BOTW = Best of the Web.
[Editor’s Note: BOTW is a new category at VEKTORRUM, in which we recommend blog posts, commentaries, articles, etc. from other sources, of value to our readership. This is our first installment.]
BOTW Blog & Post:
DezignStuff: Do SolidWorks users need/want PLM?
By:
Summary:
Matt Lombard is well known in the SolidWorks community as an author (SolidWorks Bible), a trainer, and a user advocate. His recent blog post “Do SolidWorks users need/want PLM?” explains the issues of product lifecycle management as they effect small business and single-user engineering site.
The issues Lombard reviews are not unique to SolidWorks users; they apply to all product developers not associated with major manufacturers.
Key quotes:
There really isn’t a reason why you can’t make your own PLM system by just buying a bunch of unrelated software from several different vendors, writing a great product development process, creating some custom programming to help the flow of data, and deploy it within a medium sized company.
In earlier polls that I’ve conducted, the number of SolidWorks users using manual file management techniques is astoundingly high. This means that at least the data management market isn’t saturated, but it also means that those folks might be a tougher sell if they have held out this long.
