A recent white paper by Dassault Systemes on Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) hit the nail on the head when it asked, near the back of the paper, if your Component Supplier Management system supported multiple views? Specifically, the paper on Component Supplier Management (CSM) identified three views that your PLM / CSM system has to support if you want it to be adopted across the organization and utilized across the product lifecycle:

• system (logical)

  to enable distributed and cross-organization design activities

• physical (EBOM: engineering bill-of-materal)

  to enable component identification, selection, and standardization

• financial (BOM: manufacturing bill-of-analysis)

  to enble supplier identification, selection, management and (strategic) sourcing activities

The reality is that PLM is a very involved process that not only touches most of the orgnization, but impacts most of the organizational functions. As a result, it needs to either support most of those functions or capture the data required by those functions and/or integrate with other organizational systems that capture the necessary data and/or accomplish the relevant functions in order to be useful, because PLM is not a function that can be siloed into any one organization. Keep this in mind when selecting your next PLM system.