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Thursday, November 5, 2009

PLM - The Next Enterprise Application Suite

Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) promises significant benefits to manufacturers and the market is full of vendors claiming to provide faster new product introductions, reduced product costs, reduced product development costs, increased revenue, better quality products, enhanced product innovation and other valuable benefits. Because of the high appeal of these benefits and their associated ROI, PLM has become one of the fastest growing categories of enterprise applications.

The PLM market today consists of vendors offering a variety of solutions that in some way offer value to the product lifecycle, but there is no single vendor that is supplying all of the solutions required to support a full PLM Program (see The PLM Program) October 28, 2002>. Many of the PLM solutions have their roots in the engineering department, but make no mistake; PLM is an enterprise application suite and has all of the additional requirements that come with enterprise class applications.

The PLM concept pulls together information and business processes from multiple disciplines within the enterprise and across enterprises. While product design plays a crucial role in the product lifecycle, PLM is not just a series of add-on tools for Computer Aided Engineering (CAD) and Product Data Management (PDM). But it is not just another module for ERP, either. PLM is a suite of applications that can be used by a company to get the highest value from their products to improve their business results. And like any other new suite of enterprise applications, as learned from SCM and CRM, companies may have to choose between the potential tradeoffs between best of breed solutions and solutions from their ERP vendors.

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