Product Life Cycle Management

To be innovative to survive in international market competition, all corporations and organizations should orient all their Intellectual Properties to utilize effective management. After evolution in design approaches with the advent of using CAD1, although this progress was useful in speeding up product design cycles, but there were the problem of many ‘islands of automation’ and the integration of all these functions. As technologies progressed, the CAD programs incorporated more engineering knowhow with new and developers expanding into parallel markets, like developing tools to manage the design files created in their packages (areas termed EDM2 and PDM3). Product Lifecycle Management is used to describe the process or wish to integrate these islands, producing a digital design through manufacturing solution. The perceived benefits such as manufacturing and marketing and better quality advantages are obvious and discussed in detail later in this paper. PLM is more about the integration of existing enterprise systems (CAD/CAM, ERP4, etc.) together with new systems, like collaboration portals, to envelope and control the creation, test, manufacture, service, decommission and recycle processes. This paper attempts to describe the PLM concept and the empirical viewpoints in PLM implementation in an IT device manufacturing plant.