Autor: Martin Eigner

State of the Art IT-solutions for Product Lifecycle Management (PLM-solutions) offer no support for decision makers in the early phases of product engineering. Their focus is rather on the administration of design data. This article describes a concept for the advancement of PLM-solutions. Existing approaches in Business Information Management are being discussed and extended to allow their application in the PLM-context. Fundamental idea of the described concept is a role, task and process oriented guidance of decision makers. Finally the strategy of realisation is outlined and an outlook on major potentials of realisation is given.

Technical innovations and increasing international stress of competition have lead wordwide operating companies as well as small and medium-sized companies to bring very complex products in a huge number of variants into the market. Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) is an approach to handle this complexity. In this paper a generic process model for a pragmatic evaluation of PLM solutions in a PLM implementation project is presented. Over the past years large companies, especially in aircraft and automotive industries, have made experiences with PLM and especially PLM implementation which can be adapted directly or indirectly by companies of small and medium sizes.