Managing Content Throughout the Product Lifecycle

A guide to content management systems to support product lifecycle information.

Manufacturers have implemented many initiatives, such as lean manufacturing and just-in-time (JIT) practices, to help their organizations produce high-quality products with reproducible design processes across many generations of a product. This systematic approach has led many companies to formalize lifecycles for their products, such as survey, design, build, quality assurance, sell, support and end-of-life.

During product lifecycles, a tremendous amount of product-related information is generated, ranging from meeting notes and marketing materials, to computer-aided-design (CAD) drawings, test results, and sales collateral and reports. This content is of high value to manufacturing companies, and many of them are challenged to derive maximum worth from this information.

One way to help guarantee content optimization is to efficiently manage and share product information throughout enterprises. Making accurate, consistent information available to manufacturing, selling and support partners is equally important. Increasingly, many manufacturers are using content management systems (CMS) to manage and leverage content across these audiences and throughout the product lifecycle.

What to Look for In A CMS

There are a number of features and functionality that a CMS should offer in order to effectively support product lifecycle information:

• Web-based repository