The Increasing Value of SOA-Based Architectures for PLM - New White Paper from CIMdata

ANN ARBOR — CIMdata, Inc announces the availability of "The Increasing Value of SOA-Based Architectures for PLM." Today’s manufacturing industries are under continuous pressure to deliver competitive products faster and are implementing PLM solutions to help address this issue. As PLM environments expand to encompass the complete product lifecycle, they are becoming increasingly complex with more and more functional applications being used. One of the key problems is that the number of application-to-application integrations is also increasing significantly. Additional resources, both human and financial, have to be committed to maintain and upgrade the overall environment. Simplifying the PLM environment, while providing more information and capabilities to the individual worker, is an important factor in the overall success of PLM programs.

To address these issues, companies desire to deploy their PLM environment by using applications and solutions built on common technologies, with common data models and importantly, having a common user interaction paradigm. One approach to this problem has been the selection of unified PLM solutions suites built on a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) provided by a core PLM solution provider. SOA-based unified PLM architectures provide the ability to expand the level of functionality available, improve the users’ experience even as more and more diverse users work within the PLM solution set, and reduce the overall cost of maintenance, support, and enhancement.

This paper presents the challenges that companies are currently facing, defines a SOA-based unified PLM architecture approach, describes the benefits that it can deliver, discusses the factors companies should consider in evaluating whether to transition to a unified architecture, and describes approaches to such a transition. This paper is not a review of any specific architecture. Rather it is intended to provide an overview of such architectures, their potential value, and issues to consider in making a transition decision.