The Circle is:
a) A misspelling of the Cyrkle, a sixties one hit wonder with “Red Rubber Ball”
b) An potentially malevolent application in the company of the same name, which is the topic of a popular book of the same name by Dave Eggars (confused, I am)
c) A blatant attempt to make a poor pun as a blog title
Of course, anyone who reads this blog knows that the answer is C. Why? The theme of this year’s PLM Market and Industry Forum is “The Circular Economy.”
Products and services offered in the marketplace must meet a wide range of requirements simultaneously. Of course the customer should always come first, but there are additional stakeholders with needs to be addressed. With more criteria to meet, it makes sense to consider them as early in the development process as possible. The notion of concurrent engineering, which emerged in the 1980s, addresses those needs; it is in sharp contrast to the more common waterfall approach to development commonly used at that time.
Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) emerged as a strategy to support product and process development, enabled by software technology and services. Ideally, companies manage products from concept to retirement as part of their PLM strategy. Aiming to reduce the environmental impact of products in both production and in their use, sustainability has become a common rallying cry for manufacturers. However with product retirement, many regions must deal with landfills at capacity, toxic materials in the environment, and the ultimate waste of natural resources embedded into products that cannot be reused or recycled.
Some believe there is a better way. We have made great strides in design for the disassembly, recycling, and reuse of materials from many common products. PLM strategies and enabling solutions have played a significant role in the successes to date. But what if we could have zero impact? What if everything we took out of the ground, or created, could be infinitely reused and repurposed? This is but one notion of the “circular economy,” a radically new approach to thinking about most of what we do, build, and use. Meeting this more stringent need will require new PLM enabling solutions and services to help companies adapt. Solution and service providers already focused on enabling sustainability may have an edge, but there will certainly be new market entrants.
In essence this new approach involves systems thinking, looking at products in a truly holistic way. Systems engineering (SE) offers a framework to adopt this broad view and an expanding set of tools can help navigate the necessary planning and development tradeoffs. Adopters will need services from specialists—service providers who focus on this approach.
The circular economy will impose new requirements on simulation and analysis (S&A). Reusing materials repeatedly can change their properties; will they stand up to one more reuse? While we can see the benefits of applying more S&A in the early stages of the product lifecycle, these solutions are compute-intensive. Can we simulate in a more circular-friendly way? Most of the large S&A companies provide a broad range of services, but are there new opportunities?
Product data management (PDM) solutions are often at the core of PLM strategies. Recent CIMdata research in the aerospace & defense (A&D) sector showed that leading companies want to move far beyond just data and process management. Our industrial consulting has showed this same phenomenon in other industries. This will create new opportunities for specialist providers and services organizations who can deliver the subject matter expertise required to support the broader adoption and implementation demanded by this new thinking.
Organizations already spend significant resources on on-premise PLM-enabling tools. The last few years have seen increasingly more of these solutions enabled for cloud delivery. Understanding what is available, what is to come, and what else might be required will help smooth the path to a circular approach to IT utilization. Many of these tools will expand delivery onto mobile platforms, bringing capabilities to the “deskless,” and to other remote users. Mobile and cloud are changing the relationship between solution providers and their SI/Reseller/VAR partners. Are you ready?
Based on the discussion to this point, thinking in a circular fashion is really outside-the-box thinking. Similarly, PLM has created and consumed the same type of “raw material” for several generations, namely files. What will get PLM to look outside of that box? Several new trends and the actions of some leading companies are pointing to a new way to store and communicate information, as objects, creating files only as needed to support certain processes and use cases. What are the implications of this change for the PLM Economy? Follow Stan on Twitter at @smprezbo.
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