In today’s exigent global market, enterprises have to innovate to survive. Business innovation ought to occur in all dimensions—product, process and organization— to improve competitiveness and business performance. To differentiate themselves, enterprises must encapsulate, manage, and leverage their intellectual assets. This can be accomplished thoroughly & efficiently through proper application of a Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) approach that addresses the needs of an extended enterprise. PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) is a business approach for deriving maximum benefit from the high investments made in all product development phases.

What PLM?

      According to CIMdata, “PLM is a strategic business approach for collaborative creation, management, dissemination, and use of product data across the extended enterprise from concept to end of life—integrating people, processes, and information.” By increasing an enterprise’s flexibility and agility to respond swiftly to changing market pressures and competitors, PLM helps companies:

• Deliver more innovative products and services
• Reduce costs, improve quality, and shorten time to market, while achieving the targeted return on investment (ROI)
• Establish more comprehensive, collaborative, and improved relationships with their customers, suppliers, and business partners

Why PLM?

      The need for the PLM approach and software products has arisen due to prevalent business challenges. These include:

• Shrinking product lifecycle: Continuous product innovation, a necessity in today’s highly competitive markets, has led to dramatic reductions in product lifecycles. Businesses have to introduce new high quality products and upgrades much faster and more frequently to survive in a market overflowing with choices for the discerning customer.
• Mass customization: Intense competition has forced businesses to achieve differentiation in the market by providing highly customized products catering to specific customer needs.
• Increasing outsourcing: The current trend in the manufacturing industry is to outsource parts or operations from specialized vendors who provide more cost effective and/or quality products than those manufactured in-house.
• Globalization: Business alliances have to be forged on a global basis to derive maximum benefit from location advantages like cost, quality and proximity to raw material or markets.

Benefits of PLM

      Some of the major benefits of PLM in a product development process are:

      Reduction

• Time-to-Market: The length of time it takes to get a product from idea to the marketplace would be reduced due to better co-ordination between various product related functions.
• Product Development Cost: Many expensive trial and error processes like prototyping are avoided due to PLM, which brings down the cost of development.


• Rework & Rejection Rates: PLM helps collaboration to supports the philosophy of ‘Do it right the first time’, which greatly reduces rework and rejection rates.

• Product Quality: Product design tools, Manufacturing Process Management CAD /CAM/CAE, Visualisation tools help to ensure product quality.
• Customer Satisfaction: Lower lead times helps businesses satisfy changing customer needs with quality products.
• Design Reuse: Integrated management of product related design data enables its efficient reuse.
• Revenue Generation: All the above improvements result in efficient processes, which correspondingly improve revenue generation.