Product lifecycle management
What the product is meant to be: specification, structure, revisions and the changes made to them over time.
01 What it holds
The data inside it
The engineering bill of materials, drawings, specifications and change history — the design decisions that set cost before manufacturing ever gets a chance to influence it.
Part, Revision, Engineering BOM, Document, Change request / order, Approval
02 Getting the data out
Extraction, and the keys that decide whether it joins
Vendor APIs and structured exports. The interesting content is often in attached documents rather than in fields, which limits how much can be analysed without extraction from files.
Part numbers are versioned, and the engineering BOM is not the manufacturing BOM in the ERP. Mapping between them is a real, ongoing exercise rather than a one-off.
03 What goes wrong
The failures that look like success
Each of these produces a number that is plausible, reconciles to something, and is wrong. They are worth reading before the first extract, not after the first dispute.
Engineering BOM versus manufacturing BOM
They differ deliberately. Costing against the wrong one produces a number neither engineering nor operations recognises.
Effectivity dates
A revision applies from a date, a serial number or a lot. Ignoring effectivity attributes a failure to the wrong design.
Specification lives in documents
Tolerances and requirements are frequently in attached files, so over-specification is invisible to any analysis that reads fields only.
Change lead time is unmeasured
How long a change takes from request to production is usually knowable and rarely reported, despite being a direct cost and quality driver.
04 Joins that matter
What this system is worth joining to
| Join to | What it lets you answer |
|---|---|
| ERP | engineering to manufacturing BOM, and design cost to standard cost |
| QMS | to connect a recurring defect to the revision that introduced it |
| MES | which revision was actually running when a batch was made |
05 Metrics it feeds
The numbers that come out of it
06 Questions
Frequently asked
Why does PLM matter to a value tree?
Because roughly the majority of product cost is committed at design, long before manufacturing can influence it. Over-specification is margin given away at the drawing stage.
What is the practical first analysis?
Cost by revision. Joining design changes to actual production cost and scrap shows which changes paid for themselves and which quietly did not.
Connect this system without replacing it
SCIKIQ reads it in place, resolves the entities inside it and governs what the fields mean.