product lifecycle management
Product
lifecycle management or PLM is an all-encompassing approach
for innovation, new product development and introduction (NPDI)
and product information management from ideation to end of life.
PLM Systems as an enabling technology for PLM integrate people,
data, processes, and business systems and provide a product information
backbone for companies and their extended enterprise.
Business Drivers
Innovation and new product development are essential
for most companies to sustain future revenue growth. Customers demand
more new products in shorter time intervals, often customized to
their own needs. They want more attractive designs, better performance,
better quality, lower prices, and instant availability. To meet
these needs companies have to be able to collaborate closely within
their own organization and with partners and suppliers located in
various parts of the world. At the same time, companies have to
manage increasing product and manufacturing complexities due to
a quickly growing number of environmental and regulatory rules and
requirements.
The Problem
Accelerating innovation and increasing the number
of successful new product introductions is a huge challenge for
most organizations today because of their traditionally serial,
fragmented, manual, and paper based processes. The result is that
many companies suffer from NPDI practices that are slow, resource
intensive, costly, inflexible, provide little visibility, and are
difficult to manage and control.
Typical business problems are:
Innovation/New Product Development
- Bringing new products to market takes too
long
- The product development pipeline is too small
or nonexistent
- Undesirable mix between new and established
products (Stars and Cash Cows)
- Not enough revenue generated from new products
- New product development projects are often
over budget and over schedule
- Little or no visibility over status of new
product development projects
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Change Management
- It takes a long time to process change
orders through the organization
- Many people have to sign off on change orders
- Difficulty determining the impact of changes
on products, documents, manufacturing procedures and production
equipment
- Affected parties (internal, customers, suppliers,
etc) are not notified of changes
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Information and Intellectual Property Management
- Difficulty to search, access and retrieve
existing information
- Little or no re-use of existing information
and parts
- Significant effort to re-create documents
and drawings that cannot be found
- Little information security
- No or little protection of intellectual capital
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Compliance
- High cost and large effort to meet
and adhere to all regulatory and environmental rules and
requirements (SOX, FDA, EPA, ISO, ITAR, RoHS, REACH, WEEE,
ELV, etc.)
- Difficulty to keep track of and meet all the
different international regulations (US, EU, Japan, etc)
- Large effort to prepare for audits
- Risk of non-compliance
- Product redesign and changes to meet regulatory
requirements
- Large effort to determine all materials used
in a product
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Business Inefficiency
- Redundant or duplicate parts and resulting
excess inventory
- Spend significant time and effort to re-enter
data in various systems
- Spend significant time and effort to distribute
information internally and externally
- Need significant space to storage paper files
and documents
- Large paper consumption for printing and copying
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The Solution – PLM
Through their ability to integrate all product
related data and processes and to eliminate boundaries in the value
chain, PLM Systems can significantly reduce non-value added activities
and enable stakeholders to collaborate in real time using a consistent
set of information throughout the entire product lifecycle.
As a
result, productivity improvements of over 60% in NPDI-related
activities have been achieved through PLM-enabled, enterprise-wide
data and process optimization and integration that have allowed
companies to:
- Drive innovation
- Accelerate Revenues
- Increase Productivity
- Reduce Costs
- Improve Quality
- Ensure Compliance
- Shorten Time-to-Market
In today’s highly competitive, fast-paced and
global business environment, well-designed and implemented PLM practices,
processes and technologies that support an organization’s strategies
for innovation and growth can afford companies a real competitive
advantage.
The Benefits of PLM
Using a PLM system to manage product data and integrate
and automate business processes generally results in efficiency
improvements, which consequently enable companies to develop more
new products, shorten time-to-market, reduce costs, increase productivity
and improve the quality of products and procedures.
These efficiency improvements can generally be leveraged
in two ways: Increased output with the same resources (labor, time,
material) or constant output with fewer resources. The result in
the first case is a higher revenue at the same costs, in the latter
case it is constant revenue at lower costs. In both instances the
gross margin will increase as a result of using PLM.
OBEROn PLM
OBEROn provides all functionalities to develop simple
or complex PLMs. Using this platform you can define PLM object classes
(products, parts, CAD elements, ECO, ECR ... ), relationships between
them (like BOM structures), lifecycles , event rules, access rights.
OBEROn is capable of storing files (office documents, PDF, CAD drawings,
reports, images) in a distributed file system network: you can create
interfaces via webservices in order to access remote file spaces
or use the ftp protocol.
You can also define the user interfaces like menus, menu commands,
forms; these elements can be used to implement a web-browser interface
or stand-alone clients.
The OBEROn PLM is a demo web-application that demonstrates
the power of the OBEROn platform.
Here is some screenshoots that show the basic functions:
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User login
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The basic search: filter objects by class,code,revision,holder,current
status, creation date
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Create new part: part types are subdivided into classes and sub-classes.
Specific (or Extra) attributes related to the component class/sub-class
extend the basic properties.
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Show/Edit part details: a form can include also navigation items
to show connected objects (like CAD elements)
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Navigate the object showing the connected elements
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Show the object lifecycle and the current stage. Let the enabled
users to promote or regress the objects status.
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REFERENCE: "What
is PLM?". PLM Technology Guide
See also
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