RECENTLY identified by AMR Research as the fastest growing segment of the business software market, PLM (Product Lifecycle Management ) is proving to be more than just hype. It is alleviating much of the headache associated with managing and tracking components, designing and implementing new products.
Previously, a company would have agonisingly developed drawings, physical models and made endless expensive tests before taking a product to market with little or no proven prospects it will return a profit. Now it is a case of utilising available market data and actually fast tracking a product or service to exactly meet the criteria dictated by current market demand.
But instead of time-consuming drawings, these are designed, tested and refined quickly and accurately in the digital 3D environment, so wastage is virtually negligible.
Dennis Colusso, director of Product Lifecycle Management Australasia (plm), says that after a small amount of initial scepticism, Australia and NZ are now quickly up-taking the technology.
“PLM has become recognised as the instant leveller; a set of powerful tools by which companies beneath that elite multinational tier can turn their businesses into competitive, low waste, fast-design global entities in a new era of digital data power,” said Colusso.
“For example, if you look at the automotive manufacture industry, all the way along its supply chain the second and third tier suppliers are expected to have a complete level of transparency so that the car maker is completely assured of component integrity and quality.
“PLM technology facilitates a high degree of management and product knowledge from the moment of procurement right until the moment of disposal and recycling.
“With complete transparency, the car manufacturer can easily modify part designs so that additions suit assembly lines, it can incorporate niche changes for specific parts of its market, and overall have a complete level of control in bringing product to market in fast time frames.”
“Only about two years ago, the common belief was that PLM was the domain of the multinational or the huge government department or sectors of defence procurement, but that has now changed,” Colusso said.
This financial year saw the introduction of an integrated PLM platform established for SMEs (100 to 1000 employees) - the Velocity suite.
According to Barry Bevis MD of , the SME sector had always looked at PLM with a level of disdain as it was considered a business tool that was way too advanced for their immediate requirements, and had the price tag to match.
“As a result, SMEs have been coping with the onslaught of the global market by using a collection of unrelated softwares to provide tools such as CAD, CAM, CAE and PDM, but the problem was that many of these were hard to integrate.
“Although these software tools can make a marked difference to a company’s output, non-integration was always a problem. In some cases a company knew it should be designing products in 3D, yet non-integration of its variety of software limited it to 2D operation.
“However, now that SMEs have a genuine PLM platform, they too can position themselves in the same way multinationals do by mining down deep into their company data right from the beginnings of product procurement, through design and manufacture, to the sales, delivery and disposal stages, and optimise strategies at each of these stages to deliver a better, more profitable product that closely suits the customer requirements,” said Bevis.
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