Future Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) – A Consideration of Informal Communication as a Key Enabler for Future Product Development

Doing business globally involves very complex and increasingly dynamic processes and demands a high level of flexibility and adaptability from the companies involved. In the automotive sector, the timescale for development of new vehicles has been drastically shortened, while at the same time the number of variants and derivatives has grown. Under these conditions, development processes, involving communication across different disciplines and locations need to be flexible and efficient. In its research project Future PLM, the project consortium investigates future demands for product life cycle management in terms of the way it handles roles and participation of people. The project intends to discover ways in which PLM can be made more successful in future and to pinpoint challenges that PLM will have to meet. A catalogue of requirements for PLM 2020 was drawn up on the basis of the results of interdisciplinary panels, four future scenarios, qualitative and quantitative interviews and of a sector-specific use case for the automotive industry. In this paper the focus is set on an important matrix intersection: human & communication. As a result a concept for informal communication and its demands on a future product lifecycle management are shown together with an example on a social networking tool (e.g. Google Plus).