Today Product Lifecycle Management is considered as an important business strategy. But before going further, let’s first understand the term, Product Lifecycle Management (PLM). As per Wikipedia, PLM is the “the process of managing the entire lifecycle of a product from its conception, through design and manufacture, to service and disposal. PLM integrates people, data, processes, and business systems and provides a product information backbone for companies and their extended enterprise.”



Thanks to globalization, today’s business environment is competitive, fast paced and highly volatile. This has made PLM an essential tool that helps organizations to deal with the complexities and engineering challenges of new product development for the more demanding global competitive markets.



To survive in this fiercely competitive business environment, enterprises need to introduce new, better and profitable products into the market quickly. Success comes to those who know the pulse of the market and is able to figure out future demand of products. Hence, those products that are sure to perform well in the market must be introduced swiftly while those that are underperforming must be withdrawn completely without fail. This can be done if and only if the enterprises have complete control over the lifecycle of products.



Though the different stages in the life of a product vary according to the product and the industry, normally there are five stages in the life of a product namely development, introduction, growth, maturity, and decline. An understanding of the product’s lifecycle helps enterprises to understand the time to introduce and withdraw a product, its demand, its position and finally its success and failure. Thus, effective management of a product’s lifecycle helps enterprises to reap benefits. For that, enterprises require state-of-the-art product lifecycle management solution that overcomes the challenges of working across a distributed environment to deliver high-quality products while accelerating timelines and reducing development costs by up to 30%. The following are some of the advantages of using effective PLM tools.



·         Enhance product quality

·         Ability to identify quickly potential sales opportunities and revenue contributions

·         Reduced waste

·         Savings through the reuse of original data

·         Savings through the complete integration of engineering workflows



PLM thus allows enterprises to attain efficiency in the product development process. This efficiency leads to time management, cost savings, and quality enhancement.



Related Links: agile product life cycle management, product engineering
 



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