It’s widely recognized that Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) brings benefits in four main areas:

• Financial Performance - for example, PLM should lead to increased revenue from earlier market introduction of products, and to reduced product development costs
• Time Reduction - PLM should, for example, reduce project overrun time, and reduce engineering change time
• Quality Improvement - PLM should help, for example, to reduce manufacturing process defects, reduce the number of returns and recalls, and reduce the number of customer complaints
• Business Improvement - for example, PLM can lead to an increase in the innovation rate, increase the part reuse factor, increase product traceability, and ensure 100% configuration conformity

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PLM

What’s in a product lifecycle management (PLM) system? Some authoring tools, computer-aided design (CAD); large dollops of simulation and visualization; lots of manufacturing data systems (e.g., computer-aided process planning (CAPP) and configuration management); heavy-duty infrastructure stuff (database management systems (DBMS) and data communications); and plenty of behind-the-scenes infrastructure utilities, such as web-based user interfaces and application programming interfaces (API).

No one-size-fits-all exists in terms of PLM components, data requirements, or implementation, but here’s a brief description of the essential components for an effective PLM system.

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