PLM
Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) is an integrated business approach to manage the creation and dissemination of engineering data throughout an enterprise. It is an emerging and evolving field of research in academia with potentially strong impact on industry practice. From a product perspective, PLM encompasses a holistic approach to product development and its management beginning from the conception of the product and ending with its retirement/decommissioning.
From the point of view of tools required to support this and issues involved therein, PLM can be thought of as consisting of two core areas:
1. Tools to create the product content; the traditional MCAD/CAE systems fall in this category and2. Tools to manage and optimize the processes involved in the lifecycle of the product from its conception to retirement.
Product Data Management (PDM), Collaborative Product Commerce (CPC), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Supply Chain Management (SCM) are the more established areas in this category. Not much attention however has been paid to the issues and problems in the early stages of the product lifecycle although it has been recognised that decisions made in the early stages have implications on all aspects of the product and the development process, and are more difficult to change or work around. Two important issues are requirements engineering (identifying and deciding the important requirements of a product) and concept development (generating and evaluating innovative product concepts). There is very little by way of tools to support these tasks.
PLM is emerging as a major concern for most organizations (be it discrete goods manufacture or process industries) and a major opportunity for those involved in integrating diverse tools used in each task domain or stage of product development and beyond. It can be argued that technology exists today for the creation of a seamless environment for accessing, manipulating and reasoning about product information that is being produced in fragmented and distributed environment. Hence the PLM concept is feasible.
Once developed and implemented, it will enable the optimization of the product development process resulting in shorter time to market, higher quality and reduced costs for companies. The use of PLM framework to leverage innovation and creativity stages into the downstream development and business stages of new products is also an interesting line of inquiry to pursue.
From the point of view of tools required to support this and issues involved therein, PLM can be thought of as consisting of two core areas:
1. Tools to create the product content; the traditional MCAD/CAE systems fall in this category and2. Tools to manage and optimize the processes involved in the lifecycle of the product from its conception to retirement.
Product Data Management (PDM), Collaborative Product Commerce (CPC), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Supply Chain Management (SCM) are the more established areas in this category. Not much attention however has been paid to the issues and problems in the early stages of the product lifecycle although it has been recognised that decisions made in the early stages have implications on all aspects of the product and the development process, and are more difficult to change or work around. Two important issues are requirements engineering (identifying and deciding the important requirements of a product) and concept development (generating and evaluating innovative product concepts). There is very little by way of tools to support these tasks.
PLM is emerging as a major concern for most organizations (be it discrete goods manufacture or process industries) and a major opportunity for those involved in integrating diverse tools used in each task domain or stage of product development and beyond. It can be argued that technology exists today for the creation of a seamless environment for accessing, manipulating and reasoning about product information that is being produced in fragmented and distributed environment. Hence the PLM concept is feasible.
Once developed and implemented, it will enable the optimization of the product development process resulting in shorter time to market, higher quality and reduced costs for companies. The use of PLM framework to leverage innovation and creativity stages into the downstream development and business stages of new products is also an interesting line of inquiry to pursue.
