Product Lifecycle Management - How to adapt PLM to support changing product development processes in industry?

Product development as a collaborative process which requires the contribution of multiple engineering disciplines within a design department and cross the enterprise network. In industrial practice, more and more companies are facing the need of a transformation from a pure part or component manufacturer to a system provider. At the same time products - parts, components and systems - are shifting from pure mechanical design to a systems design, including electric/electronic and software. Together with trends mainly known as Internet of Things, Industrial Internet or Industry 4.0 the industrial market requires a higher level of interoperability of designed products to be addressed by the product development process. Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), a concept to manage product-related engineering data cross all phases of the product lifecycle, needs to adapt to be able to support these various emerging facets of the product development process. This paper will discuss from an industry perspective what can be leveraged from two other well-known concepts and approaches to support the evolution of PLM: Firstly, Systems Engineering as a concept to support complex product design cross engineering disciplines; and secondly Technology Management as a concept to support product innovation. Both concepts are well-established from a research point of view, but often implemented isolated within industrial companies. Implementing both concepts in companies not only as methods, but also in terms of processes and respective organization, can provide a big potential to cross-benefit PLM. PLM as a combination of processes, methods, tools and respective organizations is focusing on the ability to manage product information and provides a defined set of capabilities to a company. At the same time these capabilities can be the prerequisites for a company to establish concepts in product design or innovation management. The paper, as part of a series of research work, will elaborate on the challenges product development is currently facing, formulate requirements to PLM emerging therefrom, and propose an approach for evolving PLM developed based on an industrial client example.