company’s management team views PLM to be strategic to its business, then they would be less likely to cut its budget, remove resources, limit training, put it on hold, etc. However, the January poll indicates that the majority of programs have already been negatively impacted. This points to the apparent need to better educate management on the importance of PLM and how PLM can benefit the company during stressful as well as non-stressful business cycles. Finally, it is interesting to note that the questions that asked about specific budget-cutting effects were not selected in any large percentage, as compared to the non-budget issues. This re-enforces that the poll participants are much less concerned about tactically-oriented budget cuts that can be lived through, than they are that management doesn’t view PLM as strategic to the business. CIMdata’s recommendation based on these results is that PLM teams should continue to regularly update their management teams on the benefits being realized by the business due to continued use and adoption of PLM.
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