Dedham, MA January 24, 2003 According to a new study conducted by the ARC Advisory Group the product lifecycle management (PLM) market, which totaled more than $5.6 billion in 2002, will more than double and top $14 billion by the end of 2007, rising at a Cumulative Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 20 percent over this forecast period.
Despite world economic woes and slow growth rates among other major enterprise software markets, ARC's PLM Software & Services Worldwide Outlook cites PLM's functionality as its saving grace. The consulting firm said it has the ability to help manufacturers design and develop competitive products, lower development and support costs, deliver product to the marketplace faster, protect the company's intellectual capital, and support the customer.
"Product Lifecycle Management is more of a strategy than any one specific product," according to ARC Vice President John Moore , a co-author of the study. "Even today, no single supplier has a complete solution for fulfilling all the functions of PLM. Moving beyond its heritage in computer-aided design (CAD) and product data management (PDM) systems, PLM is evolving into a better understood, recognized and appreciated enterprise business solution/process whose impact and influence extends across the entire enterprise out to suppliers and customers."
Analyst and co-author Steve Clouther added that product data is the central component of an enterprise PLM environment, and as a concept, PLM has been around as long as product itself. "However," he stated, "it has only recently become a viable concept as an enterprise solution. PLM has taken years to become defined within the mindset of manufacturers, in part because it has been so closely associated with CAD and PDM."
The study said that today manufacturers see PLM as a business strategy that employs collaborative software solutions to create a product-centric data record for any product over its entire lifecycle, from concept to retirement. PLM encourages and coordinates interactions between a product information repository and all stakeholders, both internal and external to the enterprise, and this provides the mechanism for manufacturers to bring new and innovative products to market much faster and at a lower cost.
The study defines PLM as the integration of business systems to manage the lifecycle of a product. Within the PLM process itself, there are six distinct segments, including innovation and portfolio management, project and program management, collaborative design, product data management, manufacturing process planning, and service/support management.
