Generally speaking, Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) comprises of technologies that capture all the intellectual property within the company, enabling smooth compliance of regulatory as well as organizational standards, while streamlining processes, and efficiently managing all the data from concept to end-of-life of the product resulting in reduction of the products’ time to market and maximizing knowledge capture and reuse.

While PLM is an essential organizational imperative to build competitive advantage, it has been observed that many organizations are not getting the anticipated returns from their existing PLM implementations. Specifically talking about the Indian manufacturing industry, lack of digital maturity amongst organizations is probably the single major obstacle in the adoption and proliferation of PLM. Typically, the first step into PLM starts with PDM (Product Data Management), which is essentially managing CAD data in a PLM system. Once PDM is fully mature, different aspects of PLM will start playing a role, for instance, Requirements Management, Systems Engineering, Tooling Data Management, BOM (Bill of Materials) management, Digital Manufacturing, Manufacturing Simulation and others.

Because IT solutions like Supply Chain Management and ERP have proliferated the market place more, very often IT professionals make the mistaken assumption that these tools and technologies can do what PLM can. This could not be further from the truth. There are significant synergies between PLM and the transactional technologies mentioned above. In many ways, what these tools are to production, PLM is to planning.

An Overview of Current PLM Trends in the Industry

The global PLM market is growing despite weak economic conditions. According to CIMdata, a leading independent PLM advisory firm, the global PLM market grew close to 11.6 percent in 2012; in 2014 they forecast a 5.5 percent growth and looking towards 2018, they see an annual growth rate of 5.8 percent to $46.3 billion.