Product lifecycle management (PLM) has gained much traction in recent years. CIMdata estimates that by 2017 alone, the PLM market would be worth US$50.7 billion, while Transparency Market Research posits that the market will grow at a CAGR of 8.1 percent from the 2014-2022 period to reach US$75.87 billion.
PLM is broadly defined as the process of managing together product-related ideation, design, production, maintenance, and disposal information.
CIMdata advances that PLM is not “a piece, or pieces, of technology” but rather a “business approach to solving the problem of managing the complete set of product definition information”. Today’s understanding of PLM is also used to represent a set of software tools used in the design, review, and manufacture of products and product lines.
Benefits
PLM comes with many benefits.
• Provides coherent and manageable data structure and flow
• Avoids redundancies and gaps
• Leads to fewer errors and rework
• Enhances communication between stakeholders
• Churns out better reporting and analytics
• Improves productivity
• Minimises time-to-market
• Creates a more competitive edge
• Results in better product quality and innovation
• Lowers material and production costs
• Utilises resources fully
• Maximising long-term ROI
Cloud-based Solutions
Despite the growing interest in PLM today, most companies have not been successful in implementing an end-to-end PLM Solution as they tend to only adopt a part of the solution.
This results in pockets of disconnected data that hampers the ability to share information quickly. Traditional PLM is also seen as too costly and superfluous, mainly for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) who have basic requirements for engineering change and information management.
Recent developments in cloud-based PLM have enabled SMEs to jump onto the PLM bandwagon due to lower upfront costs. As information is all stored in the cloud, there is little additional investment needed for IT infrastructure or additional hosted computing services and environments.
Cloud-based system’s global access also allows personnel in multiple internal and external organisations anywhere in the world to collaborate and exchange information.
PLM Solution Providers
The following is a list of top PLM solution providers and what they offer.
Arena Solutions:
Arena Solutions focuses mainly on cloudbased PLM solutions. While BOM management (BomControl) is a key aspect and a flagship of their PLM solutions, there are also offerings such as project management (Arena Projects), quality management (Arena Quality) and product demand forecasting (Arena Demand.
Autodesk:
Autodesk’s Fusion Lifecycle is a rebranding and repackaging of the company’s cloud-based PLM software, PLM 360, which was developed back in 2012. Fusion Lifecycle has all the capabilities of PLM 360, including BOM, tools for product introduction, quality and cost management and tight integration with supplier networks. The entire Fusion platform is set to be an integrated interface—a single, cloud-based dashboard for users to interact with the data provided.
Dassault Systèmes:
Dassault Systèmes’s PLM solution expands from an engineering-centric view of the product lifecycle to a more enterprise-wide understanding via its 3DExperience, which is an “experience” that users can obtain when using a variety of the company’s software and services. These include CAD (Catia) to digital manufacturing (Delmia) to Simulation (Simulia) to conventional PLM (Enovia).
PTC:
PTC’s PLM system simultaneously manages both hardware and software deliverables. It has both on-premise solutions as well as cloud-based services. The PLM platform that the software runs on is Windchill 11, launched in November 2015. Windchill 11 is enabled by PTC’s ThingWorx technology that integrates data from physical products, web-based resources, and enterprise software systems. Under the platform, IoT data is captured in real time during the operation of physical products.
Siemens PLM:
Siemens PLM Software’s solutions include Teamcenter, their flagship product which is essentially a suite of PLM software applications based on a single platform. There’s also the NX, which represents a suite of integrated, fully associative CAD/CAM/CAE applications as well as Tecnomatix, a comprehensive portfolio of digital manufacturing solutions that synchronises product engineering, manufacturing engineering and production, among others.
APMEN Sept 2016, Features
