SPK and Associates co-founder Chris McHale recently spoke with PLM expert Oleg Shilovitsky, founder of BeyondPLM.com, to get his top three product lifecycle management (PLM) predictions for 2015. 1. PLM vendors will encounter greater complexity when delivering cloud...
PDM/PLM-Product Data and Lifecycle Management
Electric Commander: Performance Comparison Between ectool and ec-perl
Prior to version 5.2, Electric Commander has offered two primary ways to access the API for scripting purposes: ectool and ec-perl. Both allow users to accomplish virtually any task within Commander, but it’s important to note there is a significant performance...
Leveraging Netapp’s Deduplication Feature
We recently obtained the necessary licenses required to enable one of our clients' FAS2050 filers for deduplication. Currently, deduplication is offered by Netapp for free. You simply need to get in touch with your reseller and request both ASIS licenses...
4 Hardware Recommendations when Using VMs as a Product Development Tool
These days, there is no practical obstacle to using machine virtualization to solve computing problems without the need of acquiring additional hardware. In fact, virtual machines are a compelling product development tool. There are a variety of virtualization tools...
5 Reasons You Want Your PLM in the Cloud
Put it in the cloud. You’ve heard this catch phrase over and over again, more so in recent years with the proliferation of online technologies and services. As more and more PLM software vendors choose to move their application to the cloud, should you consider moving...
Agile Development in Regulated Environments Part 2: Key Practices
In Agile Development in Regulated Environments -- Part 1: Yes, it can work, I covered the common misconceptions about Agile Software Development -- specifically in highly-regulated industries like medical device. The common myth that regulators would not accept Agile...
In the Trenches: How IT Outsourcing Makes Life Easier for R&D Engineers
Earlier this month we posted the second blog in a series on how IT outsourcing can deliver multiple benefits to organizations. This post will delve into the benefits to R&D Engineers. Engineers fear disruption to the organization, potential loss of jobs (including...
Enhancing Electric Commander Build Processes by Creating Dynamic Job Steps
In a simple, straight-forward implementation of a continuous integration pipeline you would typically create a chain of procedures that perform the same set of operations on the supplied input. This provides a build process that is well-defined, repeatable,...
Podcast: Peter Thorne Discusses Hot Trends in Product Lifecycle Engineering Tools
SPK and Associates co-founder Chris McHale speaks with Peter Thorne, director at Cambashi, a Cambridge, England-based independent industry analyst firm. With his over 30 years of experience as a software engineer user, vendor, and now analyst, Peter's in a great...
Integrity to Windchill Integration: A Product Demo
In a previous blog article I discussed, at a high level, the Integrity to Windchill integration for PTC Integrity Lifecycle Manager. Now that we have seen some of the context of how the Integration is supposed to work, I thought it would be a good idea to actually...
The Difference Between Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery
If you've spent any significant amount of time in the world of DevOps and Agile software development practices, you've likely encountered the terms Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD). For several years, I've had these terms thrown around me...
Podcast: Oleg Shilovitsky Discusses the Difficulty BOM’s Across the Product Life Cycle
Last month, SPK and Associates co-founder Chris McHale spoke with PLM expert Oleg Shilovitsky on the difficulty of BOMs across engineering disciplines. In part two of the discussion, they focus in on the difficulty of BOMs across the product life cycle. This is...