The Emergence of Product Lifecycle Management

This chapter shows how PLM emerged as a strategic activity in the early 21st Century. Before then, companies implicitly managed products across their lifecycles. Because they didn’t manage them, even conceptually, in an explicit, ‘joined-up’, continuous way, things fell through the cracks. As a result, although it appeared that everyone in the product development, production and support chain had done their work correctly, there were problems such as products getting to market late, and products not working properly in the field. The new paradigm of PLM is described. Corollaries are evoked.