Creating a Profession for PLM Practitioners

The Home of Professional PLM

The PLM industry needs a recognised, worldwide professional structure for the people who work within it. The Professional PLM Initiative has been set up to fulfil this need.

The Initiative covers the whole spectrum of what it means to be 'professional' in PLM.  This will be a significant step forward, and will change the way that PLM practitioners work.

The Initiative is inclusive and interactive.  This web site shows the latest developments, and how you can get involved.

The process of defining and establishing a PLM Profession will generate a common, unified view of PLM around the world, with agreed definitions of skills and best practice.

As these are adopted and refined it will have a powerful effect on manufacturing countries, including the concept of 'Offshore' as is it is currently embedded in the wider global economy.

			The 'No More Offshore' Forum came up with some radical ideas on how to address this, including that a PLM Centre of Excellence should be established in India. But why have only one?  This same idea could be applied in several countries of the world.

Not only would this capture the best of PLM knowledge and expertise in each region, aligned to the needs of its 'local' user community, but the Centres could collaborate to create a harmonised definition of advanced and best-practice PLM.

The effect on Offshore is by no means the only benefit of excellence in PLM, but it is a good focal point and could be a significant driver for mobilisation.

As explained in the Summary Document, the Forum clarified the picture from the offshore point of view, and dispelled the basic myth of 'Offshore' itself by outlining the differences in PLM and in manufacturing economies. It also showed how the goal of establishing a PLM Profession will enable the balancing of PLM in a way that allows the onshore-offshore relationship to be neutralised or even reversed.

It highlighted the potential of India to take advantage of this, and made proposals for an Indian PLM Centre of Excellence and an Academic Partnership that could make these effects happen.

India has a pent-up need for improved knowledge and expertise in PLM, with clear and visible best practices that everyone can see and follow - and this would be instilled if a PLM Profession were established.

As one user put it: "Our challenge is the PLM part, not Offshore".  He then went on to list a string of technical problems and related issues that were his real barrier to everyday progress,

India also has the industrial base to build on.  India has a huge manufacturing infrastructure with its corresponding base of PLM usage.  Lots of organisations have R&D in India, and its technical resources are well-known.  Demand for consumption is high, and the economy is growing.

An uplift in PLM implementation and level of excellence would be fuel for this growth, and this could be embodied in an Indian Centre for PLM Excellence.

The programme to establish a PLM Centre of Excellence in India would crystallise a body of knowledge that everyone can use.  It would be relevant to the needs of manufacturing, and structured with a cultural and language flavour that makes it easy for Indian users and providers to work with.  This new body of knowledge would become the basis of PLM professionalism in India, and would be ahead of anything that currently exists anywhere in the world.

'Offshore' is not just India, in the PLM context.  It is everywhere, from Australia to Spain to Brazil and almost any other country you could name.  The logic applies equally well to any country that is currently outside the "PLM mainstream" - and in fact there could be a Centre of Excellence in each of them.

Quite apart from the boost to PLM knowledge, and the creation of a go-to reference body for users and providers, a Centre of Excellence can be attuned to the language, culture and manufacturing base of the country concerned.  People think more quickly and easily in their own language, so why must everyone learn and apply PLM in English?  Obviously, English will remain the common language of PLM, but some kind of helpful "colourisation" is overdue.

The presence of a home Centre of Excellence will be a magnet for users looking for information.  It may also be a focal point for vendors and providers to create a neutral starting point for guidance - and to disseminate the kind of knowledge that overcomes the most widely-encountered pitfalls and failure points.

Naturally, there should be Centres of Excellence in the "mainstream" countries, most obviously in the USA and Europe.  These would drive value in a similar way, focused on their particular locations.

There are obvious questions about where such Centres should be - Germany, the Nordics, the UK?  North America and Canada together or separately?

One might think that PLM leaders would be the first to formalise their PLM excellence, but there is an interesting paradox.

To create a Centre of Excellence, people have to agree that things could be better than they are - and that there is a future state of 'Excellence' that can be aspired to.

Creating such a Centre is a collaborative project, which will need to rationalise and harmonise the current sea of concepts and ideas into an agreed body of knowledge and best practice.  Rationalisation of the profusion of ideas about PLM will mean that some current thinking will need to be refined - and some of it may need to be discounted.  That is part of the process of getting clarity.

Achieving such clarity will benefit everyone, but it requires belief, cooperation and determination.

What if we remove the imbalance in PLM learning and adoption by bringing 'Offshore' countries up to a common professional standard?  What if we go further, and improve an 'Offshore' country so much that it becomes a PLM leader and permeates its expertise to the rest of the world?

Other countries could learn from this, and it may become a model for a future PLM Profession.  Rather than having a single global Professional Body, there could be a federation of several Centres of Excellence around the world, all attuned to their home country or region, and all working with each other to define global standards of accreditation.

It's easy to imagine the transformation of PLM that this would generate - and its consequent effect on global manufacturing performance.

Discussions are now under way to see where and how the first Centre of Excellence might be established. This is an entirely open conversation and input is welcome from PLM practitioners from any organisation and from any part of the world.

You can request the latest information via excellence@professionalplm.org.

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