Managing the Product Lifecycle
December 1, 2004 | Levent OZLER
People often describe Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) as a technology. It is more appropriately described as a strategy for making companies more innovative and productive by applying a number of technologies. These tools enable manufacturing companies to capture, use, and build upon the intellectual property created by design and manufacturing engineers, and to do so all the way from the concept of a product to the very end of its life.
A few years ago, it became apparent that manufacturing companies needed technology to capture essential data, usually engineering activities and documentation, to make it available when required to those who needed it, and still to keep it secure.
By mid-2002, CAD-using engineers complained that the hardest part of their jobs was finding data they needed. They had to search through files, load pictures of models, and hunt for the right one. That difficulty extended through the enterprise, where manufacturing engineers needed to design and build tools based on similar data, and non-engineering people, such as financial department people, needed to figure out cost data on one particular configuration. They all dealt with similar problems.
To solve those problems and replace frustration with efficiency, PLM leverages design data by making it more available for collaboration and use ac
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