Product Life Cycle Management The Future of Production Systems

PLM Product Life Cycle Management is a total production system that tracks a product from inception to disposal It includes, marketing, sales, design, planning, production, quality requirements, packaging, shipping, and disposing of the product when it’s useful life is over

The Scope of PLM Product Lifecycle Plus the engineering business systems to make the process work with the rest of the company

Where did PLM come from? Originally the term was used to describe the computer technology needed by auto makers and their suppliers to store information about vehicle parts, engineering data, design data, quality, etc.

The Benefit of PLM It is a common production system, with common computer technology for information storage and retrieval. In theory any employee, in any department can look at data created by another department or group. The information is archived and valid for the life of the product

The Benefit of PLM It is a concept that should induce ethical behavior in terms of up graded products and hopefully will drive social responsibility in the areas of innovation, design, manufacturing, quality, and disposal

PLM & Leadership PLM or PLC provides a framework to rediscover the basic stages of product development, 1. Introduction. 2. Growth. 3. maturity. 4. decline In general the leader must influence all team members to attain goals, always being sensitive to members needs

PLM & Leadership In the growth stage the leader needs to know how to communicate and delegate responsibility to team members In the maturity stage the leader and group usually struggle to maintain cohesiveness and productivity In decline the leader needs to maintain team motivation

PLM & Leadership Facilitation, communication, goal setting, project management, building consensus, organization, resource allocation, motivation, team building are a few of the LEADERSHIP skills necessary to drive a successful PLM initiative To quote a Boeing executive, “as we engineer new systems we always forget about the necessary leadership skills” We are good at doing the task, not so good at the process of getting there