At the Ann Arbor session of CIMdata’s global PLM Market & Industry Forum series on April 4 we delivered a presentation on Getting to Markets of One. During the presentation, we polled the audience which consisted of a collection of senior leaders of PLM solution and service providers.

We asked: How important Industry 4.0 was to their future market success.

Their responses are shown below:

Given the audience and the trends in the market, this result was not surprising.

As a point of comparison, the same question was posed to the audience (including many of the same people) during at the same event in 2018. While this is not statistically significant the large change from year-to-year is interesting. See the responses below:

In 2018 the question was part of a session on Industry 4.0, for 2019 it was put in a larger context around one goal of the Industry 4.0 vision: profitably serving markets of one.

This session focused on the need for advanced variant configuration management capabilities to get your products to be more configurable, and how some firms are tying this to Configure-Price-Quote (CPQ) solutions, a fast growing enterprise software category that seeks to put a tool into the hands of the salesforce that ensures they sell buildable configurations that can make the company money.

The second poll conducted as part of the session focused on the potential adoption of advanced variant configuration management. This is important because many leading providers are investing in that area, including Dassault Systèmes, PTC, SAP, and Siemens PLM Software. They are entering a market space where specialists like Tacton and Configit are focused that is also populated by configuration specialists like pure-systems, Modular Management, and MethodPark.

We asked: What percentage of your customers are good candidates for advanced variant configuration management capabilities.

The responses are shown below:

Based on this small sample it seems like investment in advanced variant configuration might be money well spent.

What do you think?

Stan