PDMGuru

This page lists a number of great books on areas related to PDM(later I'll add links to amazon.com or maybe not !) Rapid Development (Steve McConnell) - Wow what a great book this is. It discusses all kinds of issues associated with development of projects. There are some great case studies of classic mistakes and a section describing a wide range of methodologies you might encounter out there. Palm Pilot The ultimate guide (David Pogue) - This book is a must for anyone with a palm. It covers a great deal of operating the palms, a history of the palms but the greatest thing is a CD that contains hundreds of applications for the palm, some are shareware and other demos. Crossing the chasm (Geoffrey A. Moore) - This book is a great read for any company that has reached the point of selling into mainstream market after having sold into a technical "niche" market. This could be applied to the PDM industry in general....... About Face -

Introduction Any company that manufactures a product probably has a bill Materials, or more likely more the one. How the company manages this information is crucial to the success of the company. At a seminar a long time ago I heard a speaker ask "Who owns the bill Materials in your company?" Some people answered engineering some people answered manufacturing and other people answered configuration Management. The speaker said, "Actually the correct answer is the company owns the bulk material!" The bill of Materials is the company's primary asset, if it is lost or corrupted the company is out of business! How to structure? The classic answer to Bill of Materials is to keep it simple. This is often more easily said than done. I would refer the reader to a great book called Bill of Materials structured for excellence. In this book the author discusses how company can manage with one Bill of Materials. For some companies this is very difficul

As time goes by it never ceases to amaze me that companies find themselves in the position of having their corporate information in an unsupported legacy system. I plead with people to make sure they do not fall into this situation! Many companies have merged/gone out of business/change focus over the years and sometime it can be hard to justify embarking on huge migration projects "just to stay where we are". My suggestion is to be proactive with senior management and convey to them how much intellectual property is tied up in the unsupported system. The simplest way to do this is to develop a risk mitigation plan. The contents of this should address What are the likely failures of the unsupported system The probability that each will happen The action to either mitigate the risk occuring or correct the problem The impact the failure would have on the department and the business Do this on Monday! IT IS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING TO DO! I cannot str

Well I figured a PDM Blog would be fun. Not sure how long this will go on for. My initial ideas are to put down stuff in here that I find out in my travels about issues in PDM or Product Data Management and PLM (Product Lifecycle Management). Stay tuned for more postings