1.1. The PLM concept
PLM holds the promise of seamlessly integrating and making available all of the information produced throughout all phases of a product's life cycle to everyone in an organization, along with key suppliers and customers. Manufacturers can shrink the time it takes to introduce new product models in a number of ways. Product engineers can dramatically shorten the cycle of implementing and approving engineering changes across an extended design chain. Purchasing agents can work more effectively with suppliers to reuse parts. Executives can take a high-level view of all important product information, from details of the manufacturing line to parts failure rates culled from warranty data and information collected in the field.
Because PLM systems grew out of product design software, company management tends to delegate the PLM concept to engineering executives, who traditionally have managed their own technology rollouts. While this hands-off approach works for choosing point solutions, such as CAD tools, it does not work well for a company-wide integrated platform. Different business functions generate and deal with product data in disparate ways. Manufacturing and engineering, for instance, work with a different version of a bill of materials—a listing of parts and subassemblies making up a product—than does purchasing, which also relies on approved vendor lists and catalogs.
For the PLM concept to be successful, issues such as establishing data standards and designing corporation-wide integration architectures need to be addressed so that formerly fragmented information can be served up to individuals in a format they can use. That way, people in various divisions are equipped to make key decisions—such as what products to introduce or what features to include in a product's design phase—when they are most cost-effective, rather than midstream in the parts procurement stage or even during manufacturing.