Product Lifecycle Management -An Effective Business Strategy
As the business world enters the globalized environment, the wide customer base that is created, demands for solutions against complex business requirements. The enterprises in turn try to meet these demands with the help of modern technological innovations. The process however demands enterprises to continuously monitor develop or maintain the lifecycle of the product or the application. This generally works out as a collaborative effort on part of the business management team, software engineering and production and development teams.
However, product lifecycle management irrespective of the industry sector facilitates every enterprise meet the challenges of increasing engineering complexities as well as meeting a globally competitive market. PLM as it is referred to be the process of managing the lifecycle of a product from the time the idea is conceived through its design and manufacture till it is put into service and final disposal. By integrating people, process and systems this is a collection of product information and forms the backbone of the enterprises. In the area of marketing, product lifecycle management refers to the management of the life cycle of the product from its commercial perspective and involves sales and marketing measures undertaken.
Today with e-commerce taking over physical and retail store solutions, product lifecycle management is considered as a cornerstone in an organization’s IT structure. With the vastness of customer base and frequent upgrading of technology, it becomes imperative for all enterprises to manage information and communication with customers and suppliers and understand their resources used in enterprise resource planning and software development lifecycle. However, the people centric PLM targets right from the design stages of the product, the traditional PLM tools is implemented more towards the end of the lifecycle towards the release phase.
Product lifecycle management includes product data management, portfolio management, system engineering, product design, manufacturing process management. The increasing demands for PLM solutions have paved way for number of service providers to have entered the arena. Product lifecycle management tools offer the enterprises benefits in the form of minimized time to market, refined product quality, reduction in wastage, reduction in prototyping costs as well as ability to recognize the potential sales and revenue contributions. Further with the contract manufacturers having an access to centralized product information facilitates a comprehensive assimilation of engineering workflow.
However, with service providers looking in to provide enterprises with e-commerce solutions and products such as banking software solution and insurance software solutions, the agile product lifecycle management easily facilitates these even while working through distributed teams. Aimed to provide global resource and development this state-of-the-art PLM tools combined with unique methodology brings down the development charges. With centralized management of product and technology being the core of the functions, the product lifecycle management is an essential business strategy.