The Benefits of Streamlined and Modernized Product Lifecycle Management

What differentiates good product design from great product design? Great products emerge from a creation process that prioritizes inspiration, creativity, vision, and perseverance. A great product captures the desires and needs of customers while serving a specific business purpose. In this blog post, we discuss digital solutions that can assist a designer along the journey to create a great product.

We spoke with experts at technology solutions company and Mendix partner, CLEVR, about product life cycle management (PLM) and the tricks of the trade to bring great products to market.

Gartner defines Product Life Cycle Management or “PLM” as a “philosophy, process and discipline supported by software for managing products through the stages of their life cycles, from concept through retirement.”

“PLM has been subject to the regular hype cycle for many years,” said Camilo Gaviria, Chief Solutions Officer at CLEVR. He notes it began as an “engineering-driven discipline” at companies like Airbus, Boeing, and Toyota. Which is to say, from the start it was “very much a process that was meant for purpose.”

A breakthrough in PLM occurred with the “advent of CAD taking a more predominant role in the manufacturing process and becoming more mainstream,” Gaviria said. Consequently, there became a “need for PLM to become a more central business process—within the operations of a business. A company is nothing else than the product or service it produces. If you’re really going to pursue your mission, your core concern should be how you build and what your product is. That is the core philosophy behind a true implementation of PLM, the digital twin.”

Nowadays, a company will “first design your product in digital,” Gaviria further explained. “You attach every single piece of information and data that you need to sell it, produce it, deliver it, and service it to the digital model. And you make your decisions based on that digital model as much as possible, such that when you finally buy that first part and start that first machine, you have absolute certainty of what you’re doing.” Still, he notes, the “core of what PLM is, should be and has been for the last 20 years, hasn’t changed that much. What’s changed is how people perceive it no longer as an engineering process, but rather as a business process that can drive business value.”

The feedback process is central to PLM. “Exposing the actual product in its design to a broader audience of feedback—people who can actually provide constructive feedback to any of its stages—you’re actually socializing the manufacturing process and that makes it much more robust,” said Gaviria. “The role of Mendix is precisely making socialization—that linkage between the product and all the other systems that contain the other information and all the other interaction points with the users extremely easy— thus making it the adoption of PLM as a process easier as a whole.”

Rene Tusveld, CLEVR’s director of product, also told us how low-code has been a revelation for their clients. “You can really tailor your solution to the needs of the customer,” he said.

Companies benefit from low-code solutions that can streamline processes and modernize core systems. Unburdened by time-consuming administrative tasks, a designer is free to focus on the creative part of their job: building an excellent product.

While there is no substitute for inspiration and creativity, streamlined and modernized product lifecycle management gives designers an edge and unlocks potential.