The Complementary Roles of PLM and PIM
- by Ulf Köster
Oracle Product Value Chain Solutions (aka Enterprise PLM Solutions)
are a comprehensive set of product management solutions that work
together to provide Oracle customers with a broad array of capabilities
to manage all aspects of product life: innovation, design, launch, and
supply chain / commercialization processes beyond the capabilities and
boundaries of traditional engineering-focused Product Lifecycle
Management applications. They support companies with an integrated
managed view across the product value chain: From Lab to Launch, From
Farm to Fork, From Concept to Product to Customer, From Product
Innovation to Product Design and Product Commercialization.
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
the product lifecycle from product design, through commercialization and
eventual product retirement or replacement. In discrete or process
industries, PLM is typically more focused on Product Definition
as items with respect to the technical view of a material or part,
including specifications, bills of material and manufacturing data. With Agile PLM, this is specifically related to capabilities addressing Product Collaboration, Governance and Compliance, Product Quality Management, Product Cost Management and Engineering Collaboration. PLM
today is mainly addressing key requirements in the early product
lifecycle, in engineering changes or in the “innovation cycle”, and
primarily adds value related to product design, development, launch and
engineering change process. In short, PLM is the master for Product Definition, wherever manufacturing takes place.
Product Information Management (PIM) is a product suite that has
evolved in parallel to PLM. Product Information Management (PIM) can
extend the value of PLM implementations by providing complementary
tools and capabilities. More relevant in the area of Product
Commercialization, 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 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. Product Information in PIM is typically treated as the commercial view of a material or part,
including sales and marketing information and categorization. PIM
collects information from multiple manufacturing sites and multiple
suppliers into its repository, but also provides integration tools to
push the information back out to the other systems, serving as an
active central repository with the aim to provide a holistic view on
any product sold by a company (hence the name “Product Hub”). In short, PIM is the master of commercial Product Information. So PIM is quickly becoming mandatory because of its value in
optimizing multichannel selling processes and relationships with
customers, as you can see from the following table:
Viewpoint
PLM Current State
PIM
Key Benefits PIM adds to PLM
Product Lifecycle
Primarily R&D
Front end Innovation Cycle
Change process
Primarily commercial /
transactional state of
lifecycle
Provides a seamless
information flow from
design and
manufacturing through
the ultimate selling and
servicing of products
Data
Primarily focused on “item” vs. “product” data
Product structures
Specifications
Technical information
Repository for all product information.
Reaches out to entire enterprise and its various silos of product information and descriptions
Provides a “trusted source” of accurate product information to
the internal organization and trading partners
Data Lifecycle
Repository for all design
iterations
Historical information
Released, current information, with version management and time stamping
Provides a single location to track and audit historical product information
Communication
PLM release finished product to ERP
PLM is the master for Product Definition
Captures information from disparate sources, including in-house data stores
Recognizes the reality of today’s data “mess” across information silos
Provides
the ability to package product information to its audience in the
desired, relevant format to meet their exacting business requirements
Departmental
R&D
Manufacturing
Quality
Compliance
Procurement
Strategic Marketing
Focus on Marketing and Sales
Gathering information from other Departments, multiple sites, multiple suppliers
A singular enterprise solution that leverages existing information silos and data stores
Supply Chain
Multi-site internal collaboration
Supplier collaboration
Customer collaboration
Works
with customers, exchanges / data pools, and trading partners to
provide relevant product information packaged the way the customer
desires
Provides ability to provide trading partners and internal customers with information in a manner they desire, continuously
Tools
Data Management
Collaboration
Innovation Management
Cleansing
Synchronization
Hub functions
Consistent, clean and complete commercial product information
The goals of both PLM and PIM, put simply, are to help companies make
more profit from their products. PLM and PIM solutions can be easily
added as they share some of the same goals, while coming from two
different perspectives: the definition of the product and the
commercialization of the product. Both can serve as a form of product
“system of record”, but take different approaches to delivering value.
Oracle Product Value Chain solutions offer rich new strategies for
executives to collectively leverage Agile PLM, Product Data Hub, together with Enterprise Data Quality for Products, and other industry leading Oracle applications to achieve further incremental value, like Oracle Innovation Management. This is unique on the market today.
