• Helps establish a system through which different stakeholders in the product lifecycle, including those within the organisation and external ones such as suppliers, partners and customers can capture, control, evaluate and leverage product information and knowledge.
• Maintain smooth flow of product information across the entire product lifecycle.
• Helps streamline engineering processes.
• Maximises re-use of intellectual capital.
• Ensures that all value chain participants are working from the same product assumptions.
• Eliminates product lifecycle barriers by unlocking product information (that could be product requirements, project data, process data, design geometry, supplier data, product documents and other forms of product data) that is trapped in isolated application systems, and unifying them in a common product-centric framework.
• Overcomes geographic, organisational and technology boundaries to facilitate collaboration amongst product teams. Improves product innovation, cost efficiency, time-to-market and product quality by providing a real-time collaboration workspace
• CAD-neutral collaborative environment facilitates the team to configure, digitally mock up, virtually publish and study new product ideas easily.

Evolution of PLM Over the years, as manufacturing organisations deployed CAD systems, large volumes of data were generated by these systems. The use of CAD systems and the engineering data they spewed out became an integral part of the product development process. This necessitated the design and engineering functions to put in place systems for effective data management, and implement engineering process workflows that would help control and improve the flow, quality and use of this data across an organisation. PLM/PDM addressed issues such as control, quality, re-use, security and availability of engineering data, while providing support for popular techniques such as collaborative engineering.

Further, manufacturing organisations have been increasingly outsourcing design and manufacturing work, whereby the need to collaborate, and technologies to support collaboration have gained importance. PLM provided a framework for multiple entities to collaborate in real-time on product design and engineering decisions through 2D and 3D visualisation and interactive modification of engineering data.

Manufacturers make extensive use of components in an effort to drive design re-use and achieve flexible configurations. As manufacturers built more of their products from components supplied by others, the need to establish manufacturer-supplier design collaboration was increasingly felt—and fulfilled by PLM applications.