Defining Product Lifecycle Management: A Journey across Features, Definitions, and Concepts

Table 2

Features, dimensions, and description.

Set of features	Key dimensions	Description
Managerial features	Integrated approach	It means the act of dealing with PLM considering its different related aspects (e.g., information, technology, and strategic points of view).
	Business strategy	It is how an organization takes decisions and manages resources to gain and maintain a competitive advantage over a period of time.
	Creating value	It is the primary goal of every business; it means performing activities that increase the value of organization’s goods or services, generating wealth for its shareholders, and satisfying customers’ expectations.
	Design, production, and maintenance phases	They refer to the different stages of the entire product lifecycle from its conception, through design and manufacture, to service and disposal.
Technological features	Product information backbone	It means a central hub storing different data distributed among heterogeneous systems; it creates a single view of product information that can be leveraged across the whole organization and its network.
	IT tools (CAX, PDM, etc.)	They encompass a board range of software and IT systems used in all the aspects of product lifecycle (design, analysis, manufacturing, production planning, product testing, collaboration, etc.).
	Secondary information	It is all the information indirectly connected to the specific product knowledge (e.g., vendor application notes, catalogs, customer feedbacks, marketing plans, archived project schedules, etc.).
	Traceability	It means the ability to chronologically interrelate product lifecycle information and to track all accesses and changes to the data.
	Long-term archiving	It refers to the organizational need for long-term retention of older data; it helps an enterprise to maintain information integrity and demonstrate regulatory compliance and transparency.
Collaborative features	Integrating people, and process, data	It means combining in a unique approach different aspects related to PLM (business processes, human resources, data, etc.) so that they work together to better product lifecycle management.
	Sharing	It means using or enjoying data and information jointly with others in order to enable knowledge integration during collaborations in the product lifecycle.
	Within and across extended enterprise	It means a borderless organization whose processes are transformed and integrated with the ones of its partners, based on cooperative and collaborative relations.