In Stay Sharp Episode 151, The Untold Origins of PLM with Doug Macdonald, co-hosts Juliann Grant and Jonathan Scott are joined by Doug Macdonald, a self-described innovation enthusiast and recovering PLM advocate. What’s particularly relevant for this episode is that, as Juliann notes, he’s “been here since the beginning,” graduating as a mechanical engineer just as CAD/CAM were entering the mainstream. He gives listeners an insider’s perspective on how PLM came to be and what it looks like today.
Doug Mcdonald
From CAD/CAM to PLM
Doug starts the origin story with CAD/CAM, because PDM/PLM wouldn’t exist without them. He was at Computervision (CV) in the early 1980s when everyone was starting to deploy CAD. It’s hard for him to explain just how exciting the time was, he says, “There was no technology in engineering.” But along came this new software. “We didn’t know the seismic changes that were eventually going to result from it,” he adds.
The next step beyond CAD/CAM was PDM. While working for Ford in 1985, Doug was introduced to a new product called PDM that would manage backups, something the industry was starting to need. The first evolution of PDM beyond that centered on account control or retention. Before that point, companies switched from one CAD vendor to another as they had different preferences or needs. “Once you started using PDM,” he says, “I’ve got 500 CV parts I need to be able to find and access. How am I going to do that if I switch CAD vendors and now CV won’t support my PDM system?” That’s when CAD and PDM became inextricably tied together. He adds, “From the vendor’s point of view, it’s the guardrail to stop you switching CAD.”
Well into the 1990s, product data was primarily MCAD—and at that point, so was most of the world of manufacturing, at least within the automotive industry. CAD vendors quickly figured out how to create BOMs from their software so customers could put them into manufacturing requirements planning (MRP) software, a precursor to ERP. CAD vaulting was happening, and some customers were starting to want and implement change control systems. But even though all of that was going on, the term “PLM” didn’t show up until around 1999.
“We’d already established that we could manage part of the lifecycle from design into manufacturing planning,” Doug explains.
“There wasn’t really anything that happened to trigger the renaming, other than this: dot com.” Suddenly everything was web commerce, web browsers, and desktops processing UI and application services. To differentiate the new web-enabled functionality, the industry started calling it PDM plus collaborative product commerce (CPC). Then they wanted a cleaner name, and a group of them settled on PLM. Going to the internet and web browsers, Doug says, “Wasn’t a fundamental change in the problem that PLM/PDM was trying to solve. It was just the first of what was going to be many technology transitions that the industry would see.”
Are We There Yet?
Doug admits to holding a controversial opinion: PLM hasn’t really changed since it was PDM on the internet, at least not as much as people might think. The solutions themselves have changed, becoming “big and bloated” because vendors cater to their most complex, demanding customers. But in terms of the way PLM software is used by the majority of the market? Doug says it hasn’t changed much at all—and he’s heard analysts saying the same. Most PLM customers are doing the same three functions as they used to do in PDM: CAD vaulting, BOM management, and change control.
But Doug also speculates some of the adoption gap results from the platforms not adapting to current customer needs as well as they could. He pinpoints two fundamental changes that aren’t reflected in PLM platforms: MCAD focus and today’s manufacturing architecture. These days, products are comprised of more than just mechanical parts, but Doug notes MCAD is still the biggest driver of revenue for the big PLM vendors. “They need the PDM/PLM tool to enforce, strengthen, retain control over the customers because it’s the MCAD tool that makes that happen,” he explains.
PLM platforms also haven’t adjusted to how manufacturing works today. PLM systems are still aligned with the way of working that was happening in the 1990s—vertically integrated, very centralized production, like Ford was when Doug worked there. But manufacturing today is different, occurring across multiple companies, factories, sites, countries, and points in time. He says, “The idea that all we need is to be able to extract the BOM and apply a little change control and we’re done—you’re not. That’s not the world that exists anymore.”
Learn More About PLM’s Evolution
The full podcast contains more discussion and details on a variety of topics, including why most PLM platform customers aren’t typically using modules beyond core PDM, the point at which PLM started to become more aspirational than realistic, and more.
Be sure to check out Stay Sharp Episode 151: The Untold Origins of PLM with Doug Macdonald and join us each week for a new podcast.
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