Products that are profitable and also delight customers have always been a significant challenge for manufacturers. Customers expect unprecedented levels of innovation and customization from product makers. Product manufacturers, in turn, cannot afford costly inefficiencies and expect to see quicker returns on investment (RoI). Eventually, three-fourth of all new products fail in the marketplace, as they do not justify the resources that take to launch them.

The Product Story
Even in the contemporary competitive environment, product development has been more a saga of trial and error than of managed innovation. This is made worse when a company develops multiple products (and variants) which entails factoring in design collaboration with suppliers, product performance, and manufacturability early in the development lifecycle. Since 1980s, CAD (computer aided design) and CAE (computer aided engineering) tools have given designers the power to explore, simulate, and innovate faster than ever before. They generate a sea of data that has to be interpreted and managed for capitalization and reuse. Unfortunately, in most organizations, converging on a decision or optimizing a design required navigating a maze of disconnected systems and databases, whose results would then be "manually" re-organized into meaningful context. This was because PDM (product data management) systems supported virtual engineering processes that were designed to capture only the static results, like a giant file cabinet. Undoubtedly, PDM systems were essential for the organization, their control, and reporting of digital product information, but the software was designed to manage released parts, products and related data, and not "work in process". However, while product IP (intellectual property) had to be managed and repurposed as a revenue-driving asset, most manufacturing enterprises were still organized according to functional areas or domains supported by technologies designed to manage only the intellectual capital that they produced. So, the new challenge was to figure out how to promote design innovation while reducing the time and cost of endless data search, multiple iterations, and costly prototypes.

A Holistic Approach
As organizations became more global and products more diverse, the greatest opportunity for improvement was seen in the virtual phase of product developmentby simulating in-process engineering and lifecycle knowledge to optimize design and production planning. This integrated approach would not only replace or displace data management systems, but also optimize the management and distribution of virtual knowledge across lifecycle processes and global value chains, enabling right-first-time products and production, every time.

It was then that product lifecycle management (PLM) was seen as an approach that had the potential to radically change the way todays leading companies operate. Unlike earlier design management tools, PLM did not just digitize existing processes, but it allowed companies to radically revise them. Using PLM, manufacturers of the most complex products could now cut their capital requirements, increase their efficiency, drive design and manufacturing down into the supply chain to cut costs, shorten time to market, and help in innovation.

Today, PLM is an integrated business approach to manage the creation and dissemination of engineering data throughout an enterprise. It has become an emerging field of research in academia with potentially strong impact on industry practice. From a product perspective, PLM encompasses a holistic approach to product development and its management, beginning from the conception of the product and ending with its retirement/decommissioning. This present generation of PLM allows organizations to monitor and analyze performance of life cycle activities and field results to support critical product-related decisions, such as determining when to add new features, kill misguided initiatives, introduce new products, retire old products or address problems and bottlenecks that hamper product-related business performance.

PLM solutions bind manufacturers engineering and production teams together in a constant, dynamic information space. This means that ideas can flow easily, and visual models can be built and shared in real time. To keep pace with this process, most large development organizations have implemented digital design, simulation, and manufacturing solutions that help to streamline lifecycle processes and reduce the need for physical prototypes. Some perform digital manufacturing planning and simulation entirely in 3D, creating a "virtual factory" environment before releasing designs for production.

Impacts of PLM
The implementation of digital manufacturing and PLM solutions has, in turn, translated into economic benefits, which have helped organizations measure their financial impacts. PLMs impacts are felt on all aspects of the organization like engineering, manufacturing, sales, and support. Digital manufacturing provides benefits in the areas of product design and production. This in turn leads to products that minimize manufacturing costs and are easily serviced, thereby resulting in better quality and functionality of products which help increase market share. Organizations in the competitive industry sector have begun to embrace digital manufacturing not just to remain competitive but for the mere reason of survival. The digital manufacturing environment enables the manufacturing team to influence the design to reduce cost of manufacturing and eliminate engineering changes caused by previously undetected problems with manufacturability.

Data in the manufacturing hub also provides a rich resource for maintenance planning and the creation of 3D maintenance and repair instructions. High-level process planning by the advance planners during the conceptual design phase ensures that the units of construction can be efficiently manufactured in yards and in supplier facilities. Because a digital manufacturing environment allows the discovery of product ability problems early in the design cycle, the cost of change is minimal. During the design phase, detailed planning and process design is finalized and verified in a 3D environment. These product ability studies can, in turn, be used to create 3D work instructions for the shop, unifying the spectrum from concept design through production execution.

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