The recent acquisitions of Agile Software by Oracle and of UGS by Siemens have brought attention back to the software market that was born when the utility of engineering design applications for information management was brought across the entire product lifecycle. Since its emergence, product lifecycle management (PLM) technology has experienced slow adoption in manufacturing, outside of isolated, one-off types of implementations. (See Enterprise PLM: Will More Integration Offer a Cure?)

However, as manufacturers move ahead with strategic innovation initiatives, many are beginning to see PLM applications as part of the must-have technology cache that includes ERP and supply chain management applications.

PLM encompasses much more than design programs aimed at engineers. Applications now include sourcing and product portfolio management capabilities, for example. And integration with applications such as ERP and manufacturing execution systems (MES) has impressed PLM's importance on higher-level managers who are looking to tackle the ever-present project silos throughout an enterprise.

"The PLM market is now recognized as a major enterprise-solution investment for user companies," said Ed Miller, president of PLM consulting and research firm CIMdata, at the company's recent North American Vendor Forum. "Industries that have not traditionally invested in PLM are becoming more aware of its potential value and demanding solutions that address their needs."

Large, complex global companies that depend on product innovation must contend with R&D and product development efforts that often underachieve on expectations, says Andy Michuda, chief executive of Sopheon Corp., which helps companies manage current and future product portfolios. He cites a particularly harrowing statistic: the average failure rate of new products is currently hovering around 45%, with the food and beverage industry's even higher, at 76%.

"Product development is a very intensive business process requiring active collaboration between cross-functional teams," Michuda says. PLM applications, in turn, should enable collaboration by capturing and aggregating relevant project information among team members, while keeping top management informed on progress. "The goal should be to move projects forward while bringing visibility to executives," Michuda says.

Looking back to the early days of PLM applications, "the genesis of many modern PLM systems were data repositories for CAD and related information," says Chris Groves, chief executive of Centric Software, a provider of "product intelligence" software that pulls existing data from silos across an enterprise for product and project management. According to Groves, although the vision of PLM often is for "cradle-to-grave" management of a product, the reality is that most PLM products still offer only a subset of that lifecycle -- mainly for engineering.

Centric's approach to PLM is to break down information silos with out-of-the-box connectors that link disparate enterprise systems; the software functions in much the same way as Google's search engine, crawling a company's product information and directing users to its sources, Groves says.

Although a variety of reasons explain manufacturers' slow adoption of PLM solutions, budget constraints rank high among them. For product development software and services provider Aras Corp., the answer was to switch to an open-source business model. Aras's President and CEO Peter Schroer says that when the company made the change to open source in January, it expected 300 or 400 downloads in the first half of the year, but already has logged 5,000.

"[Open source] provides a way to get started with PLM applications ... with [proven] technology and business processes" that customers otherwise wouldn't have the financial bandwidth for, Schroer says. And with the accessibility of the Aras software, according to Schroer, customers are able to build a suite of PLM applications in relatively short order -- within six months or so -- including functions such as quality management and analysis, supply management, and linking the design process to the factory floor.