Most companies that produce a product are usually attempting to scale up and mass produce that product to reduce costs, improve manufacturing times, and ultimately, through repetition, create an identical product each and every time.

Hence any changes that need to be made to that product will in some form or fashion change the design either intentionally or unintentionally.

The unintentional ones are those that operations/manufacturing managers fret over the most due to waste product and lost revenue.

However, even the ones planned sometimes go awry and there are delays due to unintended errors or miscommunicated information.

Processes are launched, controlled and released in a set fashion to allow consistent, predictable product with fewer errors and faster throughput.

Discrete manufacturing businesses are those who most note increases in profitability and product quality, however PLM has been used quite successfully in process manufacturing and high fashion.

New and inventive ways are being developed constantly as the industry evolves.

This is the reason you look to Rockwell Consults for answers.

As long as you see revenue, time, and/or material lost due to design issues or faulty/lack of communication between Engineering and Manufacturing or R&D and Production, PLM will assist.

It is not a magical elixir to mysteriously "solve" all of your problems, but if implemented correctly can significantly cut down on design and development turnaround times, increase process stability and performance, enhance data throughput, better your product innovation process, bring design data to the fingertips of your business, and ultimately bring your business to the next level.

By leveraging industry-proven guidelines and through a tailor-made approach, PLM can do the following:

* Streamline the data process and idea throughput to allow a faster “design to market” strategy.

* Create a consistent manageable change process that allows engineering and production to review changes in an orderly fashion prior to product release

* Reduce paperwork and allow those on the production floor to see what the engineer sees without guessing if the print received is the latest one.

* Allow integration so BOM’s (Bills of Material) generated by engineering are reproduced and available for production.

The cost of PLM is more than offset by the cost savings.

By reducing downtime and increasing throughput, PLM can have your business humming along.

Since PLM connects design data to production, this reduces the amount of errors and allows production to gain more insight into changes before they are actually finalized and released.

Here are some of the numbers from independent studies:

* 75% reduction in time, cost, and errors associated with re-keying BOM data from engineering to ERP.

* Only 8% claim coordination between engineering and production works well.

* 14% Decrease in the number of Engineering Change Orders (ECOs) for "Best in Class" businesses, while there was a 13-14% Increase in ECOs for the industry average and laggards.

The cost of implementing PLM is more than offset by the cost of missed deadlines, incorrect or poorly designed product or delayed products to market.