What does a PLM system do ?

Product lifecycle management orPLM is a concept for the seamless integration of all information that is generated during the lifecycle of a product. The concept is based on coordinated methods, processes and organizational structures and usually makes use of IT systems for recording and managing the data. PLM evolved from more narrowly defined product data management (PDM) to become the dominant paradigm in product development in the early 21st century. Companies hope PLM will improve control over the diverse processes required in each part of a lifecycle, and thus provide transparent effort and returns. Thus, the systems affected by the concept include design(CAD) and calculation(CAE), through production planning (facilities and technology) and PPS, to sales planning, sales, distribution logistics, end-of-life management, including service and recycling issues.

Therefore, PLM is a corporate concept that must be implemented on a company-specific basis through appropriate technical and organizational measures.

To realize such goals, the software industry has developed products to enable companies to integrate and satisfy the diverse information needs. These are marketed as a category of operational software and offer varying degrees of functionality and performance.

Most so-called PLM systems have their origins in the management of mechanical product data. However, the term PLM for the management of electronic and electrotechnical (E/E) product data has now also become established on the side of E-CAD providers. Today, the larger PLM solutions often offer the option of also managing the E/E data. In most cases, however, only the data that has been developed and released for production is managed. Version and process management is left to the E/E authoring systems.

In recent years, the subject-specific orientation of the PLM solutions available on the market has increasingly proven to be a limitation for the applying industry. The enormous increase in the share of software in today's products and the compulsion to develop, simulate (digital prototyping), validate and manufacture multidisciplinary systems in their entirety pose a challenge to all PLM providers to integrate the management of software controls and, in general, embedded software in addition to the management of mechanical, electronic and electrotechnical components.

Another major challenge arises from the extension of digitization to the entire value chain. The previously common separation into the application areas:

• PLM (product development up to production release)
• digital factory(production planning and simulation of production)
• MES(Manufacturing Execution Systems for controlling and monitoring manufacturing plants and machines)
• ERP(enterprise resource planning to control production orders and resources)

prevents the efficient use of digitization in terms of higher productivity. Here, all manufacturers are challenged to enable further integration by opening up the systems, which have been mostly monolithic up to now.

In the retail industry, we already talk about PLM software when the application supports design decisions and the procurement process. Here, too, the management of product master data plays an important role, but also of product photos and other media data. Mobile use, for example at trade shows or at the manufacturer's, is important. However, the further life cycle at the retailer, especially the logistical processes, quality assurance, marketing, sales and price maintenance for the product are usually supported by other applications. The lifecycle at the retailer ends with the complete sale of a product that has not been reordered. Due to the large number of products and their sometimes short life cycles, the requirements here are different from those of a manufacturer of high-value industrial goods, for example.

Benefit potential

The potential benefits are difficult to quantify, firstly because they are made up of direct and indirect effects, and secondly because only a few companies analyze the current situation in detail from a profitability perspective before introducing PLM. Nevertheless, relevant studies prove a close interaction between PLM maturity and economic corporate success.

History

According to the information on the English-language Wikipedia page, the emergence of product lifecycle management was inspired by the American Motors Corporation (AMC), which was looking for ways to shorten its product development cycles. In reality, PLM has many fathers: ever since companies began using computer programs for design, they have felt the need to be able to find and reuse their technical product data more easily. This also inspired software houses in Germany to develop electronic management systems. By the time the term Engineering Data Management (EDM) emerged in the USA in the early 1990s, which in terms of ideas is the forerunner of today's PLM idea, the first German providers of technical information systems and graphical data technology had already disappeared from the market. The concept of EDM was not yet fully accepted in Germany.

The EDM term was replaced, even before it could become properly established in Germany, by the term product data management (PDM), which was intended to make it clear that it was a concept for the management and provision of all information defining and representing the product. Although PDM claimed from the outset to support not only data management but also the processes of data generation and provision, this term was soon again found to be too narrow. After a period of terminological competition, software manufacturers and consulting companies found a new common denominator in the PLM term. According to the understanding here, PLM is a concept and not a self-contained IT solution. PDM is one of the key components for implementing this concept, which also includes the data-generating applications such as CAD, CAE, CAM, virtual reality (VR), etc., and the interfaces to other application areas such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) or supply chain management (SCM).

PLM Market

There are hardly any reliable figures available on the volume of the German PLM market. Where figures are published at all, they are essentially based on self-reports by manufacturers or estimates by analysts. According to figures from the American market research company CIMdata, the global PLM market reached a volume of 25.8 billion US dollars or the equivalent of 18.3 billion euros in 2010. These figures include CAD, CAM, CAE, ECAD, EDA (Electronic Design Automation) and AEC (Architecture, Engineering, Construction) sales as well as sales of digital manufacturing solutions. If we consider only the cPDm (collaborative Product Definition management) market segment, which essentially comprises sales of software and services for product data and process management, the market volume is $8.73 billion (€6.2 billion). Of this, 1.37 billion US dollars or the equivalent of 970 million euros was attributable to Central Europe, i.e. essentially the DACH region. The average software share in the cPDM business is just under 40 percent, which would correspond to 385 million euros in relation to Central Europe. More up-to-date figures are not currently available.