PLM is Product Lifecycle Management. It is more of a management perspective and an approach to see the entire organization around products, the value carrier, than a application or a system. However, it has often been narrowed down as a name of any PLM software application.
When we jump out of the woods and look down at it, PLM becomes a clear concept driving our day to day business practice. It is a vision of collaboration among all human resources plus all equipment plus all tools plus all systems to support the digital thread of a product from the beginning to the end.
It is a strategy to determine the right resources to be included in the symphony towards the product.
It is a practice that allows changes to be controlled and managed across the digital thread.
It determines how everyone in the organization should work with each other, what must be taken care of, when and why.
PLM, is more of a vision than a software application. Companies must first establish the vision of Product Lifecycle Management before they can be elevated to the level of digital thread regardless of which PLM application she is going to implement with.
With such a vision, a road map of PLM should be developed next. However, it is still not about an application of PLM, it should instead be the blue print of our future processes and states of our business around our product lines from concept to delivery to service to recycle, plus the infrastructure preferences to support the business goal.
The road map will then be evolved into a list of requirements towards evaluation of PLM applications that will support the blue print with minimum cost.
We normally research and filter out three candidates before we perform rigorous comparison. The criteria to land three candidates should at least include the following:
Infrastructure (cloud or local)
key functional modules
Scalability
Adaptivity
Extendibility
Integrability
Customer reference
With the three applications selected, further comparison should be focused on detail level of each category of the criteria. For example, talking about functional features, in the cost module, B application provides other costing management in addition to BOM costing. The BOM rollup of C application is not as strong as A application, and does not take care of variants.
In the end of comparison exercise, we often find there are still requirements that are not met by any of the applications. These are the areas where we should design our own solution to bridge the gap either through customization, integration or development from scratch.
The task of application comparison does not have to wait until the blue print are released. It can be done in parallel or even earlier as soon as you have a vison of PLM and you know where you want to go. Companies with good vision start process analysis after they have already strategically selected a PLM solution if they can immediately see a match between their PLM vision and the PLM application.
Again, PLM drives your digital thread together with our processes and players. PLM technologies evolves but the vision stays without change. Hope this help you start your journey of PLM implementation from scratch with confidence.
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