Inventing Tomorrow’s Legacy PLM System

If somebody asked you to design tomorrow’s greatest legacy PLM system, how would you do it?

Let’s assume that to become legacy, companies have to have used it in reasonably significant numbers.  So it must be good at delivering a certain set of capabilities

Anyway here’s my list.  Some serious.  Some not so much.

Think of a really ‘legacy’ sounding name.  Put something very literal like ‘hub’ in the name.  If you want to go that extra mile, include the acronym ‘PLM’ in there.  ‘Hub PLM’ would be perfect!.

Make your solution both hard (or better still) impossible to customise and difficult to integrate with other systems by creating lots of technical and commercial barriers.

This way, when a customer needs to build to build a new capability or an application that is essential to their business (but which your solution doesn’t offer or isn’t very good at), they will be obliged to do that someplace else.

With luck, this ‘someplace else’ will become the go to tool for building important new stuff and your system will start to appear ‘legacy’.  Result!

Create a heavy or non-intuitive, ‘one size fits all’ user interface & and make the user experience hard to tailor for different devices and types of user.  This way, companies will adopt new platforms for creating cool new user experiences that people enjoy using.  Then, as UI fashions change, your system will start to look a bit dusty by comparison.

I’m sure I am missing some tricks when it comes to inventing tomorrow’s legacy PLM system.  Making it hard to deploy to the cloud or giving it a clunky ‘windows circa year 2000 style’ client interface spring to mind. 

What’s the lesson learned? 

Pick a low-code PLM platform with a cool name.  There’s a few to choose from.  And we implement them.

Want to know a bit more about low code?

Get in touch - sugan.rai@aessis.com