Product life cycle management (PLM) is a philosophy, process and discipline supported by software for managing the life cycle of products through the stages from concept through recycling/retirement. As a discipline, it has grown from a mechanical design and engineering focus to being applied to many different vertical-industry product development challenges. The market for PLM software includes vendors that: - Provide product data management (PDM) software to capture, cultivate and manage technical product-related content. That content defines the products’ specifications and designs and their allowable product configurations. It includes technical descriptions of the parts, materials and allowable product configurations expressed as 3D models, drawings and other related content. All PLM vendors deliver PDM functionality. - If software providers support only PDM functionality, Gartner does not consider them PLM vendors. PLM vendors support complementary applications that enable the PLM discipline to various degrees. Gartner considers a vendor a PLM provider if it supports at least three complementary software categories that enable the PLM discipline. Table 1 provides insight into the complementary categories of software that support the PLM discipline. Those additional software categories help manufacturers create, deliver, maintain, service and discontinue products.
Gartner defines the product information management (PIM) market as the packaged solutions that enable product, commerce and marketing teams to create and maintain an approved shareable version of rich product content. PIM makes a single, trusted source of product information available for multichannel commerce and data exchange. PIM solutions now support complex use cases, including product data syndication (PDS), product experience management (PXM), product information effectiveness analytics, digital shelf analytics and product data contextualization. They lay the foundation for delivering personalization, product discovery and digital experience platforms (DXPs). PIM is available as hosted cloud-native, SaaS, private cloud and on-premises solutions.