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By John Choate, Hitachi Consulting

Historically, product lifecycle management (PLM) has focused on driving product profitability by shaping the cash flow curve and getting answers to where to invest, how to maximize revenue, and how to control product transitions and minimize after-market costs. PLM goals have included:

• Shortening the time to market for new product innovation
• Providing operational efficiencies and reduced costs
• Raising product quality, and
• Improving the success rate for new product adoption

Going forward, PLM must evolve to include within its scope an associated business strategy that has evolved in parallel – product information management (PIM). PIM is focused more on the commercialization aspect of products. It integrates data from varied sources across the company including data on marketing, sales and finance. And a PIM solution can also extend to business processes outside of a company - to business partners, customers, suppliers, and others in the supply chain.

The future is to marry these two strategies into a single source of product-related knowledge to enhance information sharing and improve the business processes beyond the boundaries implemented in traditional PLM systems. By including more of a commercialization view of product information, companies can make a much greater impact in the integrated processes that span sales, marketing and service.