16. Product Lifecycle Management

Product lifecycle management (PLM) is widely understood as concept for the creation, storage, and retrieval of data, information and, ideally, knowledge throughout the lifecycle of a product from its conceptualization or inception to its disposal or recovery. PLM is seen in industry as one of the core concepts to fulfill a number of business requirements in the manufacturing industry with respect to completeness, high transparency, rapid accessibility, and high visibility of all product data during a product’s lifecycle. Those requirements are related to financial aspects such as cost management and revenue growth; to the product itself like innovation, time to market, quality, and high productivity; and to regulatory aspects such as compliance and documentation. PLM is implemented by deploying IT systems such as product data management (PDM) systems and induces a high level of interoperability of related applications. With PLM, industrial companies attempt to gain advantages in shorter cycles, lower costs, better quality by avoiding errors, and misunderstanding. After reviewing basic concepts and building blocks of PLM, we provide empirical evidence of implementation scenarios and use case studies for different integrations to build up PLM solutions. We have evaluated applications in automotive, aerospace and consumer electronic industries focused on engineering design, change management, simulation data management integration and communication with partners. Emphasis is on the organizational and IT implications and the business benefit of the provided solutions.