The Complementary Roles of PIM and PLM: Extending PLM with Product Information Management explores how Product Information Management (PIM) can extend the value of PLM implementations by providing complementary tools and capabilities. Please enjoy the free Executive Summary below, or click the report title above to download the full PDF (free of charge, no registration required).
Table of Contents
- Executive Overview
- “Products” and “Items”
- The “Single Source of Truth”
- The Demand for Commercial Product Information
- PIM and PLM Working Together
- Current State of PLM
- Table: Key Benefits PIM Adds to PLM
- Recommendations
- Summary
- About the Author
Executive Overview
Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) represents a broad suite of software solutions to improve product-oriented business processes and data. PLM success stories prove that PLM helps companies improve time to market, increase product-related revenue, reduce product costs, reduce internal costs and improve product quality. As a maturing suite of enterprise solutions, PLM is still evolving to realize the promise it can provide across all facets of a business and all phases of the product lifecycle.
The vision for PLM includes everything from gathering early requirements for a product through multiple stages of product design, commercialization and eventual product retirement or replacement. Product Information Management (PIM) is a product suite that has evolved in parallel to PLM. PIM focuses on management and synchronization of product information from multiple data sources. PIM success stories have shown the ability to provide multiple benefits, with particular emphasis on reducing information complexity and information management costs. The vision for PIM is to manage product information throughout an enterprise and supply chain to improve product-related knowledge management, information sharing and synchronization.
The goals of both PLM and PIM, put simply, are to help companies make more profit from their products. PLM and PIM solutions share some of the same goals, but take different approaches to delivering value. This paper explores how PIM can be used to extend the value of PLM implementations by providing complementary capabilities that are not available in PLM suites today.