Google Image Search

Imagine you are an engineer (maybe you are one) and you must find that picture you remember seeing about a failure mode. You spend hours trying to find it. Now imagine you type in a couple of words that you remember about the photo and boom! there it is! Fiction? nope. Not now. Google just announced personal photo search. in Google+ 

I may sound like a Google sales person but these pattern recognition and search technologies can be huge time savers. They can also save a company's butt when the engineers miss a potential problem just because they didn't find a critical piece of data. How many times  have I see that? Many.

http://www.google.com/insidesearch/features/plus/index.html

I tried searching my own photos in Google+. I searched for the word "beach". Sure enough all the pictures of beaches came up, Awesome!

PLM Cannot Deal with Flexibility

I posted this is response to a blog entry made by Oleg Shilovitsky, PLM and Data Modeling Flux

PLM systems have had a very hard time with data flexibility or data plasticity. Even more so, PLM systems do not handle hierarchical classification particularly well either. The same rigidity needed for document revisions does not work for constantly evolving product and components attributes. It's one of the reasons why I recommend a PLM solution architecture to my clients that is composed of a PLM system, search and attribute management solutions.

Think about all the rows (data) and columns (attributes) engineers manage with individual spreadsheets. The amount of time wasted in managing these characteristics about products and components is truly staggering.  The number of errors and product issues due to miscommunication of attribute data has resulted in billions of losses. You would think there would be a huge economic incentive to addressing this problem!