How should Business See the future of PLM

1. PLM in the digital era
Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) as we all know is an integrated process of
managing information systems related to the design, development, and delivery
of a product or services from its inception of an idea to prototyping,
manufacturing and service and disposal.
Earlier days PLM mostly covered the manufacturing and shipping side only,
activities related to errors or failures or delays
has been taken up only after and when
customers or management have reported
them, which are reactive and has led to
affecting the cost and reputation of the
organization.
Under this ‘ship and pray’ era, there wasn’t an
integrated process or systems that integrated
data streams from manufacturing to
operations, hence Organisations were blind to
know in advance how systems were
performing and at what conditions were causing failures/concerns etc. This has

2. resulted in delays in issue resolution, avoidable system failures, loss of business,
and ultimately lower levels of customer satisfaction.
In the Digital-era, PLM should be viewed as an
enterprise wide strategy. The PLM can build a
unified data structure by integrating various systems
in a data driven model. As an enterprise strategy, it
lets organizations work as a single team to design,
produce, project manage, support and retire
products. It empowers your business to make
unified, information-driven decisions at every stage
in the product lifecycle
So, with not much of major differentiation between
the PLM vendors in the market what will
differentiate PLM vendors in the future? Technology for sure will play a role, but I
believe PLATFORM becoming the key enabler that facilitates a single, secure and
up-to-date source of product data accessible anywhere, enabling true
collaboration across your organization to facilitate real-time decision-making, it is
very hard to create sustainable technological advantages in this market and very
few companies succeeded in bring the differentiation to the market and kept it
for a long time.
Conclusion, PLM Solution is just not about integration of various functions within
an organization, any digitalization of current organisation processes only leads to
incremental improvements, what we need to digitalize is in building value on
single version of data, Cognition and Insight that leads to digital thread of
knowledge a proactive agent in driving your business.
By
C.P.Vinodh