The Product Pulse

I recently commented on a blog post written by Chad Jackson of Lifecycle Insights that raised a question on the difference between PLM applications and PPM applications. It sparked an interesting debate amongst several folks in the industry. Here's my point of view:

PLM -- Product Lifecycle Management -- lives more in the design and engineering aspects of the product development lifecycle, which are at the core of the PLM value proposition. The Product Portfolio Management, or PPM, aspect is essential as it relates to improving product innovation, especially in the areas of understanding the front-end of the pipeline, optimizing the portfolio, building credible capacity plans and product roadmaps, and then managing effective project execution. This comprehensive approach really helps product development teams maximize their capacity to innovate with their inherently constrained resources.

Both PLM and PPM can take an end-to-end approach -- it just depends on what "ends" you're focused on -- and bringing the two together is vital, especially for complex manufacturing-type product organizations. PLM operates at the engineering execution platform level, managing detailed processes and the exponential number of design and engineering artifacts required to bring complex products to market. PPM operates closer to the business dimensions of the organization by focusing on managing demand versus resources, tying the total cost of development of new products (and more on that below), as well as maintaining existing products with revenue and margin those products create.

About "total cost of development," note that, from the Planview perspective, this does include all work. Whether it's packaging design work that needs to be completed prior to launch, the ongoing costs of maintaining products and making incremental enhancements, research on new manufacturing techniques, brand and competitive analysis studies that need to be integrated into the marketing campaign, or the actual development of the product, our philosophy is that ALL work that is necessary to get a product to market should be included as part of the total cost of development and thus factored into revenue forecasts and margin projections.