Product lifecycle management (PLM) is essential for manufacturing organizations in this day and age. These platforms help manage product development processes and data, which can help organizations optimize workflows and speed up time-to-market. Choosing the right PLM solution is essential for improving business and growing operations. Here we explore the key aspects that you should consider when picking a PLM solution from the latest Forrester Report.

PLM is essential for manufacturing organizations to manage product development processes and data.

PLM Trends

The digital transformation is an important force driving many manufacturing enterprise decisions. Although this transformation often starts in the IT or business office, the same process optimization expectations are starting to bleed into the PLM world. As a result, the following are some of the main goals organizations are hoping to achieve by implementing a PLM solution:

  • Ensuring that product data and records are consistent across the entire product lifecycle
  • Having useful data analytics that can provide insight into product development processes
  • Improving collaboration with functional organizational tools
  • Having a real-time single source of truth for all product development data
  • Planning for new and emerging technologies that impact product development

PLM Evaluation

Top Players Evaluated

The Forrester Report evaluated the following PLM key players:

Evaluation Criteria

The Forrester Report evaluated these key players using 20 criteria broken down into the three following categories:

  • Current offering: Assessing the flexibility and features of the current PLM platform to meet each client’s specific needs.
  • Strategy: Assessing each vendor’s product vision and go-to-market approach in addition to their implementation partners and cloud offerings.
  • Market presence: Evaluating each vendor’s revenue generated from their PLM solution and number of current customers.

Each platform was evaluated specifically on:

Current Offering

  • BOM management
  • Quality and compliance
  • Supplier management and collaboration
  • Manufacturing process planning and management
  • Digital twin
  • Simulation data management
  • Innovation and product portfolio management
  • Role-based applications
  • Analytics
  • IoT platform and usage data management
  • Additive manufacturing
  • Mobile
  • Integration capabilities
  • Implementation and sustainability
  • Configurability and flexibility

Strategy

  • Product vision
  • Partner ecosystem
  • Delivery model – cloud

Market Presence

  • Revenue of product
  • Number of customers

Learn How These PLM Solutions Stack Up

Interested in learning how these top PLM contenders perform against one another? Download the complete report The Forrester WaveTM: Product Lifecycle Management for Discrete Manufacturers courtesy of NxRev.

Or, if you are interested in learning about our available PLM solutions, contact us.