Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) is an integrated business approach to manage the creation and dissemination of product data throughout an enterprise. PLM is more and more an evolving field of research in academia with potentially strong impact on industry practice, a major concern for most organizations, be it discrete goods manufacture or process industries.

Aim of PLM-IWG
Generally speaking the PLM-IWG aims to develop consensus over a conceptual model of the Product Lifecycle Management paradigm.
Specifically, the PLM-IWG aims at:

• consolidating the international community of PLM, already existing and acting inside the International Conference on Product Lifecycle Management and in the board of the International Journal of Product Lifecycle Management since years;
• creating knowledge and synergies for the worldwide PLM community, exploring the latest R&D results and applications and defining next PLM visions and boundaries;
• promoting and disseminating the concept of PLM to the scientific and industrial society;
• providing a place where researchers and users could meet for debating their points of interest on PLM.

Scope of PLM-IWG
In recent years the competitive pressure coming from the opening of markets has strongly affected the companies approach to product development: shorter lifecycles and explosion of product variety has been the main consequences, together with an ever standing requirement for low production cost. Reduction of time to market, collaboration and delocalization has been the companies answers to these issues, which were achieved by restructuring the organizational models of product design and product production, while leveraging on the new IT tools made available by technology progress.
For what concern product design, the “old” model of concurrent engineering was “re-discovered” and enlarged including collaboration and delocalization, thus realizing the concept of a networked company for product design and development.

From the IT point of view, the PLM paradigm emerged as “a product centric business model, ICT supported, in which product data, are shared among processes and organization in the different phases of the product life cycle for achieving top range performances for the product and related services”.
In the meanwhile PLM software solutions appeared into the market as the enablers of this new company model. However the PLM approach was mainly related to the design phase, even if, just from the beginning of its development, strong integration with the ERP software was seen as the corner stone for efficiently managing variety, product change and supply chain synchronization. This way comprehensive software solutions (integrating CAD, CAE, PDM, ERP in a collaboration environment) were first implemented in big companies (i.e. in the automotive and aerospace sectors), while SMEs followed the track not so far away.

However the product lifecycle is clearly made of three main phases: Beginning of Life (BOL), thus including design and manufacturing, followed by Middle-of-Life (MOL), including use, service and maintenance services and End-of-Life (EOL) where products are recollected, disassembled, remanufactured, recycled, reused, or disposed.

Therefore, while PLM is presently related mainly to the BOL phase, it is expected that many more functions and services will be delivered for the BOL and EOL phases in the near future. To this concern, the importance of the PLM approach will be enforced by the fact that the environmental impact of human activities might be no longer neglected and a new product/process paradigm is foreseen to emerge together with a new environmentally conscious model of living. Really, information sharing along the product life cycle will be vital for designing sustainable products and processes, thus relying on the PLM fundamental support to product and manufacturing sustainability.

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The PLM-IWG secretariat can be contacted here: info@plm-iwg.org.

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The International Working Group on PLM (PLM-IWG) groups researchers and users of PLM, with the common aim in disseminating and consolidating the PLM concept. For this main reason, since 2003, the PLM-IWG members have been promoted the International Conference on Product Lifecycle Management (ICPLM). The next PLM Conference will take place in Seoul, Korea on Jully 2008.

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