Product Lifecycle Management guides products from concept through design, production, and distribution. Ninety percent of PLM problems come from data transfer errors when specs are shared via PDFs and spreadsheets. PLM software eliminates these bottlenecks to cut costs, improve quality, and speed products to market.
Chapters
What is product lifecycle management? How do you evolve an idea into a successful product? It's not as easy as you might think, especially if you have to do it over and over again with increased speed and efficiency. That's what product lifecycle management is all about. Product lifecycle management is the collaborative process of taking a product from inception and development through phase-out. The end goal of product lifecycle management is optimizing the product development process. This optimization must occur across 4 key phases early in the overall lifecycle. The concept phase, where teams brainstorm, examine market research, and perform preliminary analyses on new product ideas. The design phase, where ideas are translated into detailed specifications and plans. This involves creating prototypes, blueprints, and mockups to visualize and refine the product's features, functionality, and aesthetics. The production phase, where product designs are manufactured at scale. This requires requires setting up manufacturing processes, sourcing materials, and optimizing product efficiency, all while maintaining quality standards. And finally, distribution, where products are shipped to retailers. In each phase, product attributes are passed between numerous teams encompassing both internal departments and external suppliers and sellers. Each of these parties works with complex product specifications that must be accurate and consistent. When product data is lost or muddled, it can cause serious problems. In fact, 90% of PLM issues are caused by mistakes that happen when product information is transferred. These mistakes are usually a result of sending product specs saved on PDFs and spreadsheets over email. Retailers often have many PDFs in circulation that contain different iterations of product specifications. Sometimes the wrong PDF is sent to an external partner. When this happens, external partners end up working from outdated designs. This causes production delays, increased cost due to rework, and potential dissatisfaction among customers if the final product doesn't meet expectations. Product Lifecycle Management attempts to fix these complex collaborative issues. A top-notch PLM plan will eliminate communication bottlenecks and enable internal and external parties to be on the same page. As PLM processes are optimized, retailers can expect to see 3 key improvements: 1. Production costs will decrease because collaboration inefficiencies will be eliminated. 2. Product quality will improve because teams will be better able to identify and correct issues with products during the design stage. And 3, time to market will decrease due to improved communication and collaboration processes. As communication errors are eliminated, quality issues are easier to detect and address, and efficiency skyrockets. That's the power of product lifecycle management. It's the power to unify collaboration and align your teams on up-to-date product specifications. You'll be delivering higher quality products in record time. For a more detailed breakdown of product lifecycle management, download our Complete Guide to Product Lifecycle Management.
