Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Dr M Manjuanth Shettigar
Professor of Economics & Management
Christ University, Bangalore - 34
To understand how and why product lifecycle management first developed and why there is a
clear and growing need for PLM, we first need to look at what we mean by product lifecycle.
Pioneering
Competitive
Retentive
The next reference was from a man called Jones who worked for Booz, Allen and Hamilton, and
in 1957 he theorized that there was a lifecycle that is characteristic of most products and he put
forward this terminology:
Introduction
Growth
Maturity
Saturation
Decline
In 1959 Patton wrote that there was consensus that the key element of the product lifecycle was
that profits are high during the growth phase and decline due to competition during the maturity
phase.
Towards the end of a product's life, the market and not the manufacturer would set its
price.
Introduction
Growth
Maturity
Decline
Reduce manufacturing costs as product moves from growth to maturity and into decline.
One of the first recorded applications of PLM was in 1985 by American Motors Corporation who
were looking for a way to speed up the product development process of the Jeep Grand
Cherokee.
The first step was the using CAD tools with the primary objective of increasing the productivity
level of the draughtsmen. Accuracy and consistency was enhanced because drawings and
documents were stored in a central repository in their database. This in turn facilitated the
engineering change process with easy access to correct documentation, allowing quick and
effective resolution of design errors.
This novel approach was so effective that when Chrysler purchased American Motors in 1987
they retained it, and this helped to make them the lowest cost American manufacturer in the next
decade.