Difference between PDM vs. PLM?

Field Guide for Identifying PDM from PLM

Article courtesy Edward Lopategui of E(E)

 

What’s the difference between Product Data Management (PDM) and Product Lifecycle Management (PLM)?  Only one letter separates the two loaded acronyms, and customer confusion, especially in today’s marketing environment is totally understandable.  This simple field guide arms you with the knowledge to understand the distinction, and to help you make more informed enterprise software decisions that match the needs of your business.

 

In the simplest terms, PDM is a subset of PLM.  Let’s think about the entire process behind any engineered product.  That process is the product lifecycle.  You can break that process down into several distinct steps, but don’t assume that necessarily implies a linear process.  There is quite a bit of overlap in the steps, and many of the best organizations try to do as many of the steps in parallel as is reasonable.  In general, the steps are:

• Ideation: When a product is conceived, this may be derived from stated requirements, market research, or just plain falling off the toilet and doodling a flux capacitor on a napkin.
• Design: The stage where the idea is refined, vetted, analyzed, simulated, and otherwise turned into a virtual product.  Computer Aided Design (CAD) and Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) is central to this process these days.  This includes characterizing supply and procurement for component parts as well as raw materials. It’s a highly iterative process, and in the best organizations it’s coupled tightly with ideation.
• Build: The step where the virtual design is turned into reality.  This can be as simple as a 3D print, and as complex as a new factory with supply chain, tooling, and an assembly line specifically tailored for the product.
• Support: Once the product is a reality, it needs to be distributed, delivered, sold, and serviced.  Upgrades, recalls, customer feedback, every activity associated with a product out in the wild falls within the support realm.
• Disposal: Every product has an end of life from a single use to a hundred years.  A product’s end of life may be instantaneous or it may be phased out over time.  In the past, this stage might have been all about throwing things away, but these days ongoing customer relationships, recycling opportunities, and regulatory concerns factor into this stage.

If we visualize the lifecycle as a continuous loop, it looks like this: 

 

PLM encompasses the entire circle. 

 

PDM was most often strongly associated with just design, because at least historically the majority (but not all) of the data management occurred in this stage.  In early incarnations, PDM was strictly a CAD management technology, and access was typically isolated to design staff.  As CAD visualization and collaboration technologies have evolved, elements of PDM are now much more relevant throughout the lifecycle.  The short of it is this: the PDM of today is much more sophisticated and expansive than the PDM of the past.  So both PDM and PLM encompass this lifecycle.  CIMdata, an established PLM industry market analyst and consultancy coined a term called cPDm (Collaborative Product Definition Management) for this reason.  You could read their definition, but it’s likely to give you a migraine, so I’ll boil it down to this.  What CIMdata calls PDM is the PDM of the past.  cPDm is the PDM of today.

 

It would seem that differentiating PDM and PLM has become a little arbitrary, but here’s an easy way to keep things straight:  PDM is primarily concerned with just the engineering data needed to define the product design and little else.  Typically these are CAD files (mechanical and/or electrical) but can be other file types, including drawings and documents.  Any process, security, or configuration control capabilities of PDM are limited to just that engineering data.  PLM on the other hand, not only includes all the data in PDM, but also all the other data, people, processes, and decisions made throughout the organization in the context of that lifecycle.  So PLM capabilities are decidedly more complex and far reaching.  If your business is just trying to manage engineering data – PDM is the first step, PLM is the second step once you want to tie multiple processes across the enterprise to work in an integrated manner.

 

You may find that evaluating available products on the market may still lead to confusion.  Why is this so?  It’s not your fault.  There are actually several very genuine reasons why the lines between PDM and PLM are often quite blurred:

• Keep in mind that most of the popular PLM software products evolved from PDM tools; sometimes that heritage is very apparent.
• The first PLM software tools differentiated clearly from classic PDM tools.  However, most (but not all) of the modern tools actually include elements of both.
• No single tool truly captures everything defined in PLM.  Often businesses end up with a suite of applications with different strengths in different spaces that have to be integrated.  Any claim of a true end to end solution should be taken with a grain (or truckload) of salt.
• No one truly controls the definition of PLM.  The old saying goes if you ask ten different people about PLM, you’re likely to receive ten different answers.  Add in marketing types and that quickly turns into a thousand different answers.
• Often (but not always) a particular vendor’s PDM solution is either embedded into or requires installation of their PLM solution or vice versa

In summary, if you are primarily concerned with CAD integrations and management of technical product data, PDM is your cup of tea.  If you are looking for more expansive solutions then look towards PLM.