Overview

Product lifecycle management (PLM) is an integrated approach for managing product information from design and manufacture of a product, through its distribution and maintenance, and across the product's eventual disposal and discontinuance. Product-related data is different from many other forms of organizational data in a variety of ways:

1. Dynamic Product Information: Product data is constantly changing, and for good reason - it is the engine for innovation. It the design phase design ideas are continuously iterated across multiple versions of a product or product family. Changes then continue throughout a product's lifecycle as components are updated, regulations change, or incremental innovations take place. Managing product changes and their impact over the lifecycle of a product is one of the biggest challenges facing product organizations today. Changes cost money, time, and changes that are not captured immediately may cost an organization dramatically.
2. Complexity of Product Structures: Product information must capture intricate product relationships - between assemblies and components, for example. Products can share smaller components, and can be components of larger products, and can be shared across platforms. Organizations are under pressure to standardize components and materials across products, product families, and platforms. Organizations are focused on standardizing, lowering cost, and improving performance across shared components and component suppliers, which must be managed across all product families - often across diverse global contexts.
3. Complexity of Relationships between Product and Other Organizational Data: Product data is interrelated with a variety of other data in an organization, resulting in a great deal of complexity - especially in light of the continuous changes. Parts, assemblies, recipes, testing data, etc., are all interrelated, changing, and can relate to multiple suppliers, customers, and product families, etc.
4. Complexity of Relationships between Product Data and Organizational Document: Product data can be spread across multiple documents of various types, and documents can contain data relating to multiple products. Similar data can be spread across a variety of documents, and different documents can contain different snapshots of the same product data. These documents are often visual - like computer-aided design, simulation, or testing data - which adds another level of complexity.
5. Collaborative Product Information: Product organizations can no longer afford to be master of a single product discipline. New materials, technologies, and services are requiring that organizations partner up and collaborate between communities, organizations, and globally. Groups that have never worked together before are brought together for a single project and expected to perform immediately.

PLM Challenges

Product organizations today are under pressure to innovate relentlessly, do so faster than ever, across the globe, and with more complex products than ever before. These organizations are becoming increasingly aware that they need to maximize profits over an entire lifecycle and across a portfolio of multiple products. Product organizations need to meet demands of diverse international regulators, focus ever more issues of environmental sustainability, and provide a suite of complementary service offerings.

Information technology solutions for PLM (such as Oracle's Agile Suite) are designed and developed specifically to meet the challenging demands of managing product information across a lifecycle. Other technologies, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) solutions simply do not begin to adequately meet a product organizations demands for 21st century product development.