To consistently produce great products, companies need a product development process that becomes, in itself, a competitive differentiator. While some see product development as synonymous with engineering, a truly effective product development process engages a variety of cross-functional participants from marketing, engineering, procurement, manufacturing, sales, and service departments. Ever-increasing levels of outsourcing have driven suppliers and manufacturing partners into direct roles in the product development process. At the same time, a strong customer focus has necessitated the customer's direct involvement.

As a result, attempts to optimize product development naturally evolve from a departmental focus within engineering, to an enterprise focus, and ultimately to a distributed value chain focus.

Developing digital products in a value chain environment-and under intense time and cost pressure - is certainly not easy. While many manufacturers have made great strides improving operational effectiveness across their enterprise and supply chain as it relates to manufacturing and logistics, most companies will admit that their product development processes are rife with problems. The digital content that describes products during the development process typically gets fragmented across organizational boundaries, with each group having different forms of product definition stored in different systems, and many with incompatible formats. No easy-to-use capability exists to share information among these enterprise systems in a controlled manner.

Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) describes a comprehensive framework of technology and services that permit manufacturing companies and their partners and customers to collaboratively conceptualize, design, build, and manage products throughout their entire lifecycle. PLM solutions must enable companies to create detailed, intuitive, and realistic digital product information; collaborate by incorporating early input from the various participants in order to identify and resolve critical issues; and control and automate critical processes such as release to manufacturing, change, and configuration management throughout the product's lifecycle.
PLM has emerged as the primary means by which manufacturing companies can achieve step-change improvements in their product development process.