| | September 20168CIOReviewProduct Lifecycle Management ­ The Increasing Value for Successful Digital Innovation and Engineering TransformationBy Vivek Kotru, Marketing Head, Capgemini Product and Engineering ServicesOPINIONIN MYAs global organizations embark on much talked about Digital Transformation programs, PLM emerges as the backbone of digitization for all processes and functions that participate in the product lifecycle.Product Lifecycle Management or PLM is established as the enterprise system that helps to manage the engineering data during product development. The research firm CIMdata defines PLM "as a business approach to solving the problem of managing the complete set of product definition information ­ creating that information, managing it through its life, and disseminating and using it throughout the lifecycle of the product". Use of digital technologies is not new in engineering and product development. What is new, however, is that product development organizations need to increasingly strategize and execute their product development, manufacturing and product launches from an all-digital perspective leveraging smarter technologies, more useful data and better insights. Digital tools are already playing a significant role in the complete lifecycle of any product, right from the product conception to retirement. However the varying maturity of digital technologies adopted in each phase and the varying instances in time when a particular phase in the product lifecycle is digitized has led significant inefficiencies in the process or rather significant opportunities to make a material improvement in the engineering and R&D processes through adoption of integrated enterprise PLM. It is the time to look at PLM as a critical business system.Increasing Product Complexity and the Value from PLMIt is clear that PLM is key to the engineering and R&D efficiency of a global organization. Product innovation and investments in R&D continue to recover and grow from the lows of a few years back. With more R&D activity and investments the value from PLM will only grow. However there is an increasing complexity in product development posing new challenges for PLM. In the current times of IoT and Industry 4.0, software lead differentiation for mechanical or physical products emerges as strategic for product success. The increasing content of electronics and software
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