Why Driving in Circles is the Right and Best Future for PLM

Derek Piette, Product Management Director, PTC

The long and relatively straight road of product engineering in the automotive and transportation sectors has served us well over the past decades and produced several innovative and compelling products that enrich our lives on a daily basis. The mega-trends of safety, personalization, connectivity, and security are seeing that road heading towards a cliff when it comes to not only how we manage the product lifecycle but what we consider the product lifecycle itself and how we implement processes and tools to address it. Layer on this the exponential rise of complexity in our products, whether due to regional or market variation, cost, and regulatory constraints or the growing importance of non-physical “parts” in terms of software components or the data generated from these products and the environment they operate within.This presentation will explore the inevitability of the challenges ahead and why product engineering can no longer be disconnected from manufacturing, operation, and service and how a closed loop process based on sound systems engineering principles and that includes the connected world as part of the product definition is the only right and best approach to meeting them.