Product
Lifecycle Management (PLM) is an integrated business
approach to manage the creation and dissemination of
engineering data throughout an enterprise. It is an emerging
and evolving 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.
From
the point of view of tools required to support this and
issues involved therein, PLM can be thought of as consisting
of two core areas:
1.
Tools to create the product content; the traditional MCAD/CAE
systems fall in this category and
2. Tools to manage and optimize the processes involved in
the lifecycle of the product from its conception to
retirement.
Product
Data Management (PDM), Collaborative Product Commerce (CPC),
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Supply Chain
Management (SCM) are the more established areas in this
category. Not much attention however has been paid to the
issues and problems in the early stages of the product
lifecycle although it has been recognised that decisions
made in the early stages have implications on all aspects of
the product and the development process, and are more
difficult to change or work around. Two important issues are
requirements engineering (identifying and deciding the
important requirements of a product) and concept
development (generating and evaluating innovative product
concepts). There is very little by way of tools to
support these tasks.
PLM
is emerging as a major concern for most organizations (be it
discrete goods manufacture or process industries) and a
major opportunity for those involved in integrating diverse
tools used in each task domain or stage of product
development and beyond. It can be argued that technology
exists today for the creation of a seamless environment for
accessing, manipulating and reasoning about product
information that is being produced in fragmented and
distributed environment. Hence the PLM concept is feasible.
Once
developed and implemented, it will enable the optimization
of the product development process resulting in shorter time
to market, higher quality and reduced costs for companies.
The use of PLM framework to leverage innovation and
creativity stages into the downstream development and
business stages of new products is also an interesting line
of inquiry to pursue.
This
international symposium will bring together researchers,
developers, and users of PLM. Via such forums and the
involvement of all stakeholders, we hope to shape the future
of this new field and advance the science and practice of
enterprise systems development. The program will consist of
presentations on all aspects of PLM, including product
innovation and creativity, CAD tools for early design,
collaborative product development, capture and resuse of
design information, supply chain and product recycle
management.
There
will be a special emphasis on issues in the early stages of
product development that have a strong influence on the
entire lifecycle. Integration between hitherto different
domains, tasks and tools will be an important theme of the
symposium. Paper presentations will be interspersed with
panel sessions and open discussion sessions to give all
attendees the opportunity to participate in developing a PLM
roadmap and prioritizing the technical agenda.
