An approach to characterize and evaluate the quality of Product Lifecycle Management Software Systems

Abstract

PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) is an information management system that can integrate data, processes, business systems and staff in a company, in general. PLM allows managing efficiently and economically the information that all these elements generate from the initial idea to design, manufacture, maintenance and elimination phases of the product lifecycle. PLM has to include processes and tools to assure the quality of the final products. This way, it is difficult for PLM experts (from aeronautical or automation organizations, among others) to find an environment that suggests which is the best PLM solution that copes with their necessities. A number of PLM solutions are available for this purpose, but experts require a suitable mechanism to select the most appropriate one for the specific context of each organization. For this purpose, this paper presents a quality model, based on QuEF (Quality Evaluation Framework), that aims at helping organizations choose the most useful PLM solution for their particular environments. This model supports both static and dynamic aspects that may be customized for any kind of organization and taken as reference model. Particularly, our approach has been validated in the context of large enterprises in the aeronautical industry within a real R&D project carried out between our research group and Airbus.

Group decision support for product lifecycle management

“…As PDM systems developed, there was a growing realization of the opportunities for organizations to utilize and exploit the inherent value in product and process data generated over the whole product lifecycle (Saaksvuori and Immonen 2008). PLM systems began to emerge around 2001 (Stark 2015;Stark 2018) with the realization that aspects such as quality, cost, innovation and conformance to regulations needed to be managed throughout a product's lifecycle (Enríquez et al 2018). Ameri and Dutta (2005) were some of the first authors to view PLM as providing not just technological solutions but as systems that could potentially provide sustainable competitive advantage to an organization that may be hard for competitors to replicate.…”

“…PLM systems contain and/or support the use of specialist software tools that are crucial to decisionmaking (Messaadia et al 2016). For example, CAD modelling tools are central to PLM (Enríquez et al 2018). Kärkkäinen, Pels and Silventoinen (2012) view the support for, and integration of ICT tools as central to the question of PLM maturity, with even the lowest level of PLM maturity assuming the use of ICT tools in an organization.…”

“…Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) systems have been developed over the last two decades to enhance an organization's ability to manage its product portfolios over the product lifecycle (Stark 2018). Such systems not only store data and information about products and the processes needed to produce them, but also seek to capture and reuse knowledge to support organizations in developing new products, manufacturing them, introducing them to the market, and managing them over their lifecycle (Enríquez et al 2018;Marra et al 2018). New products that enter the market go through growth, maturity, and decline phases until they are withdrawn or replaced (Saaksvuori and Immonen 2008;Corallo et al 2013;Stark 2018).…”

Identification of barriers to PLM institutionalization in large manufacturing organizations

“…Each organization has different aims to implement PLM systems, and there are a plethora of PLM systems available with the vendors. Enríquez et al (2019) proposed a model to choose the best suited PLM systems and validated the model in an aircraft firm. Meier et al (2017) discussed the last 20 years of PLM by considering the participation of the blogger community also in case of PLM implementation.…”

Model-Driven Skills Assessmentin Knowledge Management Systems

“…Web environments have become the nerve center in many organizations and they now integrate data, processes, business systems and staff to ensure the quality of the final products [17]. To manage their employee's knowledge, many organizations have adopted web environments based on Knowledge Management Systems (KMSs) due to their features in terms of communication, learning, sharing information, information retrieval and learning functions integration [28].…”