---
title: "PLM won't save the planet"
categories: 
  - "software-solutions"
draft: true
---

When I got into PLM my main focus was the digital thread. It was 2009, I was a Process Engineer in a french Defense et Security company and a coworker was drawing (yes drawing including arrows) bill of materials of systems we shipped to customers in an Excel File stored on a shared drive (not even sure this was not on his PC). I had a previous experience of ERP (SAP FI-CO-PS) consultant and I couldn't stand this missing digital continuity in many aspects of the product development.

Quickly I met with 2 types of PLM enthusiasts:

- The PLM extremists who believe PLM is a revolution, which fixes digital continuity from requirements to recycling, by "just" changing the way you work, installing a software and running a few trainings and voila.
- The PLM pragmatics/realists who know what's going on in the field. They knew spreadsheets were still the main PLM tool out there, hurting the product development efficiency.

With a few "PLM pragmatics" we created a club in France called PLMLab ! The main concept was to get back to basics. At the beginning of each conference, [Pascal Morenton, President of the association](https://www.linkedin.com/in/morenton/) and Professor at [CentraleSupélec](https://www.centralesupelec.fr/) was using simple examples to remind everyone how we were not aligned on simple PLM concepts. The Goal was to create a "no-bullshit" environment.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdvGo7DsFbQ

## are we making planes fly !

PLM has made a lot of promises in the past.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bMVzTDP8c0

## We won't save the planet

I love

Starting initiatives to claim that we can fight climate change with PLM is just offering a forum for large PLM editors with a large marketing department. It doesn't help injecting money in real PLM product development.

## It is about data and configuration management

PLM is about data and configuration management.
