To define PLM is tough job for some organizations. Usually, my practical recommendation to manufacturing companies is not to be concerned how to define PLM. As I told many time, every company does PLM, but just calls it differently. For many years, I’ve been collecting variety of PLM definitions and it was lot of fun. You can check for some of them here.

Usually when you see customer presentation, it starts from the way company defines PLM for their organization. And this is a very important thing. Definition of PLM can help you to understand your process, what needs to be improved and other related aspects of data and process management in organization. However, spending too much time on the agreement about PLM definition can be dangerous. It can be simply waste of money and resources.

Here just few more examples, I captured during the recent PI PLMx Congress in Hamburg.

Universal PLM Project Narrative

As a weekend experiment, I decided to develop a universal PLM project narrative. The following paragraph can give you an example of universal PLM narrative you can use in an organization when planning your PLM project. Here is my formula:

PLM is [insert fancy name] that helps you to solve [adjective identified with importance or complexity] [insert problem name] and [insert business activity related to product development] by allowing organizations [verb characterizing organizational goal] process across [insert data silo1], [insert data silo2(optional)], [insert data silo3 (optional)] and helping to achieve improvements in [insert business activity].

It seems hard, but in practice it looks like this.

PLM is a framework that helps you to solve fundamental data management problems and change ECO management  by allowing organizations to streamline business process across engineering, manufacturing and production and helping to achieve improvements in product cost and maintenance programs.

To explain and express the problem is 50% of a future solution already. PLM companies and businesses are famous for complexity and slowness of product related decisions. To help organization to define problem can help to speed up PLM projects.

What is my conclusion? I’m sure my narrative formula can be improved, but hope you liked my experiment. So, with a a bit of practice and perseverance you can become a great PLM innovator in your organization. Besides that, I hope you just had some weekend laugh…Just my thoughts.

Best, Oleg

Want to learn more about PLM? Check out my new PLM Book website.

Disclaimer: I’m co-founder and CEO of OpenBOM developing cloud based bill of materials and inventory management tool for manufacturing companies, hardware startups and supply chain. My opinion can be unintentionally biased.

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