Although the roots of PLM started in the Manufacturing, Electronics, and Facilities domains, today, the key concepts of Product Lifecycle Management are applicable to many industries. As an example, Consumer Packaged Goods, Retail, Apparel, Life Sciences, etc., all have adopted various elements of PLM. Although at the high level product development processes and practices are similar across industries and the same set of issues of globalization, cost reduction, commonality, process re-engineering, customer focus, and human change management are prevalent, the differences appear in specific needs for industry applications and in some cases in the underlying data and process models for lifecycle management. Some of the PLM systems have provided specific templates and/or content on base products specific to an industry segment for lifecycle management. In addition, PLM systems offer integration for many of the tools required for authoring the product definition and for developing the processes/ formulations that are required as part of Product Development. Many best practices have emerged from the leaders implementing PLM in manufacturing both in depth (i.e. rich information models that define the product and process definition) and in functional coverage (i.e. coverage of the various functions within an extended enterprise). As a first step, the MESA guidebook is focused on Discrete Manufacturing. Based on the interests of MESA members, we can hopefully extend the PLM guidebook to other domains. MESA's Strategic Initiatives Guidebooks are available to Premium members only. 

Date Published: June 2010