Will PLM be the next shift in enterprise solutions for the industrial world?

Product lifecycle management (PLM) is the strategic process of managing the complete journey of a product in five stages:

1. Conception & design,
2. Development,
3. Production,
4. Service & support,
5. Disposal.

With today’s circular economies and more transparent supply chains, that story extends back to the raw materials used, and forward to the end-of-life stages of the product, such as recycling and repurposing. As a technology, PLM software (simply called PLM) helps organizations to develop new products and bring them to market in far more efficient, collaborative, and sustainable ways. It integrates processes for each stage of a product’s lifecycle across globalized supply chains, making tracking and sharing data along the product value chain easier.

The industrial world has been investing heavily in digital transformation in general since Covid, because it faces significant challenges:

• Workforce evolution, integration of Generation Z, who needs to be trained quickly and retained
• Supply chain resilience and agility (e.g., to cope with component shortages in one location)
• Software-defined products: the value comes from software, which leads to product complexity
• Evolving business models, which require optimizing services to offer maximum value to customers
• Regulatory constraints, particularly environmental

However, manufacturers still work in silos to a large extent. The data is fairly reliable within each silo, but there needs to be collaboration between them. In addition, with agility, there are many changes to the product, which are still too often manual. This makes it difficult for companies to maintain information traceability/digital thread. Finally, many processes are still specific to individual manufacturers. The mission of PLM is precisely to provide reliable data on the product and to maintain traceability throughout the entire lifecycle. It also enables parallel working on processes and secure true collaboration, to be able to work across the extended enterprise with subcontractors, etc.

That is why PTC refocused its strategy on PLM as a basis for all its offerings to allow the overlay of digital and physical products, which is the foundation of digital transformation. PTC’s PLM solution portfolio, Windchill, is already well established in the manufacturing industry. It starts with a regulatory requirements management process, then manages the product lifecycle stages and change processes, taking into account the complexity of the product, like variability with proliferation of options and variants. It then considers environmental aspects, manufacturing by creating a bill of materials, purchasing and supply chain by proposing components very early on, as well as services with a service nomenclature (spare parts). The software is available in both on-premises and SaaS modes. The benefits are numerous:

• Faster time to market through task parallelization,
• Management of hardware and software complexity,
• Digital work to anticipate problems, resulting in fewer costly quality issues,
• Cost reduction through inventory optimization,
• Operational efficiency of teams that can find the right information and collaborate,
• Possible reuse of components, a source of savings for the company,
• Provision of reliable data for AI …

A few decades ago, the shift in the industrial world came with ERP, which enabled greater governance and execution of transactional activities. Today, the top priority of industrial companies is to improve time to market, efficiency, and quality; they realize that understanding their product data is key to achieving these business outcomes. Manufacturers do not centralize their data yet, whereas PLM can do it, especially if it is leveraged as Enterprise PLM used throughout the enterprise. In an AI context, where manufacturers are still trying to understand the value for them, with increased complexity in products and processes, environmental constraints, etc., how can this reliable data coming from PLM during the whole product lifecycle be leveraged throughout the enterprise? Where ERP handles business planning and transactions, PLM handles the evolution and distribution of product data. Best practices require a robust integration between the two systems with a clear partition of roles and a logical flow of data. So, the question remains: How will PLM be integrated across the entire enterprise, when it has historically been confined to engineering?

The adoption of Enterprise PLM by companies will be gradual. First, it involves Core Engineering with PDM (Product Data Management), it will then evolve towards Expanded PLM for Product Engineering, and finally transition to Enterprise PLM, providing access to data for everyone in the company. The reliable data provided by PLM can add value to other business functions throughout the company. Enterprise PLM is not intended to replace ERP, but to make it more efficient by providing accurate, high-quality information. Current ERP Modernization and “Saasification” projects are opportunities to redefine the boundaries between systems and demonstrate the value of PLM for manufacturers as an enterprise solution, not just an engineering solution.