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rob at bomello dot com
For those unfamiliar, Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) is software used to track the lifecycle of a product (and it's parts) from design, through to manufacture and distribution.
My team are software engineers from hardware backgrounds, and we've built Bomello (link: https://bomello.com/) by borrowing systems and concepts from the software world, where development practice is light-years ahead of hardware.
One of our key analogies has been to Github - which shares some similar purpose to PLM. Like Github, PLMs are the centralized data store where engineers input their work, so that rest of the company can deploy it into the hands of users.
We see the current landscape of PLMs as ripe for disruption. The market is highly fragmented, and polarized. Older players (such as Arena), work well to develop structured development processes, but are overly complicated and often require a dedicated engineer to administer. Newer entrants focus on flexibility, or introducing brand new technology such as AI. On this side, workflows and process take a back seat - which in my mind should be the core of PLM.
What we've built focuses on workflows, centered around a detailed review process with side-by-side comparison of incoming changes. We guide development process towards industry best practice, using modern UX inspired from software dev.
I’ve been a long time fan of HN, but this is my first time starting a company. It’s been just as stressful and exciting as expected! I would really appreciate any feedback, so let me know if these ideas resonate.
A note on PDM:
Product data management (PDM) is a different class of software, but key to PLM (and is often included). PDMs are focused mostly on the engineering users, synchronizing their work such that it can later be reviewed and released into the PLM. Some parallels could be drawn between PDMs and git, although functionally they are very different. We currently aim to be PDM agnostic, as they are typically tied to users’ CAD choice and deeply integrated. However, we have not ruled out building our own PDM in the near future.