It Product Lifecycle Management
Analisa Wack
Product life cycle management (PLM) helps businesses plan and execute all aspects of the product life cycle, from design and development through distribution, marketing, and sales. It speeds up time to market, reduces costs, and helps manage resources efficiently. PLM connects cross-functional teams using a standardized approach to delivering products. It improves communication, promotes collaborative problem-solving, and brings everyone together around a common goal.
PLM first emerged in the 1930s. In 1957, the advertising firm Booz Allen Hamilton developed the five-step life cycle that mapped a product from its inception through development and eventually until its retirement. PLM has changed over time, but its primary aim has remained the same: speed product development and gain competitive advantage.
A PLM system brings disparate groups together on a common platform. When teams collaborate, they generate good ideas. PLM has demonstrated business benefits for nearly 100 years. Some of the most notable benefits of PLM include the following:
Managing a product from idea to production requires a sustained effort from multiple teams across the business. A product manager uses PLM software to enhance collaboration by removing silos and aligning people on common goals. It facilitates focused, effective communication in cross-functional teams.
With a centralized source of information, updates are easier to manage and disseminate. This allows project managers to coordinate multiple schedules. Design and development teams can understand new or changing requirements. Production and manufacturing personnel adjust to changing demand. When working together, businesses are more efficient, which decreases time to market and adds flexibility.
Reducing waste improves product quality by allowing teams to break down complex work into iterative improvements and repeatable processes. PLM captures quality control measures and statistics at each phase to allow businesses to make rapid adjustments and corrections.
New technology, like AI, cloud-based solutions, and machine learning, allow businesses to collect and analyze data more efficiently. This will likely result in changes to PLM as businesses find new opportunities to reduce costs and improve product quality.
Product management tools that promote collaboration give cross-functional teams better ways to work together to address sustainability issues. Information sharing results in faster resolution and more comprehensive solutions.
Jira is purpose-built to ensure all team members can collaborate effectively on a shared platform. It provides all the tools needed to build better products and centralizes information in a single source of truth. This helps teams navigate complexities across the entire life cycle.
The most common challenges to implementing PLM are silos and disconnected systems. Legacy systems often present data-sharing roadblocks and further entrench disparate teams. This makes it difficult to stay current on change requests, issues, dependencies, and timelines.
In industry, product lifecycle management (PLM) is the process of managing the entire lifecycle of a product from its inception through the engineering, design and manufacture, as well as the service and disposal of manufactured products.[1][2] PLM integrates people, data, processes, and business systems and provides a product information backbone for companies and their extended enterprises.[3]
The inspiration for the burgeoning business process now known as PLM came from American Motors Corporation (AMC).[4][5] The automaker was looking for a way to speed up its product development process to compete better against its larger competitors in 1985, according to Franois Castaing, Vice President for Product Engineering and Development.[6] AMC focused its R&D efforts on extending the product lifecycle of its flagship products, particularly Jeeps, because it lacked the "massive budgets of General Motors, Ford, and foreign competitors."[7] After introducing its compact Jeep Cherokee (XJ), the vehicle that launched the modern sport utility vehicle (SUV) market, AMC began development of a new model, that later came out as the Jeep Grand Cherokee. The first part in its quest for faster product development was computer-aided design (CAD) software system that made engineers more productive.[6] The second part of this effort was the new communication system that allowed conflicts to be resolved faster, as well as reducing costly engineering changes because all drawings and documents were in a central database.[6] The product data management was so effective that after AMC was purchased by Chrysler, the system was expanded throughout the enterprise connecting everyone involved in designing and building products.[6] While an early adopter of PLM technology, Chrysler was able to become the auto industry's lowest-cost producer, recording development costs that were half of the industry average by the mid-1990s.[6]
Product lifecycle management (PLM) should be distinguished from 'product life-cycle management (marketing)' (PLCM). PLM describes the engineering aspect of a product, from managing descriptions and properties of a product through its development and useful life; whereas, PLCM refers to the commercial management of the life of a product in the business market with respect to costs and sales measures.
Product lifecycle management can be considered one of the four cornerstones of a manufacturing corporation's information technology structure.[9] All companies need to manage communications and information with their customers (CRM-customer relationship management), their suppliers and fulfillment (SCM-supply chain management), their resources within the enterprise (ERP-enterprise resource planning) and their product planning and development (PLM).
The core of PLM (product lifecycle management) is the creation and central management of all product data and the technology used to access this information and knowledge. PLM as a discipline emerged from tools such as CAD, CAM and PDM, but can be viewed as the integration of these tools with methods, people and the processes through all stages of a product's life.[12][13] It is not just about software technology but is also a business strategy.[14]
For simplicity, the stages described are shown in a traditional sequential engineering workflow.The exact order of events and tasks will vary according to the product and industry in question but the main processes are:[15]
The reality is however more complex, people and departments cannot perform their tasks in isolation and one activity cannot simply finish, and the next activity start. Design is an iterative process, often designs need to be modified due to manufacturing constraints or conflicting requirements. Whether a customer order fits into the timeline depends on the industry type and whether the products are, for example, built to order, engineered to order, or assembled to order.
Many software solutions have been developed to organize and integrate the different phases of a product's lifecycle. PLM should not be seen as a single software product but as a collection of software tools and working methods integrated together to address either single stages of the lifecycle or connect different tasks or manage the whole process. Some software providers cover the whole PLM range while others have a single niche application. Some applications can span many fields of PLM with different modules within the same data model. An overview of the fields within PLM is covered here. The simple classifications do not always fit exactly; many areas overlap and many software products cover more than one area or do not fit easily into one category. It should also not be forgotten that one of the main goals of PLM is to collect knowledge that can be reused for other projects and to coordinate the simultaneous concurrent development of many products. It is about business processes, people, and methods as much as software application solutions. Although PLM is mainly associated with engineering tasks it also involves marketing activities such as product portfolio management (PPM), particularly with regard to new product development (NPD). There are several life-cycle models in each industry to consider, but most are rather similar. What follows below is one possible life-cycle model; while it emphasizes hardware-oriented products, similar phases would describe any form of product or service, including non-technical or software-based products:[16]
The first stage is the definition of the product requirements based on customer, company, market, and regulatory bodies' viewpoints. From this specification, the product's major technical parameters can be defined. In parallel, the initial concept design work is performed defining the aesthetics of the product together with its main functional aspects. Many different media are used for these processes, from pencil and paper to clay models to 3D CAID computer-aided industrial design software.
This is where the detailed design and development of the product's form starts, progressing to prototype testing, from pilot release to full product launch. It can also involve redesign and ramp for improvement to existing products as well as planned obsolescence.[17]The main tool used for design and development is CAD. This can be simple 2D drawing/drafting or 3D parametric feature-based solid/surface modeling. Such software includes technology such as Hybrid Modeling, Reverse Engineering, KBE (knowledge-based engineering), NDT (Nondestructive testing), and Assembly construction.
Once the design of the product's components is complete, the method of manufacturing is defined. This includes CAD tasks such as tool design; including the creation of CNC machining instructions for the product's parts as well as the creation of specific tools to manufacture those parts, using integrated or separate CAM (computer-aided manufacturing) software. This will also involve analysis tools for process simulation of operations such as casting, molding, and die-press forming.
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