This year marks the 5th
anniversary of Product Innovation (http://oc.pi.tv/) conference in US. This year the
conference was held in Orange County, CA. The conference has evolved a lot from
first conference in 2012 that was held in Atlanta. This year’s theme focused on
PLM, PLM 2.0 & Digital Business. PLM 2.0’s focus is about extending PLM to
Product Analytics, Business Intelligence and Data Analytics. There were 30+
vendor’s booth, which is 25+ % jump for last year, which is good change. Also,
there were some very small niche software vendors that participated in the US
conference for the first time. One such vendor was ESKO (http://www.esko.com), a software platform that helps
organizations to manage and Product Packaging, Sign and Displays. The other
small vendor that caught my attention was PropelPLM (http://www.propelplm.com), a cloud based PLM platform build
on Salesforce.com platform. PropelPLM also presented a client case study at the
conference along with the client. Interestingly, in the past 5-7 years, there
have been many small PLM vendors that have started offering very niche or
extended capabilities. This is very helpful for small to medium size
organization who have niche or specific requirements and do not have pockets
for big 5 PLM vendors implementation.
Day 1 highlights - Bloodhound SCC’s (http://www.bloodhoundssc.com) chief engineer presented their story about “Breaking the
World Land Speed Record”. It was a wonderful presentation as they demonstrated
the reinvented wheel for the car they developed which could travel
at 1000 mph/per hr. in 11 seconds. The BLOODHOUND Project is a global
Engineering Adventure, breaking a 1000mph world land speed record in an attempt
to inspire the next generation to enjoy, explore and get involved in science,
technology, engineering and mathematics. A leading automotive company presented on they
evolved to PLM 2.0. They build analytics for Engineering Change Managements which
helped them to make faster decisions.
Another key highlight
was from a leading CPG company which presented on topic “Overcoming Cultural
Resistance to PLM 2.0 Strategy”. They mentioned some quotes like “IT does not own
the systems, Business owns the systems” & “R&D create data and Supply
Chain creates products”. This was music to my ears as we educate our clients
every day on the same thing. Day 1 concluded with a presentation from the CTO
of Salesforce (https://www.salesforce.com) on “Welcome to the New Era of
Manufacturing”.
Day 2 highlights – The chief of Analytics – Global Connected Consumer experience at GM (http://www.gm.com) gave a very insightful presentation on “The Disruptive Effects of IoT & Analytics on the Product Development and PLM Space”. On an average a person researches 10 hrs. before buying a vehicle, with 46% purchase finance online. Ebay Motors sells 500,000 cars each year. One of the key take away from the presentation for me was “Data from Connected Customer and Connected Product with test PLM environments may present an entry point for new Vendors”. A leading LifeScience company shared their experience on how critical it is to sustain executive sponsorship for a successful PLM business transformation program. Also, over engineering processes, application and making complex UX screens can prevent a smooth end user adoption experience and can also derail the program.
A leading Pharmaceutical company presented on how to ask the right questions and building a compelling case. Finally, a leading Medical devices company talked about the importance of simplifying the UX across applications and how leveraging Design Thinking helped in system adoption.
Focus groups discussion were part of the prime slot presentation, this was a change from last year. The focus groups are exclusive for the delegates with no vendors attending it. I believe the focus group should be extended to Product Innovations practitioners that are not affiliated to any software and bring in the industry and domain experience. This will make the focus groups more interesting.
Overall a great conference for learning and knowledge sharing.
Remember, Knowledge is valuable when shared, so come and join the 6th Product Innovation US conference in Wild West Texas in Oct 2017.
Happy Holidays!!!
