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Manugistics response
Stephen Franks, VP Manufacturing Europe
What is PLM?
 Product
Lifecycle Management (PLM) is a set of solutions that facilitate
more efficient product collaboration between functions within the
enterprise (Sales, Marketing, Engineering, Purchasing, Manufacturing,
Planning, Forecasting, Service, Customer Support) and external to
the enterprise with the companies' suppliers and customers.
PLM streamlines all the activities and data involved
with a product throughout it's entire lifecycle, including product
concept, design, sourcing, manufacturing, transportation, storage,
promotion, sales, support, maintenance, retirement, and even recycling.
There is a significant amount of data associated with the product,
the programs and projects, and the people and functional areas involved
in this set of complex processes.
PLM Background
PLM is the evolution of Product Data Management (PDM) and Collaborative
Product Commerce (CPC). PDM started as a way to keep track of all
the complex information about a product. Some of the information
it encompasses includes: product configurations, data vaulting (check
in and out), audit trails of product information changes, document
management, workflow, product data publishing, bill of material
(BOM) management, engineering change data, parts definitions, specifications,
CAD drawings, geometric models & images, manufacturing process
plans and routings, and quality management data.
Data
One of the benefits of capturing this information is in providing
visibility to the information throughout an organization, giving
people consistent data, and also leveraging intellectual capital
that may otherwise be lost when a person leaves the company, or
that might be lost because of a long product lifecycle. Aerospace
& defense manufacturers can take years for an aircraft to go
through conceptualization and design to finally being complete.
A PDM system does not just keep current product information, but
also keeps all historical information about a product. A company
many want to manufacture a product again in the future, so they
would need to have access to the product specifications and manufacturing
data that were used the last time the product was made. In shorter
lifecycle industries like Hi-Tech, the rapid pace of development
necessitates a strong engineering change management capability,
and the PDM system needs to track these changes and store the BOM
configuration for each product iteration.
Collaboration
Once all this data was collected and stored and managed within the
enterprise, it was a natural evolution to enable customers and suppliers
to have access to this information. Several trends also fueled the
need to go outside the enterprise: company outsourcing of key business
processes such as manufacturing, the Internet's pervasiveness, stronger
computing power, and a shortage of qualified design engineers within
North America all contributed to the PLM drive toward collaboration
with suppliers and customers. This need to share information centered
around allowing suppliers and customers input to the design process,
and evolved into CPC.
Product Lifecycle Management
Although most vendors in the PLM market space talk about being able
to manage data and collaborative processes around the entire product
lifecycle, their traditional strength has focused on the product
concept and design part of the lifecycle. Some vendors are also
stronger in the support of the "support and maintain"
part of the lifecycle, in that they can track assets, serial numbers,
and other data associated with repair of products. Recently, however,
PLM vendors have been extending into the sourcing part of the lifecycle,
because there are many synergies between designing a new product
(or making a change to an existing product) and being able to both
parametrically search for and source components needed for the design.
PLM vendors have also added capabilities to their repertoire to
manage the programs and projects associated with getting a product
(or product change) from concept through to market launch, enabling
the people, functional areas, suppliers, and customers involved
to collaborate on the complex product data.
Complete Product
Lifecycle Optimization
However, PLM companies today don't really manage the broad PLM vision
that tells them how to manufacture, store, transport, promote, price,
sell or retire a product. They cannot forecast product demand, determine
pricing or promotions for the product that is being designed, or
plan for where and when product will be sold, determine where and
how much product should be manufactured, and how much of each component
should be purchased from a supplier. They also cannot deal with
forecasting and planning for maintenance and repair needs, or for
the reverse logistics which are a requirement today in some industries.
This is where there is synergy with Manugistics' capabilities; Manugistics
SCM and PRO solutions together with a PLM vendor can together fill
in the complete PLM lifecycle and optimally consider supply chain
constraints, component inventories, pricing, and other factors in
the up-front design process.
You can find out more about Manugistics on their website: www.manugistics.com
If you have any feedback
to add to this debate, please email plm@cambashi.com
with the subject "PLM debate".
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