Learn Your Product Lifecycle Management ABCs ………. PLM Platforms Defined…. Mark Stansberry
…. The Statistics Matrix …….. August 12, 2023
A Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) platform is used to manage engineering, manufacturing and marketing, or all in all businesses processes. A PLM platform may be defined as a centralized database management system with a centralized database. The centralized database is synchronized with company-user (engineering) databases and vendor databases. The centralized database contains all the data and workflows that represent the current design, manufacturing, and market state of all a company’s products.
As a specific example, an electronics board company’s PLM platform is often integrated and synchronized with the CAD or EDA system of each individual engineer in the company. Each engineer’s product design files are checked into and out of the centralized PLM platform as workflow steps are completed. These design files, for example, could include schematics, simulation results, Verilog and Spice representations of the design, and manufacturing files that are used in the physical building and testing of the board. Manufacturing files often include the physical dimensions of an electronics board, where the electronic and mechanical components are placed, that is how the board is to be physically laid out, the finalized packaging used to enclose the board and the necessary test files used to test the board after it is manufactured.
Mechanical (such as cable connectors) and electronic components (like integrated circuits and passive components) used to design electronic boards from outside vendors also available in the PLM database for the individual engineers to use in their own product designs.
From the product design database, a PLM platform is often used to produce a bill of materials and cost breakdown of each of the product designs, or for that matter a complete bill of materials for all the products at the company,
As one might imagine, a PLM database can be used to store any type of data that a company might deem necessary to assure the optimization of the design, manufacturing, and marketing process of its products. Because of this, PLM platforms are evolving as the central systems in today’s companies. They are also being used as the central database for anyone at the company to access, search, sort and generate structured reports from. Or in other words, basically find out everything they need to know to perform their job function efficiently.
Although there are a variety of PLM platform software packages out there, PLM platforms can be built with any database platform software that allows different CAD (ECAD and MCAD) users and different CAD and vendor database platforms to access and exchange information with a centralized database in a controlled and synchronized manner.
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