PLM for SMB – who are those companies?
Posted by mikilumnitz on July 1, 2008
PLM for the mid-market
This post is in continuation to my previous post in this subject ‘Do Mid-Market companies need to adopt PLM?‘ and the question in hand is who are those mid-market companies? what are their characteristics?
I will try to specify those companies to maybe share some light on this matter.
Mid-market company in the PLM world
Unlike what we would have think, the mid-market companies develop today very complex products and need to use complex development processes (in the past we could see mid-market companies developing simpler products, but not any more) and they need to do so with fewer people. which means they face essentially the full range of challenges in the PLM world but must be much more efficient in solving those. In addition to that, they face higher competition than in the large OEMs.
Those companies are not anymore local but global (could be even in very small sites) and tend to grow faster. They are usually working across industries (if I am a mold maker for automotive probably I develop molds also for other industries) and they are in most cases part of value chains (need to exchange and collaborate with other companies, do not have responsibility to the end product end to end).
Another interesting characteristic would be the organizational structure. because of the fact that those companies tend to work in more small projects in parallel, they will use in most cases matrix organization instead of hierarchical/program organization.
You will find that the users (the engineers) are integral part of the decision making team and therefor have higher end user influence on decision makers. in general you could say that in those companies you will find more individual view versus corporate process view. This does not reduce those companies’s need to standardize their business processes.
Those companies usually have fluctuating cash flows & unpredictable revenue stream with limited IT resources. Which leads to the fact that they did not rush to implement the traditional PLM because of low budget and low risk capacity.
Do you have the feeling we are talking about your neighbor carpentry workshop? if yes, you are wrong. We are talking about companies up to around 1 billion $ revenue…
If you find most of the characteristics above fits your company… congratulations! your company is a mid-market company and my guess will be that ENOVIA SmarTeam will fit your company PLM vision.
Where is the MBOM ? « Jos Voskuil’s Weblog said
[...] But let’s assume we have the ideal PLM solution for an SMB company. This was the startpoint, I had during my meetings this week. How would you motivate a company to implement PLM, knowing all the constraints of SMB companies. Miki Lumnitz wrote about it in his blog -PLM for SMB who are those companies ? [...]