Episode 11: Breaking Down Data Silos: PLM Integrations as a Strategic Enabler with Michael Pieper

In this episode of the Share PLM Podcast, we are joined by Michael Pieper, Managing Director at XPLM Solution GmbH. XPLM is a global provider of integration solutions that connect PLM systems with enterprise applications such as ERP, ALM, ECAD, and MCAD tools. Their focus is on enabling end-to-end digital thread visibility by bridging data silos across engineering and business systems, helping organizations streamline product development and lifecycle management.

In this conversation, we take a deep dive into how forward-thinking organizations are reimagining integration—not just as a technical task, but as a strategic enabler of innovation, collaboration, and agility. 

Here are the core ideas unpacked:

⚉ PLM as Strategic Infrastructure, Not Just Software
⚉ XPLM’s Mission: Enabling Seamless Integration
⚉ Deep Vendor Partnerships and Vendor‑Certified Integration
⚉ User-Centric Integration: Making Integration Invisible
⚉ Openness: A Growing Trend in Integration Ecosystems
⚉ Mastering Data Migrations—With Agility
⚉ Exploring AI & Future Innovation in Integration
⚉ Integration as a Strategic Enabler


CONNECT WITH MICHAEL:
⚉ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-pieper-ba1538116/ 

CONNECT WITH SHARE PLM:
⚉ Website: https://shareplm.com/ 


Join us every month to listen to fascinating interviews, where we cover a wide array of topics, from actionable tips, to personal experiences, to strategies that you can implement into your PLM strategy.

If you have an interesting story to share and want to join the conversation, contact us and let's chat. We can't wait to hear from you!

Transcript

[00:00:11] BEATRIZ GONZALEZ:
Hello everyone and welcome to the Share PLM podcast. My name is Beatriz González, and I'm CEO of Share PLM. And today, as always, my lovely Jos Voskuil, our great cohost. So welcome Jos. How are you doing? And who is with us today?

[00:00:28] JOS VOSKUIL:
Hi Bea. Good morning. Well, a little bit sweating here. It's hot in Europe. And today we are speaking with Michael Pieper, who is the CEO of XPLM and XPLM was one of our sponsors on the PLM summit. And maybe you have seen, if you heard about also Ruth Bittner’s story about the work that XPLM is doing.

So Michael, you are quite challenged because we expect a lot from you from the same style that Ruth was bringing and the passion. So first of all, please give us an introduction of yourself and what keeps you busy at the XPLM.

[00:00:59] MICHAEL PIEPER:
Sure. Well good morning and thanks for the invitation. My name is Michael Pieper. I'm managing director of XPLM. I started here at XPLM as a project engineer more than 12 years ago and helped a lot of customers to get the best possible benefit from utilizing our solutions within their enterprise applications.

And today my responsibility as managing director is more a leading XPLM strategic direction, overseeing our global operations. And ensuring that we continue to provide top-notch integration solutions for our customers.

[00:01:35] JOS VOSKUIL:
Michael, when I look at XPLM and your focus on integrations, I think you are fitting very nicely in the modern debate about PLM. Is PLM a system or is PLM is an infrastructure? What are your thoughts about that? How should companies do PLM?

[00:01:50] MICHAEL PIEPER:
Well, I think like companies need to see PLM as a strategy, not just a single, single system.

[00:01:57] BEATRIZ GONZALEZ:
How do you help or support companies to define their PLM strategy? Something that XPLM helps with.

[00:02:05] MICHAEL PIEPER:
Well, indirectly, yes, but not directly. So, XPLM is not a provider of PLM systems. So PLM vendors are reaching out to us, or their partners are reaching out to us in order to provide those customers with integration solutions from XPLM.

[00:02:21] JOS VOSKUIL:
And do you do any type of integrations or are you specialized in a certain area?

[00:02:25] MICHAEL PIEPER:
Yeah. I would say like XPLM is a global leader in system integration. Our core expertise is to conduct PLM applications with all kind of other enterprise applications like mechanical cut applications, ECAT applications, ERP systems, requirement management systems. So basically all kind of applications that are used by engineering companies all over the world.

[00:02:48] BEATRIZ GONZALEZ:
You connect the applications, and you also help defining the process, the working process for the connection application. Right?

[00:02:55] MICHAEL PIEPER:
Exactly, yes. So our mission is to break down data silos and that in order to enable a seamless information flow between those applications that are like natively not talking to each other, right.

[00:03:09] JOS VOSKUIL:
I think 20 years is, is a long time. Have you seen major technology transitions in those 20 years? How integrations were done.

[00:03:16] MICHAEL PIEPER:
Yeah, of course. I think that is ongoing and probably a lot of our customers are facing is the switching from on-premise applications to cloud applications. So that is of course something that is changing and it's recently and it's ongoing and it will continue to be a thing in the future.

This one and then the other aspect I would say is that a lot of applications now, like if we take a look on the last couple of years, so we had a lot of offering tools like SolidWorks for example. And then tools or those authoring tools then they established own smaller PDM system or full PLM systems around those applications.

So a challenge that XPLM is facing currently is that we see a moving from an integration from an authoring tool to a PLM system, towards a integration between a PLM system and another PLM system, or a PDM system to another PLM system.

[00:04:13] JOS VOSKUIL:
Exactly. Yeah. I think everyone sees that managing 3D CAT with an external shell, PDM Shell, is much more difficult than if you have your internal APIs and then provide a database around the 3D CAT. It's also, I would say, a signal of people are moving away from file base to a database driven ways of working.

And talking about the cloud, I think especially if you look at the mid-market companies are still a little bit reluctant for the cloud. How do you see this happening? Is it a 50-50 demand now or is it still in the early days that people look into the cloud?

[00:04:47] MICHAEL PIEPER:
I think 50-50 is a good, good thing. So we will have applications that are moving to cloud. I think we see that with Jira, for example. So cloud data, the application, we see that with a lot of PLM systems that are moving to the cloud. ARAS for example, being one of the most prominent here. But also like a windshield plus from PTC or Teamcenter X from Siemens.

So all of those applications are moving to cloud and the customers, I would say, they want to follow that one. But having that said, I think here in Germany people are more resistant or hesitant on moving to the cloud than they are somewhere else like in the US for example.

[00:05:25] JOS VOSKUIL:
Hmm.

[00:05:26] MICHAEL PIEPER:
And that is probably has to do with governance and security and data ownership and stuff like that.

[00:05:31] BEATRIZ GONZALEZ:
And talking about ARAS and Siemens, you have mentioned, does XPLM has key partnerships?

[00:05:38] MICHAEL PIEPER:
Yes. And I think that what sets us apart from the rest of the market, like XPLM has a partnership agreement, official partnership agreement with almost all of the major vendors out there and that not just like since yesterday. A lot of those partnerships are existing since decades now, already, like the beginning of XPLM or a couple of years later on in, in that journey.

And that, of course, is offering possibilities and a lot of benefits for our customers as well.

[00:06:04] JOS VOSKUIL:
And when I hear interfaces, I think that's something in the background. But are you also creating part of the interface that is user-centric so that we reach, in the end, the end user also?

[00:06:15] MICHAEL PIEPER:
What do you mean? Like in terms of…

[00:06:17] JOS VOSKUIL:
Menus or integration menus that pop up or interfaces.

[00:06:21] MICHAEL PIEPER:
Of course, I mean like all of our integrations. So if we are connecting a offering tool to a PLM application, then XPLM is quite deeply in integrated into those applications. So we have integrated menus from XPLM in those applications, as well as we are sitting behind those workflows in the applications.

So it's partially a automated process as well as a manual process supporting the user in their daily business. So I think like the easiest example is probably an engineer is designing something and the CAT application is pressing the safe button. And then automatically our integration is taking care about moving those structures to the PLM system, publishing a BOM and creating view files, for example.

[00:07:05] JOS VOSKUIL:
Yeah, some people say the the best integration is invisible, huh?

[00:07:09] MICHAEL PIEPER:
That's true. That's true. But that of course requires a lot of trust in the integration and in the technology.

[00:07:16] JOS VOSKUIL:
Exactly. And then when it comes to open, it's because I think also users are now much more having advanced demands on how to have systems integrated and the, the voice of the user is strong. How open are the systems compared to, let's say 10 and 20 years ago? Is openness of the systems you're integrating, still a topic or is it more a puzzle?

[00:07:39] MICHAEL PIEPER:
Well, of course it's depending on the vendor itself. But I would say that the majority of those vendors, they understood that this openness is something important, right? They need to enable the possibility of creating integrations to third party components. 

So that is important and I think it's not a, like if we talk about a trend here. I think it's more going into the direction of being more open than, than being more, more closed.

[00:09:11] JOS VOSKUIL:
And are you following in, in the integrations, any kind of standards, ISO standards, for example, for exchange of CAD data or metadata?

[00:09:20] MICHAEL PIEPER:
No, of course, what we are doing is since we are official partner of those vendors we are committed to following their development guidelines and following their principles in order to or how we are designing our interfaces. So that goes hand in hand in direct collaboration with the vendor itself to ensure that we are keeping as XPLM our official partnership with those vendors.

[00:09:43] BEATRIZ GONZALEZ:
What about the data migrations? Sometimes when you connect it to applications, so maybe it's a new one and they need to migrate. Do you have also, do you support also there or how you work with your customers on that?

[00:09:55] MICHAEL PIEPER:
Yes. So data migration, I mean since XPLM is like a vendor agnostic company. So we are basically, we are working with all the vendors. If they let us working with them and we are not preferring one of those vendors, right? So it's like a daily business for us since vendors are reaching out to us for integrations.

Well two scenarios here. So either their customers starting from scratch, right? They didn't have a PDM or a PLM system established. So that's an easy task. But the majority of situations we are facing now they're switching the PLM system or they are switching from a PDM application to a full blown PLM system.

And then of course, somebody needs to take care of transferring that existing data and the legacy system to the new application. And this is something where we kind of specialized on because it's, as I mentioned, it has been part of our daily business. So we have a team at XPLM focusing on data migrations, in all various combinations.

There are of course combinations that we can do on our own because we have built the problem knowhow. But yes, still we are faced with, sometimes we're faced with combinations that we don't have the experience, but here we have a lot of partners out there that are supporting us in that manner.

[00:11:13] JOS VOSKUIL:
Are there any do's or don'ts in migrations? I mean, I have some don'ts because I had some experience, but do you have any do's or don'ts to share from migrations?

[00:11:23] MICHAEL PIEPER:
Probably the one that I have faced myself because like I did actually acquire a couple of data migrations my own during the last couple of years as, try to keep it as simple as possible and take care about the missing stuff afterwards. Sometimes we've seen that we really took a lot of effort in the, in the first place to really define a hundred percent full automated integration or data migration scenario.

And afterwards, it took months not yet years to, to complete the data migration. I think a more Agile approach here is key to create the best possible outcome in the end.

[00:12:02] BEATRIZ GONZALEZ:
Jos, can you say your don'ts in data migration?

[00:12:05] JOS VOSKUIL:
Yeah, I think I partly heard them also. One of them is don't go for a fixed price or a fixed time. I mean, I wasn't one migration where the reseller offered two months migration because it was from a database to a database. So it should be easy.

[00:12:21] MICHAEL PIEPER:
Yeah.

[00:12:21] JOS VOSKUIL:
It became almost two and a half years. And the main reason was that the source database was a, a mainframe application, which relational tables and the destination was object oriented data model.

And then you see mapping between different data types is almost a mission impossible. And that's a, a lesson learned I have seen for many migrations. If you go from a different data paradigm, forget migration, try to import as much as possible, as good as possible, so it's not migrating anymore.

[00:12:51] MICHAEL PIEPER:
Yeah, exactly. I mean, like there, of course you need to be prepared on those kind of situations, right? You need to be prepared or even sometimes need to accept that you are starting with like not a hundred percent, all in shape, data set afterwards.

But I think it's okay if there are like following activities and really fixed and agreed upon certain data migration, certain activities planned that are happening afterwards. And coming back to what to Bea's question in terms of getting the user on board because I think that that is a crucial aspect here is to really take care about the user adoptions right from the start, right? So like making key users being a part of that migration concept and making sure that they understand that like, yes, it is maybe not perfect right from the start. And there will be certain loops afterwards that will correct things and, and complete things.

[00:13:46] BEATRIZ GONZALEZ:
Yeah. And I think here it's also key having the business involved from the beginning, not only communicating why it's important, the migration, et cetera, but also understanding the data. Because sometimes from IT, we think that we know these attributes should go there in the database or whatever, and sometimes maybe it's not useful. It's not right. And then the users ended up working with their data that they don't know what is it. And so it's very important to have their input, their intelligence in the data.

And also talking about intelligence. What about the AI? What is the strategy that XPLM has as, are you introducing AI in your services or the connection?

[00:14:24] MICHAEL PIEPER:
No, of course. I mean like this is also something that is quite interesting for the integration scenario. We are currently facing two different situations here at XPLM. So first of all, we are including the AI agents that are the vendor itself is providing. So making certain functionality and certain intelligence from the PLM system, from the connected PLM system available directly from within the offering tool as a part of our integration.

And the other thing is what we are evaluating as well is building in like, not own AI, but vendor independent AI functionality to our integration to support maybe like a well support the automatization process of certain reoccurring tasks in the integration or maybe like getting upfront proposals.

Hey, there is existing design that you once designed already. It is already available. There's no need to design that from scratch again.

[00:15:20] BEATRIZ GONZALEZ:
Yeah, I think it's going to be a really big change. Having AI, especially for not only connection, for data migration, all the data cleansing and so on already so, it's going be from a nightmare to a dream having 20 seconds.

[00:15:36] MICHAEL PIEPER:
Of course, I fully agree here. Yes.

[00:15:38] JOS VOSKUIL:
I'm a little bit in the middle between the nightmare and the dream, but I think.

[00:15:43] BEATRIZ GONZALEZ:
Yes. Okay. No black and white.

[00:15:46] JOS VOSKUIL:
But, the big advantage I see is that indeed AI can expose data that you were not aware of and at least bring it in the context of the, of the user through AI agents. And I think that's the biggest discussion we have in the PLM world now, huh? How can we support engineers by providing them with information they were not aware about?

[00:16:06] MICHAEL PIEPER:
Yes.

[00:16:08] BEATRIZ GONZALEZ:
Okay, so I think we are approaching to the end of the episode. Jos, do you have a last question for Michael?

[00:16:14] JOS VOSKUIL:
Well, somehow we already shared something. It's all about experience and the main question is always experience is what you get when you don't get what you expect. So, Michael, what we would be your personal experience that you want to share with us?

[00:16:30] MICHAEL PIEPER:
Yeah. I don't think it's a specific experience or a specific moment that was important for me. I think, like for me personally, one of the biggest steps for me personally was that accepting or understanding that that failure itself is not the opposite of success, right? That it is more a, a crucial piece of the success. And so yeah, as mentioned, a lot of things change for me personally when I accept that situation that there are will be situations where we fail and there will be situations where the outcome is probably not what we expected, but hey, that's fine.
I mean, like as long as we take a look back on that situation and try to learn from it and figure out how we can avoid it in the future. And I don't want to sound like, like cheesy, but there's a pretty good expression here. It's like, to get something you will never had, you need to do something you never did.
And I honestly, I think about that one quite, quite often. So that, that one work got really stuck in my mind.

[00:17:28] JOS VOSKUIL:
Yeah, that's indeed a good one, I think. Yeah. Also, it's a mindset. I mean, failing has a negative connotation where you could say learning is positive and you can only learn by having things not, not done before. I mean, uh,

[00:17:41] MICHAEL PIEPER:
That's…yes.

[00:17:41] BEATRIZ GONZALEZ:
Learn by doing and failing. Yeah.

[00:17:46] JOS VOSKUIL:
Fail fast and learn faster. Some people say.

[00:17:50] MICHAEL PIEPER:
Yeah. Exactly.

[00:17:52] BEATRIZ GONZALEZ:
Okay. Michael is there something that you would like to leave to our listeners, anything?

[00:17:59] MICHAEL PIEPER:
Yes. I think keep in mind, integration is not like just a technical task, right? It's not like just connecting one application to another and expecting that everything, that this is solving your problem. It will solve a specific problem and it will support a specific challenge, but integration is a, a strategic enabler. If you want to innovate faster or reduce errors or make better decisions, you need all your systems to talk to each other. That is really important. And yeah, well, we are XPLM, we are here to make that happen and support our customers on that journey.

[00:18:35] BEATRIZ GONZALEZ:
Thank you very much Michael for this episode. It was very interesting.

[00:18:39] MICHAEL PIEPER:
And thanks again for the invitation.