Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) software can help businesses of any size proactively manage their mission-critical intellectual property and control their product definitions to help them avoid problems and lost design cycle time due to unmanageable design and change processes.

SharePoint is poised to become an ubiquitous document and content management system with great capabilities for ad hoc collaboration, whereas Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) is a similar but more structured system focused on product development content.

Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) helps manufacturers in many ways ranging from operational efficiencies to top-line financial improvement. It improves business performance in multiple dimensions including increased revenue, reduced product cost, and decreased product development cost. But PLM is just one of many systems in the engineering and enterprise software ecosystems, and provides greater value when it shares data and connects workflows with other software. As reported in Product Lifecycle Management Beyond Managing CAD, “Top Performers are much more likely to integrate PLM with a host of other systems.”

PLM is the set of business processes involved in designing, building, selling, and supporting a product, and there are corresponding software tools (known as PLM software) to automate and optimize these processes. Most companies today want to deploy PLM software to enhance their PLM processes, but struggle with how to define, pursue, and reach reasonable PLM goals.

In this paper authored by Tech Clarity, they explore the challenges for “To Order” manufacturers around customizing products as product complexity impacts lead times, cost and profitability. Is it possible to improve this process in the early stages of sales configuration? Paul Gimbel, our DriveWorks evangelist offers his insights, sharing why guided selling combined with sales configuration simplifies the complexity by automatically identifying and creating the right product based on needs. It’s important to choose the right approach to realize the greatest benefit.

Most would agree that integrating two or more business systems together is a wise business decision. A solid integration will eliminate duplicate data entry, reduce errors, save time, lead to more accurate data and therefore improve productivity and the bottom line. Razorleaf recently sponsored an article on Engineering.com that talks about the reasons, challenges and solutions related to PLM system integrations…