PLM Software in Discrete Manufacturing Industries Reviews and Ratings

Mandatory Features:

• Life cycle workflows and change management: Configure the automation of business processes to support stage gate processes across the product’s life cycle, such as ideation and design approvals, supplier management, and quality processes. This provides the ability to review, approve and apply status to design, document and other data changes and track their impact on product development and manufacturing outcomes.

• Collaboration, search and vaulting: Check in/check out, edit simultaneously and create markups. This includes the ability to find data using keywords, filters and/or sorting based on one or more attributes. It captures and organizes product data intended for sharing and reuse.

• Design software interfaces: Access and manage 2D/3D mechanical designs, electrical designs, materials data and software.

• Revision and access control: Preserve, view and control previous versions of data using distinct statuses. Define rules for which users have access at which levels to various categories of data. Levels can include rights to publish, edit and view, as well as the ability to support classified and nonclassified environments to support International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) and export control rules.

• Application programming interfaces (APIs): APIs allow integration architects to share data with complementary software categories such as ERP, manufacturing execution systems (MES), configure, price and quote (CPQ) and supply chain management.

• Product structure and bill of materials (BOM) management: Define the hierarchies of relationships that define the structure of products, including creating and modifying BOM structures, such as engineering, manufacturing and process BOMs — and increasingly even software components — to support product configuration management and manufacturing planning.

• Traceability and impact analysis: Relate product-development-related data across the life cycle phases to increase understanding of how product definition and build characteristics are connected and more easily analyze the impact of changes.

• Specifications management: Define and organize product specifications, such as material properties, dimensions and performance criteria. The specifications are managed as documents or as electronic records.