The Product Lifecycle Management and Information Technology Formation - Essay Example

Secondly, to explore how PLM could help in different stages of Computer-Aided Design (CAD) design or where PLM could contribute and involve in new product development. This paper also incorporates the case studies of PLM and how the adoption of PLM has helped SMEs to secure an established position in the industry. The project analyzes important studies and then conducts a primary survey that centers on SME's adoption of PLM. The results of the studies have confirmed the conclusion that SMEs have grown with the acceptance of new sophisticated technologies.

PLM strategy is a solution addressing many components for managing product data (Kemmerer, 1999) and provides the requirements and capabilities companies need to successfully manage information and facilitate communication and collaboration across the entire product lifecycle from idea through retirement [PTC n.d. ]. PLM is the extension of PDM (Abramovici and Sieg, 2002) which appeared during the 1980s. With the advent of Computer-Aided Design (CAD) solutions, engineering design entered a new era.

Parallel with the continued development of Computer-Aided Design and Manufacturing and Engineering (CAD/CAM/CAE) tools, Product lifecycle management (PLM) is the crucial business approach that assigns a constant set of business solutions on behalf of the cooperative establishment, management, distribution, and application of product definition orientation across the extended business from abstraction to edge of life and it is now clearly acknowledged by many firms as basic to the product innovation evolution, and a corporation's top-notch and fundamental accomplishment (Stark, 2003, 4)PLM is the method of managing a firm's products across their life cycles in the most effective way.

If the firms start losing control over their products, then it will lead to adverse effects. A product does not exist when it is at its development stage. That is the time when it becomes difficult to manage. This is practically the reason why there is a need to completely involve PLM in the process to be sure that the product would make a good introduction and growth within the industry that it is involved with. Penetrating the industry is not that easy, this is true even for those products whose brands have already been established in the market.