Ed Miller, President, CIMdata Inc.
Articles
PLM Expands into Factory Automation
The expansion of PLM into factory automation provides a major point of integration between the traditional arena of PLM and the production planning arena of enterprise resource planning (ERP). Indeed, factory automation and product structure definition are areas of heavy overlap.
PLM is vital for today’s systems engineering
Developing highly complex products requires contributions from specialists in multiple technical disciplines. This report tells how state-of-the-art product life-cycle management (PLM) software helps diverse engineering teams focus on the single goal of developing the best possible product in the shortest amount of time.
PLM不仅仅是for big companies anymore
Historically, product life-cycle management (PLM) was practical mostly for large, distributed enterprises with the extensive resources needed to invest in and deploy the systems, understand the approach, improve the technologies, validate benefits, and establish organizational practices to make PLM effective. Companies that originally invested in PLM often were the big OEMs in industries such as automotive and aerospace, with complex global facilities and far-reaching supply chains.For the most part, PLM solutions for these large organizations are all-encompassing enterprise systems focused on issues that affect multiple domains such as program management, engineering, manufacturing, purchasing, asset management, and quality. Typical functionality includes program management; CAD file management, CAD integrations, bill-of-material (BOM) and bill-of-information (BOI) creation and management, document management, visualization, strategic sourcing, and extensive workflow management capabilities to automate various complex processes.Recognizing a tremendous market potential, PLM suppliers have and are continuing to adapt these same capabilities for small and midsize companies that aren’t content to let PLM remain the domain of industry behemoths.
PLM trend: Product data for the masses
One of the major trends in the product life-cycle management (PLM) industry has been its expansion beyond engineering to users across the company and its extended enterprise. But an even broader expansion of PLM enables visibility of product data to others outside this corporate structure—even to consumers of the products.