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About Product Lifecycle Management (PLM)
Product lifecycle management (PLM) software applications support businesses in bringing products and services from idea through to design, production, and final disposition. PLM solutions have evolved to provide comprehensive functionality for all aspects of product innovation, including product development and portfolio management, manufacturing process management, ideation and requirements management, service data, and regulatory and compliance criteria. PLM solutions allow you to create, communicate, and store a "single version of the truth" for effective collaboration. PLM also incorporates vital product data management (PDM) functionality.
Product Lifecycle Management Benefits and Drivers
- Along with tighter control over product quality, PLM also assures more efficient use of existing product data in order to speed time-to-market.
- Integrated engineering processes allow you to save time at the development and prototyping stages.
- PLM reduce material and tool wastage by maximizing the use of resources through all stages of design and delivery
- The knowledge capture and management capabilities of PLM reduce cycle times by providing real-time visibility into all product information.
- Communicate product data and geometry to other applications for testing, simulation, manufacturing, sales, and marketing.
- PLM solutions facilitate quality specification definitions, as well as the recording of sample timing and frequency.
- Ensure adequate product and material specification, handling, disposal, compliance, performance, safety control, and hazard management.
Can ERP Speak PLM?
Product lifecycle management (PLM) promises significant benefits to manufacturers, and the market is full of vendors claiming to provide faster new product introductions, reduced product costs, reduced product development costs, increased revenue, better quality products, enhanced product innovation, and other valuable benefits. Because of the high appeal of these benefits and their associated return on investment (ROI), PLM has become one of the fastest growing categories of enterprise applications.
Potential PLM Projects
There are a number of high-return projects that should be considered as a part of the PLM Program. The following examples are taken from the early success stories and provide excellent candidate projects to be selected and sequenced based on the individual company and their objectives.
Portfolio Management - Portfolio management tools and techniques allow the company to select the right projects to pursue while reducing resource competition from less strategic projects. This portfolio approach allows the company to complete more projects effectively with the same capacity, simply by reducing the clutter from lower value projects. At the same time, the projects completed will be of higher strategic value to the business. One advantage of the portfolio management approach is that it can be implemented without significant disruption to current processes and systems.
PLM Process Management - Another way to improve the over capacity problem is to improve the throughput of the product innovation process itself. Project management tools and best business practices that involve periodic review and approval, or gates, can provide the company with the ability to better manage their innovation projects so they run more efficiently and have significant reductions in rework. Significant gains have been achieved by automating the innovation and approval processes
Material Rationalization / Strategic Sourcing - Another problem that many companies suffer from is lack of control of material definitions. Many companies have significant redundancies in the raw materials that they buy because designers don't have an easy way to find an existing material definition that will work. This lack of control results in redundant inventory, the inability to take advantage of bulk discounts in purchasing, and potentially even stock out situations when a perfectly applicable material is sitting in inventory. Specification management and product data management tools with parametric search capabilities can be implemented in order to allow designers to search existing items before creating new ones. Strategic sourcing initiatives can leverage these common material definitions to take advantage of larger volume purchases for a smaller number of items.
Design Rationalization - An additional project that can be implemented that takes advantage of the common material definitions from rationalizing materials is a systematic review of existing designs to analyze whether duplicate designs can be rationalized, and to find opportunities to replace materials with less expensive alternatives. In addition, standardization of designs enables more rapid development of similar designs when designing new products.
Collaborative Design - One last potential PLM initiative is reducing time to market by improving the effectiveness of the design process. Some of the potential projects above will likely reduce new product introduction lead-times because projects can be completed more quickly when they are run efficiently and when they are not competing with too many other projects.
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