Effective Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) is the key to decreased time to market, increased product quality, greater revenue, and much more. If you’re unfamiliar with PLM, it’s a process of managing the entire lifecycle of a product. This can include steps like engineering design, manufacture, service, and disposal of manufactured products. Like ERP systems, PLM is a consolidation strategy. Accordingly, it can transform your company’s potential into a reality. However, implementing a strategy that takes your company from point A to point B can be intimidating.
A good PLM system is about more than just software. Specifically, PLM is an entire discipline for guiding products from ideas through retirement. Ideally, this is done in a way that creates the most value for businesses, partners, and customers. Your PLM strategy should take into account business objectives, departmental objectives, organizational change, and prioritization.
PLM Trends
In a survey across industries, here are some of the top trending business objectives achieved with PLM:
- Reduce product development costs.
- Improve product quality.
- Reduce time to market for new products.
- Increase percentage of revenue for new products.
- Integrate PLM into enterprise wide business processes.
- Improve after sale product maintenance and service.
- Ease outsourcing of product development tasks.
PLM Uses
While PLM trends can vary by industry, let’s define some notable uses of PLM:
- Digital transformation/digital enterprise: A digital enterprise is an organization that uses technology as a competitive advantage. Digitalization is the use of digital technologies to change a business model. Additionally, it can provide new revenue and value-producing opportunities.
- Digital twin: A digital twin is a virtual counterpart of a real object. Other software/systems can interact with the digital twin rather than the real object. As a result, this improves maintenance, upgrades, repairs, and operation of the actual object.
- Industry 4.0: Industry 4.0, or the fourth industrial revolution, is a collective term embracing contemporary automation, data exchange and manufacturing technologies. Historically, it has been defined as a collective term for technologies and concepts of value chain organization. Therefore, this concept draws together Cyber-Physical Systems, the Internet of Things and the Internet of Services.
- IoT (The Internet of Things): IoT is the network of dedicated physical objects that contain embedded technology to communicate, sense or interact with their internal states or the external environment. The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is a core building block for smart factories, many industrial productivity initiatives, and digital business.
Through digitalization, PLM offers a way forward when it comes to achieving these goals. For example, through use of a digital twin, you can benefit from a more effective assessment of your system’s current and future capabilities during its lifecycle. This in turn leads to optimization of operability, manufacturability, inspectability, and sustainability leveraging models and simulations.
Learn More From ArcherGrey
The Senior Director of Business Process Consulting at ArcherGrey — Lewis Kennebrew — is an expert on how companies like yours can leverage product lifecycle management to reach your growth potential. Below, we’ve included the slide deck from his presentation on current PLM trends and best practices. Learn how to maximize the impact of your PLM strategy by staying ahead of PLM trends and understanding best industry practices.
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published on September 21, 2018 and has since been updated to reflect current PLM trends.
