Digital Transformation in PLM – Oleg Shilovitsky, OpenBOM

This is texturong TV. Welcome to techstrong TV. I'm Bonnie Schneider today.

We'll be exploring the impact of digital transformation on PLM and how new technologies like the internet of things and AI are shaping the future of the tech industry joining me now is Oleg Sheila vitsky the co-founder and CEO of open bomb a digital Network platform that manages product data and connects manufacturers with supply chain networks with expensive expensive experience in engineering manufacturing and software Oleg is an expert on the future of product life cycle Management in the manufacturing industry Oleg. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you.

It's pleasure meeting you and thank you for inviting me excited to be here. Great. Well, for those of us who may not be familiar.

Can you please explain what the product life cycle management or PLM is and why it's important for the manufacturing industry. Yes, thank you. That's that's a great question product life cycle management was around for the last 20 years and it was shaped to provide support and manage information about product over its life cycle.

And I know it's a little bit product life cycle over its life cycle, but let me explain it is about how you manage information about product through its life cycle. So you have design cycle you have engineering manufacturing sales maintenance. All these stages of the product development and then later user producing a lot of data producing a lot of information requires coordination of people so PLM, it's taking the overarching approaches how to address all this information management and how to coordinate between all these people that involved in the designing of Products Manufacturing of products and then later usage of products.

A lot of our audience are people that work in technology. So they may be interested in knowing some of the challenges that you face, especially when implementing digital transformation strategies. Yeah, you see the the biggest the biggest thing in manufacturing can transformation of manufacturing that it is moving from the old fashion Legacy approaches.

Where are the company was doing everything by itself into more connected approaches where the companies are not by themselves. Like if you go back in the all the Ford Motors Factory that was doing everything from glass and rubber to the cars today if you manufacture complex products, thanks automobiles airplanes or even very A smaller high-tech devices that are involvement of many companies. It's the entire value chain starts from the manufacturer of components.

Contractor supplier. So the entire system is interconnected. And this is where the challenges for many manufacturing companies are coming because the entire network needs to be controlled managed and the companies needs to be connected and companies needs to assess risks and also coordinate their work.

That's the entire mechanisms that needs to be managed. And that's that's the challenge because it's the complex environment that requires coordination and information control. How can PLM help address these challenges and improve operational efficiency?

Yeah, that's that's it's a great point because what is what PLM brings to the to the manufacturing companies? It brings the entire information model about how to focus and manage product information and all related pieces of data. It's like the foundation of this is the information about product what it includes How It's Made Who is involved in making this product?

What components needs to be purchased with components needs to be manufactured. So it's all together and provide the entire life cycle model of this information management, and it sounds like simple thing but it's really really very complex. Let me give you just one example.

So when you design car with all components and all configurations, that would be one perspective on the card. So the design and then you build those cards and on the assembly line, you might have 25 different configurations of the car and you need to deliver a particular components to the assembly line. Then let's go move forward.

Someone is a company is selling this car and you're driving this car and then the company wants to deliver a new feature to your car, which is very common. Use case these days and when you deliver this feature to your car it needs to be delivered to your particular kind based on the particular configuration of your car based on the particular plant that you have in this car. So it's a lot of complexities involved into just one use case of making cars just highly sophisticated product.

Like if you go to more complex products, like airplanes defense systems become even more complex, but I have also great news for developers of the Different high tech devices those do in many other products. It's everything that we want to deliver today. It's highly configurable because we want to be able to go to website configure the product the way you want and make it delivery to think about how many chains of information needs to be engaged in order to deliver this information and build a product exactly based on the year requirements.

So it's a highly sophisticated environment and PLM brings the information foundation for this companies. What are some of the benefits of improved collaboration and information sharing across departments and how can PLM facilitate this? Yeah, you see in the past the work was done first in design.

So Engineers were. Sitting together group making great design and then this was a concept of throwing over the wall of manufacturing. So the engineers were throwing this the drawings to the manufacturing people and say no build it.

So that was the good old days and then manufacturing people by the way saying everything that you design cannot be made so they be make it differently. So what today is impossible because there are many reasons why companies need to work together in collaboration. So just give you a treat first a complex complexity of the products in skyrocketing today every product It's a combination of mechanical electronic mechanical electronics and software components.

So the people need to collaborate to make it together because there are different Engineers involved in this world and then you need to make it so you you need to engage with contractors you need to engage with suppliers. So it's another element of collaboration and then if you for example make products that requires me, and as you have maintenance Facilities and maintenance companies that doing this work. So they think about how many inter interdisciplinary Communications in a variety of forms also in the design also in the life cycle stages and also in geography because companies located everywhere.

So it's all of this. It's all needs to be connected together collaborating together because these days no one wants to wait we want information right here right now. So that's that's how it's all requires collaboration.

And this is how the PLM that brings this collaboration to this environment. It's actually providing huge benefits to companies. What about the cost?

How did it reduce costs? Well, I you know, let's start from simply saying that I didn't see a single company manufacturing company that is not interested in cost. So of course, it's obviously one of the immediate questions because like we are all in business.

Now the management of all information and pieces of information together actually can help you to get visibility on cost which is by by itself very hard to manage. You can come to a company and you can ask them tell me about the important elements of the course the cost breakdown It's usually the information that doesn't sit in the single person. It's usually the information that involved coordination of multiple people and again coming back to the question of the information management and collaboration to bring this information together getting the Enterprise cost assessment is not a simple task that can be done very single person.

It's requires coordination of people and information together. It's eventually as an impact on customers. Can you talk a little bit about open bombs specifically of what it is that the services that you're providing and how you're helping manufacturers manage the data.

Yeah, absolutely. So the first one we started open bomb our vision was. To provide a platform that can help to manufacturing companies Engineers their contractors and suppliers to work together.

So this is the the big problem that we have seen in the industry is that companies are turning into networks and working as networks, but all Legacy products where I developed for a single company. So when you have a product that develop for a single company that need to operate as the network obviously doesn't work. So and that's where the Gap in the industry is that the companies that are becoming more efficient and want to become more efficient is a networks and coordination, but the products and technology and PLM industry like a city Technologies very developed like 2025 years ago.

So the opportunity for us and open bar was to bring in new platform that capable to manage data and work as a network platform so capable to help companies to manage information also individually, but also coordinate together. So that's the biggest advantage of open bomb is to be able like it's called multi-tenant data management. So we allow the different companies to manage their information also coordinate and share data together.

So that was the vision of open bomb and the second big vision of open bomb. Is that when we dealing with a lot of information? The everyone today is trying to become more intelligent with the information.

So you think how to make a right decision based on data, you know in our everyday life getting a lot of intelligence out of simple usage of application. Let's just make a super simple example, I go to supermarket pull my Amazon application instead of buying something from the Shelf. I'm ordering on Amazon and the place so that's that's a simple decision like we drive and we make a lot of decision when we driving we are on navigation tools.

Like that's all intelligent data deliver it to us in the easy way to make the right decisions. So what we see as a vision of open Moment manufacturing business is that we would like to help manufacturing companies based on the data that they have make right decision. It's a very easy to say it's very complex to implement because it requires a lot of transformation in the industry.

But what is happening now and be clearly see it in our business that companies are transforming and the switching from thinking about application. To thinking about data so data is becoming more important for companies rather than application because the data stay longer it's provides more value and you know today data is used with while application and tomorrow date is used with another application. So that's companies understanding and this is where the transformation is taken us.

Oleg Shilovitsky Speak with you. Thank you very much. Great questions.

I enjoy it. Thank you for having me and look forward to stay in touch. Thank you so much.

All right. We'll stay with us on Tech strong TV. We'll have a lot more coming up.