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CIMdata’s 2014 PLM Market & Industry Forum: “Moving Towards a Circular Economy: New Challenges Offer New Opportunities”

For more information on the Circular Economy take a look at CIMdata's Essential Reading List.

Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) has emerged as a strategy to support product and process development, enabled by software technology and services. Ideally, companies manage products from concept to retirement as part of their PLM strategy. Aiming to reduce the environmental impact of products in both production and in their use, sustainability has become a common rallying cry for manufacturers.

Great strides have been made in design for the disassembly, recycling, and reuse of materials and PLM strategies and enabling solutions have played a significant role in the successes to date.

But what if we could have zero impact, what if everything we took out of the ground, or created, could be infinitely reused and repurposed?

This is one way of looking at the “circular economy,” a radically new approach to thinking about what we do, build, and use.

What does this mean for you?

• Meeting more stringent needs requires new PLM enabling solutions and services to help companies adapt.

- This new approach involves systems thinking, looking at products in a holistic way.

- Systems engineering offers a framework to adopt this broad view and an expanding set of tools can help navigate the necessary planning and development tradeoffs.

-  Adopters will need services from specialists—service providers who focus on this approach.

• The circular economy will also impose new requirements on simulation & analysis (S&A).

- Reusing materials repeatedly can change their properties; the question is: will they stand up to one more reuse?

- While we can see the benefits of applying more S&A in the early stages of the product lifecycle, these solutions are compute-intensive. Can we simulate in a more circular-friendly way?

- Most of the large S&A companies provide a broad range of services, but are there new opportunities?

• Product data management solutions are often at the core of PLM strategies.

- Recent CIMdata research in the aerospace and defense sector showed that leading companies want to move beyond just data and process management.

- Our industrial consulting has showed this same phenomenon in other industries.

- This will create new opportunities for specialist providers and services organizations who can deliver the subject matter expertise required to support the broader adoption and implementation demanded by this new thinking.

• Organizations already spend significant resources on on-premise PLM-enabling tools.

- We have seen increasingly more of these solutions enabled for cloud delivery.

- Understanding what is available, what is to come, and what else might be required will help smooth the path to a circular approach to IT utilization.

- Many of these tools will expand delivery onto mobile platforms, bringing capabilities to the “deskless,” and to other remote users.

- Mobile and cloud are changing the relationship between solution providers and their SI/Reseller/VAR partners.

Are you ready?

Thinking “circular” is really outside-the-box thinking. PLM has created and consumed the same type of “raw material” for several generations, namely files. Several new trends and the actions of some leading companies are pointing to a new way to store and communicate information, as objects, creating files only as needed to support certain processes and use cases.

• What will get PLM to look outside of that box?
• What are the implications of this change for the PLM Economy?

Let’s find out!

CIMdata’s 2014 PLM Market & Industry Forum, the leading event designed exclusively for solution and services providers in the PLM economy, is a key deliverable for our PLM Community members.