Why Care About PLM?

This article studies the role of product lifecycle management (PLM) in industrial engineering. The basic concepts of PLM—product data management, engineering change management, and product structure management—were also discussed. PLM provides data and management capabilities to reduce the non-value-added tasks required of engineers. It also increases engineering productivity, provides insight into engineering efforts, and improves product quality and customer satisfaction. Companies are receiving significant value and return from their PLM investments. Many companies begin implementing PLM by establishing a single source of product data, or product record. Most PLM solutions offer sophisticated interfaces to many design automation and office applications, which reduce the need to capture, store, and validate product data. Product designs are maintained as assemblies and parts in the PLM system, and that arrangement allows engineers easy searching when they are looking, for example, for legacy components, with software providing a critical control and value portion of the product. With PLM, disparate engineering teams work more collaboratively.