Product Lifecycle Management

The Architecture of a Product Lifecycle Management

Product Life-cycle Management (PLM) is often referred to engineering activities, though PLM only complete when it includes full product E2E thinking and it should be part of digitization projects. So, it includes not only life-cycle BoMs (eBoM, mBoM and sBoM) but also the interface to Enterprise Resource Planing (ERP), e.g. material master.

Before a digitization project starts, the PLM architect should clarify some fundamental concepts such as Configuration of variants to sales, Interchangeability of materials to sourcing, design change Applicability to manufacturing and service.

• Life-cycle Configuration requires managing options/features as variants, from Sales, to engineering (eBoM), to Sourcing, to production (mBoM), to service/maintenance (sBoM), and finally to recycling/upgrading. Configuration happens.

  • For example, neither wind turbine life-cycle, nor the variant management does not end at end of production, i.e. the final product-configuration happens at commissioning point including features which are activated via software revision, sometimes with add-on hardware.

• Life-cycle Interchangeability, as part of change-management process, is a fundamental aspect and part of material definition at creation. Material interchangeability applies not only to different design revisions, but also to same design but different suppliers. PLM of Products like wind turbine, with long service time, can become complex when this aspect is not fundamentally addressed in company E2E process.

• Lifecycle Effectivity/Applicability management is also part of implementing a change. Often depending on other factors, such as regional availability of materials, regulatory, tax benefits, etc. All outside of engineering process but part of applicability after design release. PLM of products like wind turbine, which are manufactured and serviced globally demand different applicability rules in different lifecycle stages, i.e. before Start of Production (SOP), after SOP & before commissioning and Product Under Service (PUS) stage.

Such fundamentals of PLM process architecture require a mature understanding of product from design to service as well as the digitization landscape