In Stay Sharp Episode 155, The Future Platform for Hardware Engineering: The Report, Explained, co-hosts Juliann Grant and Jonathan Scott talk with returning guest Doug Macdonald, a self-described “recovering advocate” for PLM. The trio discuss Doug’s new report that identifies platforms that don’t yet exist, but need to. For lack of a better term, he calls the category the “future platform for hardware engineering” (FPHE) and describes it as finally fulfilling the promise that PLM has failed to meet.
Why Not PLM?
Doug’s opinion is that PLM hasn’t changed with the needs of the industry. While the world of manufacturing and products has changed, going from products that were mostly or entirely mechanical to every discipline in one, the CAD/CAM-based PLM platforms haven’t kept up.
Doug Macdonald
“He says, “PLM has not reacted adequately enough to this increasing complexity in the way that products are designed, what they're made up of or even how they're manufactured.””
This isn’t new. Doug’s been watching it happen for the last 30-plus years—and he’s clearly frustrated and fed up. “This was always meant to be something that would help people develop new products,” he explains. “I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that a PLM system is almost a liability now.” For evidence, he points to LinkedIn, where everyone is discussing something new, like cognitive threads, product memory, or knowledge graphs. “They’re all implicitly saying legacy PLM is not enough,” he concludes.
After telling himself to stop moaning and commenting on LinkedIn posts, he started doing something about it. First, he asked himself what engineers need to be able to do today, and then he looked for companies that are trying to find those answers. He says, “There are plenty of small companies around that are developing solutions that you could call PLM successors.” They’re a different kind of solution, which he categorizes as FPHE.
While Doug has no stake in the game, he has goals. One is to get industrial companies to recognize the reality of the problems they have today in their PLM environments, “to recognize that they are a mess,” he says. And two, for them to start looking at the new solutions being developed and use those that can solve their problems, “because these businesses can only thrive if they get customers,” he adds.
Pieces of the FPHE Puzzle
Doug identified eight companies that are addressing some of the problems that exist. They’re all very different but share certain characteristics. He explains, “They were not tethered to MCAD, and in fact, they were not tethered to anything. They were all recognizing that product information comes from many different sources now, and that really the challenge is in tying together all of the different sources of information.” He calls the octet’s defining characteristic “being able to get information backwards and forwards across the life cycle, across many different integrated systems.” That’s in stark contrast to PLM, which doesn’t go much beyond creating a BOM.
Though the companies are all taking different angles, appealing to different audiences, and solving different problems, they have to do similar things, such as start with a platform that means they can integrate with lots of data sources at any point in the product lifecycle. Their commonality is more a pattern of the kinds of problems they’re solving, rather than a pattern of a specific architecture, Jonathan notes. In a sense, the fact that there are so many companies solving the same kind of problem—Doug started with a list of 20—is proof that there’s a need beyond PLM. Or as he’d argue, to out-PLM the PLM platforms
The Future of FPHE
The challenge for these small companies is growth. They’re up against the big three vendors who spend many marketing dollars telling companies their problems are already solved. This goes back to Doug’s goals: if companies realize they don’t have the solution they need even if they have an established PLM platform, and then if they look around for smaller vendors who are actually solving the problems, maybe there will be an FPHE. “My big concern,” Doug says, “the thing that could stop all this in its tracks is these small companies either go out of business or they get acquired. Either way, the things that they’re trying to do disappear. Nothing happens.”
Doug maintains that he isn’t trying to sell or convince anyone of anything. He’s reporting what’s happening right now and suggesting companies take their blinders off and evaluate the reality of their systems. “This is not Doug’s imagined world of the future,” he says. “If you don’t like what’s in my report, you don’t like reality.”
Learn More About the FPHE
The full podcast contains more discussion and details on a variety of topics, including what Doug says is vendor gaslighting, the companies he believes are working on an FPHE, and more.
Be sure to check out Stay Sharp Episode 155: The Future Platform for Hardware Engineering: The Report Explained and join us each week for a new podcast.
Follow the Razorleaf Podcast, Stay Sharp in Digital Engineering on:
