Product Lifecycle Management Selection

This evaluation and selection guide will help organizations select the best product lifecycle management software for their business requirements.

Product Lifecycle Management Selection Overview

Leading manufacturers across discrete industries, such as aerospace & defense and automotive recognize that product lifecycle management (PLM) is the backbone for their design/build processes and are making PLM solutions and strategies the cornerstone of their enterprise architectures.

Solution providers have supported this shift to a more central role for PLM. They are continually enhancing their solution portfolios and today’s PLM goes well beyond traditional product authoring and testing applications (CAD/CAM/CAE).  Modern PLM suites include powerful support for every stage of the product lifecycle. Product design has become tightly integrated with manufacturing and service processes and powerful collaborative environments are enabling complex, global net-works of partners to freely collaborate in product innovation, development, production, and support activities.

Considering these developments, manufacturers can no longer view investments in PLM as merely buying a set of applications and tools for product development and to improve engineering efficiency. The real objective is to enable more effective and collaborative global business processes.  Achieving this goal requires an understanding of a company’s business strategies and processes, and the engineering resource and IT infrastructure requirements they impose.  PLM solution selection can then follow as a rational process of matching these requirements to individual solution capabilities.

Product Lifecycle Management Selection Strategic Issues

ARC has been researching the PLM market for many years, and we understand the challenge companies have in selecting and implementing a solution that will meet their engineering needs, business strategy, and IT requirements. These include:

• Selecting licensing and deployment models
• Determining the appropriate design and simulation tools for your engineering requirements
• Identifying the improvements of new PLM technology
• Understanding how PLM can benefit business strategy