In year 2000 the work with PLCS, Product Life Cycle Support, began. Sponsors included US DoD and MoDs from UK, Sweden, Norway and Finland. Industry was there with BAE systems, Boeing, Hägglunds Vehicle, Lockheed Martin, Rolls-Royce and Saab. These organizations all design, manufacture and/or support complex systems. They have a need to manage and update PLM data over a long time and to share it with business partners using different systems for PLM, ERP and MRO. So they invested in PLCS.
Eurostep had the technical lead for the PLCS development. PLCS is in use, proven and delivering superior value to users in many industries including aerospace and defence, automotive, energy and AEC. The PLCS data model is rich and fine grained and it covers the complete scope of PLM, from requirements and systems engineering to installed base and IoT. PLCS is used for data exchange specifications but there are also end user applications based on PLCS such as ShareAspace from Eurostep.
Fast forward many years: Everyone talks about the cloud and an increasing number is using it for CRM and other applications. For PLM there has been a lot of resistance but new PLM companies are challenging the big ones, at least at customers that is not classic PLM users. The acceptance for cloud is increasing everywhere although the most likely use in larger companies will be hybrid, a mix of OnPrem and Cloud. For reasons.
So what about PLM in the cloud? The use today is either allowing for custom code, basically the same as a hosted service or IaaS, also referred to as single tenant use. Or based on a data model limited in scope which might be better than a shared spreadsheet but still not really PLM. A cloud (SaaS) service, making use of what is unique with the cloud in a SaaS environment, based on PLCS, will make a real difference. This is an application that supports individual configuration over customization and has a joint upgrade path for all tenants at the responsibility of the provider.
Truly a great fit for sharing of PLM data in the extended enterprise, across companies and domains, where a neutral meeting space is needed to manage engineering changes (requests and orders).
Follow Eurostep in 2019. We promise you an interesting year!
