Product Lifecycle Management (PLM)Software—Top 10 Solutions & Feasibility

Product lifecycle management (PLM) software helps users manage data throughout the product development lifecycle—including creation, servicing, and scrapping. PLM software enables companies to boost productivity, bolster collaboration, increase quality, enhance creativity, and minimize time-to-market. This software integrates business systems, data, documents, and people that deal with product creation. With PLM software, users can systematically track the development of products.

Top Ten Vendors of Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) solutions are:

1. Propel: Propel handles the important bits of production, allowing users to rest easy. It brings information management, product lifecycle, and quality management onto a single platform and ensures quick resolution of product issues raised by customers as well as compliance with quality tests.
2. Teamcenter: Teamcenter is an end-to-end PLM tool that optimizes the product lifecycle of a company. Its innovative document management features and publishing tools help users create reports, technical publications, 2D & 3D illustrations, and test results.
3. Oracle Agile: Oracle Agile PLM aids businesses across the product development cycle and helps build efficient and economical processes. The solution facilitates innovation by enabling rapid collaboration across unified networks, maximizes profits through high-quality development strategies, and helps management teams make data-driven business decisions. With Agile, users can enhance the design and deployment of their products.
4. SolidWorks Inspection: SolidWorks Inspection caters to the manufacturing and technology industries, where it assists in the large-scale management of products across their lifecycles. This solution helps to ensure the production of high-quality and cost-effective products.
5. Upchain: With Upchain, the product lifecycles of companies become efficient, quick, and economical. Companies rely on Upchainfor creating product networks that facilitate real-time data sharing. This software also provides integration for critical tools that help different departments perform their jobs.
6. AutoCAD Plant 3D: With AutoCAD, engineers and designers can create and edit piping and instrumentation diagrams (P&IDs) swiftly and easily. This software makes product lifecycle management easy with familiar AutoCAD in-context editing tools.
7. OpenBOM: OpenBOMhelps businesses organize and maintain product lifecycle information through a single, centralized window. Stakeholders rely on OpenBOMto edit and update product details simultaneously and in realtime, ensuring consistency and minimizing errors.
8. SAP PLM: With SAP PLM, flexible product development becomes easy, processes become more efficient, and planning &designing become very simple for engineering and designing personnel. This solution also makes collaboration swift and simple for its users.
9. PTC Windchill: PTC Windchill enhances product development by integrating processes, people, and systems.  Its‘product information warehouse’ enables manufacturers to achieve a cutting-edge advantage in the market that they operate in.
10. Aras PLM: Aras PLM comes with easy collaboration as well as numerous functions that meet all the PLM requirements of clients. A key feature of Aras PLM is its direct API functionality.

Other leading vendors of PLM Software include Bamboo Rose, Centro, CMPRO, DDM, DevEX, ENOVIA, Mimic, PRO.CEED, Prodigy, ProductCenter, ProductVision, Shop Floor, and SolidWorks MBD.

Is PLM Software Worth the Investment?

Best PLM software works with ERP and CAD solutions to manage data during product development—from inception and manufacturing to servicing and disposal. PLM software is typically used by multiple stakeholders across departments, often with different permissions and roles.

Higher management often fails to see the benefits of PLM because its definition and scope are neither clear nor limited. In a company, PLM often swings between Engineering and IT departments in terms of responsibility. To calculate the feasibility of PLM for a business, the management team needs to define a PLM process across the organization and map the participation of each system as well as keep an eye on how data, processes, and people interact from beginning to end.

C-level executives should know that a PLM system is actually CRM + PDM + SLM + ERP + SRM + other systems that help manage the product lifecycle. Only after understanding this can an informed decision be taken on the feasibility of PLM software.