PLM Evoluation and Challenges

PLM initially know as PDM, Product Data management is evolved from CAD applications. Manufacturing companies started using CAD for shortening the lifecycle of Product development. Once the CAD tools are used in the manufacturing process, the challenge is how to communicate different divisions and how to maintain the data produced by CAD tools. This brought the concept of Product data Management, Which is nothing but having central database for all the CAD Data and using the workflow process to access it, review it and modify it.

Initial PDM applications are mainly focused on content data, i.e, and the data that is relevant to CAD. Later needed the little bit of metadata requirements, like Part Name, Part Number, and Reviewer etc. In Windchill world these defined as static fields in the data model. Later on, concept called Instance based attributes (IBAs) to extend the metadata requirement. Fields you can define on the instance/ type. These types can be configured in the system. This is main concept for FlexPLM data model, as the Retail,Footwear/Apparel PLM process has more metadata. Concept wise it’s same; however the implementation of data model is different. Taking the Windchill main traits like iterated, versioned, folder etc and extending it to next level on top of it, defining all the relations like Product, Product-Season, Product-Season-Source, Product-Season-Source-Specification, Product-Season-Source-Specification-BOM, made a big performance impact. Because of this complex relations FlexPLM product is becoming just transactional application rather than full fledged system where you can run margin reports, where used reports or forecast reports, and to extract/import the data. The solution to this problem will be either PTC needs to simplify their data model or tightly integrated report tools.