How PLM Software Improves Product Engineering Management for eCommerce

Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) software has emerged as a pivotal tool in streamlining and optimizing the product development process and product engineering management. From conceptualization to manufacturing and beyond, PLM software facilitates collaboration, enhances communication, and ensures data integrity across all stages of the product lifecycle.

In this article, we will learn more about this software and how it helps in the product engineering procedure.

What is PLM Software?

PLM software is utilized to manage the product’s related data through all the stages of a product’s lifecycle. While it is used primarily by design and engineering teams handling CAD data, the software can also provide visibility into the product design processes of all the product’s stakeholders.

5 Phases of Product Development [Implementation]

The five phases of product development include product ideation, development, production, launch, maturity, and retirement. Let’s find out more about these phases in detail below:

Stage 1: Brainstorming and Ideations

In the first stage of product development, an idea is posed about the type of product that needs to be created. For that, you need to define product requirements depending on competitive analysis, consumer needs, and market gaps.

Stage 2: Production Development

In the second stage, a product’s detailed design is prepared. Analyzing, validating, developing, prototyping, and testing of products are also done in this stage. This will help you get feedback and understand if any improvement needs to be made.

Stage 3: Production and Launch

The design of the product is tweaked based on the feedback provided to create an improved version of the product. After that, the product is launched and distributed in the market.

Stage 4: Product Maturity

In this stage, the product is made available to customers and support services are provided to them. You might also need to make packaging and marketing changes to the product.

Stage 5: Product Retirement

Over time, the product might be less in demand, and you may need to create a plan to reinvent the product.

What Happens When Product Engineering is Managed Incorrectly?

Managing product engineering incorrectly can lead to severe repercussions for the organization like production delays, missed project deadlines, poor product quality, etc. Here are some other implications a business faces when product engineering management is handled incorrectly:

• Reduced Product Quality: Lack of communication and improper testing can lead to unidentified flaws or bugs in the product design and implementation. All this can negatively affect customer satisfaction and your brand reputation.
• Raises Safety Issues Concerns: In specific industries, inadequate product engineering management can lead to safety issues in the final product. This might harm the users and lead to legal repercussions for the company.
• Delays to the Development Process: Frequent errors, inappropriate planning, and communication gaps could lead to rework and delay in the development procedure that leads to increased production costs.
• Inefficient Resource Allocation: Without proper oversight and clear goals, resources like personnel, materials, and budget might be misallocated, leading to wasted spending and missed projects deadlines.
• Missed Deadlines: Unrealistic timelines, poor planning, and unforeseen issues due to mismanagement can significantly delay the product launch, leading to missed potential revenue.

How PLM Can Reduce Cost?

Using PLM software can help you in reducing cost by optimizing part usage, enhancing product planning, shortening product development time, streamlining communication, and so on. Here is the detailed enumeration of how product management and development software help in cost reduction:

• Optimizing Part Usage: PLM software finds opportunities to reuse existing parts across products, minimizing the need for new designs and reducing material and manufacturing costs.
• Improving Product Planning: By providing real-time visibility into production, the software promotes better planning and scheduling that minimizes resource waste and rework.
• Shortening Development Time: Streamlined communication and collaboration help projects progress faster, reducing costs associated with lengthy development cycles.
• Streamlined Collaboration and Communication: PLM creates a centralized platform to manage product related information, removing any need for managing multiple versions. This also reduces errors in projects due to miscommunication and reduces rework costs.

Benefits of Using a PLM Solution / How PLM Software Improves Product Engineering Management

Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) software offers several benefits for businesses like improved collaboration among stakeholders, a centralized way to manage data, quicker time-to-market, and so on. Here is a detailed overview of all the benefits of using PLM software for your business:

• Centralized Data Management: Provides a centralized platform for managing product-related data, including designs, specifications, documents, and revisions. This helps ensure data consistency and accessibility across teams.
• Improved Collaboration: Facilitates collaboration among cross-functional teams, such as design, engineering, manufacturing, and marketing. It enables real-time communication, feedback, and document sharing.
• Enhanced Productivity: By streamlining processes, automating repetitive tasks, and reducing manual errors, PLM software increases productivity throughout the product lifecycle.
• Faster Time-to-Market: With better control over product development processes, including faster design iterations, optimized workflows, and clearer communication, helps accelerate time-to-market for new products.
• Cost Reduction: By minimizing rework, improving resource utilization, and optimizing supply chain processes, PLM software helps reduce overall product development costs.
• Regulatory Compliance: Often includes features for managing regulatory compliance requirements, ensuring that products meet industry standards and regulations. This is particularly crucial in industries like healthcare, automotive, and aerospace.
• Risk Mitigation: By providing visibility into the entire product lifecycle, PLM software helps identify and mitigate risks early on, such as design flaws, quality issues, or supply chain disruptions. This reduces the likelihood of costly recalls or delays.
• Customer Satisfaction: By enabling faster response to market demands, delivering higher-quality products, and ensuring product consistency, PLM software contributes to increased customer satisfaction and loyalty.
• Reduction of Errors: Tracking all product information can get difficult when using multiple applications such as Excel, email, Dropbox, and PowerPoint. A PLM tool simplifies workflow and provides insight into all product-related data, reducing the number of meetings, phone calls, and emails, together with the time spent searching for and updating information.

How to Choose PLM Software?

Choosing the right PLM software for your business to improve product engineering management, involves several key considerations like considering your requirements, evaluating software features, ability to scale itself, and so on. Let’s look at the complete factors in detail below:

• Define Your Requirements: Start by identifying your specific needs and objectives for implementing PLM software. Consider factors such as the size of your organization, industry requirements, regulatory compliance needs, collaboration requirements, and integration with existing systems.
• Evaluate Software Features: Look for software that offers a comprehensive set of features to support your product development processes. This may include capabilities for data management, document control, version control, workflow automation, collaboration tools, analytics, and integration with other business system.
• Scalability: Select a PLM solution that can scale your business as it grows and adapts to changing needs. Ensure that the software is flexible enough to accommodate different product types, processes, and workflows within your organization.
• Ease of Use: User experience is crucial for successful PLM implementation. Look for software that is intuitive and user-friendly, with a clean interface and streamlined workflows.
• Vendor Reputation and Support: Research the reputation and track record of PLM vendors, including their experience, industry expertise, customer reviews, and customer support services. Choose a vendor that is responsive to your needs and provides ongoing support and updates.

Challenges in PLM

Although PLM software provides a centralized space to create, work, and collaborate on product development, it is still not free of challenges. One such challenge is standardization of data in the PLM procedure.

Data standardization is an issue in PLM software due to several reasons. Firstly, various departments use different formats to store data. Moreover, there’s a lack of universally adopted standards across vendors and companies for storing data that creates a challenge in establishing a unified system.

This might lead to reduced data accessibility, increased errors, and inefficient collaboration, ultimately raising costs. This problem can be addressed by developing clear data standards and using industry-specific data standards to share and store data. Additionally, leveraging PLM software’s features for data validation and transformation can further improve data consistency and interoperability.

Secondly, users find it challenging to handle data from diverse procedures of product development. This is because data lacks standardized structure, that makes integration with other systems difficult. Moreover, version control and collaboration functionalities for procedures might be limited and different compared to that software designed specifically for managing product data.

However, overcoming these challenges is possible. Implementing organization-wide standards for procedure documentation, integrating PLM with specialized tools designed to manage procedures, you can significantly improve how PLM software handles the data from diverse procedures.

Use Cases of PLM in Product Engineering

Product lifecycle management software can help developers in different stages of the product development process like designing, supply chain, production, distribution, etc. Lets look at each use case of PLM software in detail below:

• Designing: Product development management software enables you to design your product in real time along with the updated product specific data. This helps in providing complete visibility in the product design procedure for all the people involved in the production.
• Supply Chain: As the business scales itself, you need to modify your supply chain strategies as well. You can streamline the supply chain and manage every component of the procedure to meet the requirements of buyers and regulatory requirements.
• Production: Due to the collaboration feature, a product lifecycle management tool can help you in shortening your product’s time to market while also saving expenses. By offering the product’s traceability in real time during the manufacturing procedure, the software enables external partners and internal teams to follow the right workflow to work on the project.
• Distribution: Product information management is a type of phase that takes place after the product is manufactured. With the help of PLM product development software, you can easily share and send appropriate information about the product distribution and service items to the required stakeholders.

Conclusion

The adoption of PLM software marks a transformative shift in the landscape of product development. By integrating disparate processes, fostering collaboration among stakeholders, and providing real-time insights, PLM software empowers businesses to navigate the complexities of modern product development with unparalleled efficiency and agility.

As industries continue to evolve and innovate, embracing PLM technology becomes not just a competitive advantage, but a fundamental necessity for organizations striving to deliver high-quality products, meet market demands, and succeed in an ever-evolving marketplace.

How PLM Software Improves Product Engineering Management FAQs