Manufacturing companies across myriad industries are investing in PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) application suites 3 to the tune of $2.3 billion in 2003, according to AMR Research (Stackpole,...

Manufacturing companies across myriad industries are investing in PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) application suites 3 to the tune of $2.3 billion in 2003, according to AMR Research (Stackpole, 2003). Why? Because they see PLM’s potential to vastly improve their ability to innovate, get products to market and reduce errors. PLM is an integrated, information-driven approach to all aspects of a product’s life, from its design through to manufacture, deployment and maintenance 3 culminating in the product’s removal from service and final disposal. PLM software suites enable accessing, updating, manipulating and reasoning about product information that is being produced in a fragmented and distributed environment. PLM allows the integration of business systems to manage a product’s life cycle. MatrixOne Inc. is a recognised leader in delivering collaborative PLM solutions, giving companies the ability to rapidly deploy a secure collaborative environment for their value chain that eliminates the barriers caused by geographically dispersed organisations and multiple disparate systems. This enables companies to dramatically accelerate time-to-market and significantly reduce product development costs. For example: JDS Uniphase. JDS Uniphase is a global leader in the design and manufacture of products for fibre optic communications for the industrial, commercial and consumer markets. Challenged with complex products, a fragmented and corporate structure due to a series of mergers and a globally dispersed value-chain, JDS needed to consolidate work practices and share information more effectively across many discrete entities. As a result of a MatrixOne solution, the product transfer process has been greatly simplified, resulting in design-to-manufacturing gaps being eliminated. This was illustrated by engineering changes being turned around in 5 days rather than the previous 50 days.