Open words – ProSTEP-iViP Symposium in the BMW Welt, Munich

Munich is the PLM capitol this week: the ProSTEP-iViP Symposium as the annual meeting of the PLM community took place on April 5-6, 2011 in the BMW Welt. Working for the PLM unit at Cirquent in Munich, I couldn’t miss this home match. We made a tag cloud poster to display our topics at the booth and were fortunate enough to have many interesting conversations with the 420 participants.

Cirquent PLM tag cloud

The vibes were all good – automotive and aerospace are doing much better than last year. A lot of PLM projects are to be launched now that were on hold in 2009 / 2010. The bottleneck seem to be the human resources for the project teams – the business experts at the companies are as busy as the consultants at the service providers.

BMW AIDA – PDM backbone for E/E

BMW not only sponsored the nice location, they also contributed some presentations to the conference. I was especially impressed with the AIDA presentation: the BMW project manager presented the vision for an integrated electrical / electronical development process. In the second part of the presentation, Dassault Systèmes made a live demo of CATIA Systems and Enovia V6 to show what is possible today. We from Cirquent are commited to the success of AIDA as an innovative and challenging project with about 30 consultants.

PLM Openness Initiative

The announcement of the ProSTEP-iViP association to launch a PLM Openness initiative in 2011 made my day. This is supposed to develop a codex for open standards and interfaces that can be supported by PLM vendors via a voluntary commitment. Not all vendors like to be open, especially when they consider proprietary technology as a competitive advantage. In my view, this initiative meets a critical customer demand, the control over product data as the main asset of a company. Please also refer to the discussion in End-to-end OOTB vs. open, standards-based PLM and in Open Standards and Data Sharing . I will follow this and support the initiative.

Looking forward to the next symposium at Airbus in Hamburg...

(Translated from my original German posting on Cirquent Blog)