Enhance Your Sales Lifecycle Management for Engineering

How to create outlook signature

product data management and product life cycle management often get conflated in a lot of organizations and i want to talk about the similarities and differences between these two fields if you were to think of it in terms of a venn diagram product data management is a subset of product lifecycle management let's talk about some of the key differences between pdm and plm first off product data management is primarily used by engineering organizations whereas product life cycle management is used across the entire enterprise the primary users and customers and consumers of product data management are people who drive cad computer aided design software such as creo parametric or catia or nx or solidworks or inventor whereas product life cycle management is used by groups like manufacturing integration the supply chain and configuration management product data management by definition is based in cad data whereas you can actually perform product lifecycle management without cad models or drawings for example plm is used extensively in the fashion and apparel industries as well as in non-discrete manufacturing to explain non-discrete manufacturing well let's talk about discrete manufacturing discrete manufacturing is when you sell individual objects so for example if you sell a refrigerator or a washing machine or a car or a computer or an airplane hey those are discrete objects but with non-discrete manufacturing you're making things like agriculture maybe you're making corn or wheat other food products and beverages like even beer or alcohol those things are sold in volumes and not in discrete units let's talk about some of the main functions in product data management primarily it is your cad vault it is where you are going to be saving and storing and managing your parts assemblies and your drawings you will also be controlling who has access to those different models and whether they can just view them or if they have the ability to modify them you're going to have your version history so that you can access previous iterations of the model you're also going to release those different objects to downstream processes like manufacturing and supply chain and also you are going to revise the objects so for example let's say that you release it to production you find out there is a problem well you need to revise it back down to a design state so that you can make modifications to it on the screen is the definition of product life cycle management by dr michael greaves i highly recommend that you read his book on product lifecycle management and i'm not going to read this definition to you but i want to point out a few key phrases first off people processes and technology that is the core of product lifecycle management and the point is to trade product information for wasted time energy and material and this contributes to lean thinking and this is critical to manufacturing and the entire enterprise some of the key product lifecycle management functions are listed on the screen here and i'm just going to mention a few of them well you've got your change management so that you can control the different changes that you need to make to the data within your enterprise in a closed loop process you've got your bills of material you've got your requirements you've got your configuration items and a bunch of other different functions including visualization visualization enables people across the enterprise to be able to view your parts assemblies and drawings without having the native authoring application installed on their computers besides your product lifecycle management system there are a number of other different systems that you're going to have in your organization what you see depicted on this picture is not the sum total of all of them but in a product development organization you will typically also have other systems like your manufacturing execution system your enterprise resource planning system and your quality management system you can also have other systems that pertain to human resources and customer relationships management but these are some of the key systems when it comes to manufacturing and making different products and what you'll see is that there is overlap between these different areas so that a plm system might end up performing some of the same functions as your quality system your manufacturing system and your resource planning system but if you have multiple of these systems implemented at your organizations often you're going to have interfaces so that your data will flow between them thank you very much i hope you enjoyed this explanation of some of the similarities and differences between product data management and product life cycle management