Product Lifecycle Management Evolves To Underpin Smart Manufacturing
Three Steps To Prepare For Your PLM Evolution
This time last year, we found that more than half of manufacturers planned to replace or upgrade their product lifecycle management (PLM) platforms. Why? Because massive changes in markets, regulations, and technology drive the need to develop distinctive competencies in product innovation.
To help with this transition, we have recently published research on three needed steps to transform PLM. Below is a summary of a three-step process that tech leaders should follow by reviewing their PLM practices, platforms, and partners.
Step 1: Overhaul PLM Practices
You should review your existing PLM practices first and:
- Decompose engineering artifacts from documents to data. To boost concurrent design, modern PLM decomposes documents and models into atomic elements. You should selectively encapsulate data for collaboration.
- Explore modeling languages to simplify complex system design. Consider the example of Ford using modeling language SysML to specify, analyze, design, and document complex systems.
Step 2: Review PLM Platform Options
Once you have reviewed your PLM practices, you should review your PLM platform options, namely thinking about their support for concurrent design and engineering change management.
Concurrent design accelerates time to market but depends on platform support for scalable multi-enterprise and -disciplinary collaboration. You should:
- Understand vendors’ offerings. Vendors’ adoption of systems engineering standards will help you migrate to the cloud as well as integrate PLM and other enterprise applications such as product information management.
- Boost product introduction success rates with AI-ready composability. Review the incidence of late-stage engineering changes because of unexpected test results. Consider dynamic test and retest process reconfiguration capabilities to help maintain a competitive new product introduction cadence.
- Scale product innovation from personal to planetary. Review platform providers’ cloud deployment roadmaps. You should use them to underpin your own global collaboration and inform your plans for role-based user-experience personalization, extensibility, and integration.
- Refocus PLM processes from engineering to enterprise. Select a data architecture that enables product and business model innovation. You need vendors’ support for open API specifications — from groups such as OSLC — that capture the meaning of data shared with other apps, like sales teams’ quote-to-order solutions.
- Explore platforms’ compatibility with API frameworks and data catalogs. Consider managing data and metadata across engineering disciplines using general-purpose data cataloging and API frameworks for both data cataloging and event monitoring.
Now that manufactured products and assets include mechanical, electrical, electronic, and embedded software elements, platforms must also support multidisciplinary engineering change management (ECM). You should:
- Rethink engineering change management. Rethink your ECM process using your chosen vendor’s platform to synchronize engineering changes across multiple suppliers in different supply chain tiers and across engineering disciplines.
- Focus on platforms’ potential to support changes in manufacturing volumes and variety. Perpetual ECM means that you need a product data model embracing desktop and departmental data accumulated over years of legacy PLM work-arounds and customization.
- Check platforms’ ability to link asset lifecycle events to data authoring and consumption. Think about the way that critical PLM events — from staging and construction to commissioning and operating — trigger different parties to author, approve, or consume product or asset data. Assign data stewardship responsibilities early in your PLM evolution planning.
Step 3: Enlist PLM Partners
When you are finished with modernizing your PLM practices and reviewing your PLM platform options, you should recruit systems integrators (SIs) to help:
- Pave the path to PLM paradise. Review SIs’ tool and expertise offerings that mitigate the dull daily challenges of locating and maintaining data.
- Identify authoring applications. SIs can help identify all the “author” applications that engineering and testing roles use to generate structured or unstructured data and content for aggregation and consumption by manufacturing, marketing, and service roles.
- Apply the lessons of cloud mobile architecture. Work with SIs to develop role-specific applications that consume PLM data.
- Reflect regulatory and legal requirements. SIs label legacy data by taking account of context such as the client’s regulatory framework to establish selective viewing and editing authorizations.
Please schedule an inquiry with me if you would like to discuss your own path to PLM paradise. Also, look out for our March 2025 refresh of the PLM landscape report.