Investigation into Current Industrial Practices relating to Product Lifecycle Management in a MultiNational Manufacturing Company

In today’s modern business environment, where globalization and cross-region collaboration is required, Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) may be seen as crucial to underpinning corporate ability to meet customers’ increasingly bespoke demands in a sustainable and competitive manner. PLM offers companies the capability of a framework to capture, store, retrieve, represent and re-utilize product and process knowledge in order to compete more effectively in today’s knowledge-intensive Product Development (PD) environment. PLM, however, is not solely a technological framework; it is seen to offer social and cultural dimensions which contribute to the strategy and competitive advantage of organisations.
PLM systems have gained acceptance for managing all information relating to products throughout their full lifecycle, from conceptualisation through operations to disposal. The PLM philosophy and systems, therefore, aim to provide support to an even broader range of engineering and business-related activities than merely PD. PLM was initially conceived as an academic concept to address the management of data, information and knowledge during product lifecycles, but subsequently has gained acceptance in industry to provide support to a wider gamut of business and engineering practices.