James Heppelmann
Management
Yes, I think what's really come into light, it always was true, but it's really much more appreciated now, is that PLM is the system of record for products. So PLM, in an industrial company, it's absolutely as important as your CRM system, which is the system of record for your customers, or your HR system for employees, or whatever. So, when companies think I really want these processes to be digitized and mobile, you become mobile and global and in all that. You realize, we need a reliable source of product data that everybody in engineering, manufacturing, service, marketing, sales, whatever can transact against. So we need one single system and we all need access to it. And so we're starting to hear that more and more that it's not about making the engineer's more efficient, which was kind of the first generation of PLM. This is more about making sure that everybody across the company has access to the right product data, because everybody is making decisions about products, pricing them, selling them, supporting them, manufacturing them, and we need to have accurate data and it needs to be two clicks away. And that's what PLM is, now being recognized as the system of record for products and industrial companies can't get very far down the journey of digital transformation without saying, hey, shouldn't we have a system of record for our products? I mean, honestly, they are product companies. So I think PLM is really emerging into something different. Quick example would be that maybe contract we won, it's about product support, it's about everybody supporting ships, having access to data of all ships in the systems they contain, support data. And so we're using PLM concepts to support the operation of ship, not the engineering of manufacturing, but actually, the operation of ships that were engineered, manufactured years ago. And it's kind of a good example of digital transformation versus engineering productivity.