Evergreen PLM favorites
During my career in PLM and Product Management – some 20+ years – the same Evergreen favorite questions have been asked over and over. My guess is that even in the future, these evergreen hits will remain the pretty much the same.
Product Lifecycle Management
- How to succeed in implementing a PLM system? Or Why PLM implementations fail? What is the key success factor when implementing a PLM system?
- How to calculate a business case or ROI for PLM?
- How to define a product? Or What is complete product definition?
- How to manage other product documentation than drawings in PLM?
- What is the role of PLM compared to an ERP? Or Should we configure the BOM in PLM or in ERP system?
- What should be the content of a BOM?
- How sales configurator should be connected to a BOM configurator?
- How do we address product portfolio management in PLM?
- How to manage services and software in PLM?
- …
Product Management
- What is the role of a product manager?
- How to combine / split technical and commercial product management?
- What is product definition? Or How to define a product?
- How to combine / split technical and commercial product definition / portfolio?
- What is product portfolio management best practice? Or How to manage a product portfolio?
- How to productize services?
- How to combine products and services?
- … and many more
All of these are very significant questions from the business performance perspective and yet still in many cases they remain unanswered. In my opinion this is mostly due to:
- PLM – being conceptually still a bit vague. Roots deep in CAD data management and engineering department, still trying to grow out of drawing and part domain more towards actual lifecycle management, product management and business.
- PLM being technology driven, very seldomly promoted and driven by business line management
- Product Management – not being a very well-established discipline, with targets to lead a product, but having a mandate to review and comment technical details in tenders. All in all, its role, mandate, and significance not that well understood by corporate management.
- It is also very much due to PLM being cross border topic. There is no natural and obvious owner in organizations with a clear cross border mandate for PLM.
However, there is great potential embedded into developing PLM as well as product management further especially in the modern technology oriented cross functional businesses.
I have written a series of blogs to address these topics, trying to find answers to these above-mentioned questions. Hopefully, you will find clarity to the topics in the upcoming blogs.