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There's a New APP in Town

There's a New APP in Town

PLM aims to streamline product development and boost innovation in manufacturing. But it won’t be easy or cheap. Here’s what CIOs need to do about this latest buzzword technology

Shopping Tips for the Vendor Bazaar

Vendors offering the full complement of PLM functionality come from different worlds. Here's how they stack up now, but analysts predict some consolidation among the players in coming months.

Design Vendors. These companies hail from the engineering space and have added to their design-focused product data management applications to support additional manufacturing and operations-oriented business processes. Companies in this space include EDS PLM Solutions, Framework Technologies, MatrixOne, the IBM/Dassault Systemes partnership and PTC. Their products tend to have a strong engineering foundation and thus have gained a strong early following from product-oriented companies, which see product lifecycle management (PLM) as a way to increase collaboration and improve management of engineering-specific data. These vendors are a good pick for companies with design-centric PLM requirements.

Enterprise Vendors. ERP players such as Baan, Eigner, Oracle, PeopleSoft and SAP are extending their enterprise suites with PLM components. If you've got ERP and like the idea of a single-source supplier, it's probably worth a look at their offerings. These PLM products link to financial and manufacturing systems (mostly the vendors' own, of course) and include supplier management capabilities and hooks to customer data in CRM systems. Still, since most PLM deployments begin by trying to solve engineering-oriented problems, these vendors' PLM offerings are not yet in widespread use.

The Newcomers. Companies such as Agile Software and Arena Solutions were created for the sole purpose of providing an extended PLM platform. These tools generally balance design and manufacturing functionality.

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