Product Lifecycle Management solution providers will continue to aggressively make penetrations into new industries. The traditional market share and highest adoption of PLM technology historically has been the discrete industries such as automotive, aerospace and defense, heavy equipment, industrial fabrication and assembly, machine tools, and high-tech and electronics. These mainstay discrete industries that retreated during the economic downturn of '08 and '09 gave more impetus to PLM suppliers to look to non-traditional industries. Solutions are now being readily adopted by a set of industrial verticals such as medical devices, CPG, consumer goods, shipbuilding, energy generation and utilities, and AEC; and the adoption growth rates in these sectors reflect this trend. PLM suppliers are looking for growth in these sectors to fuel revenues as their business growth in the discrete industries matures.
Dick Slansky, the principal author of a new study from ARC Advisory Group, "Product Lifecycle Management Worldwide Outlook," has this to say: "Clearly, the market leaders in PLM, as well as many of the smaller suppliers, have responded to the broadening adoption of PLM technologies into new markets with strategies and solutions to penetrate these industrial vertical markets. PLM suppliers have all developed industry-specific market strategies that are focusing well beyond their historic discrete industry strengths and into the process and hybrid industries. Leveraging advanced 3D modeling and simulation technologies these PLM suppliers continue to penetrate industries such as shipbuilding, energy and power, oil and gas, life sciences, construction and architecture, retail, and even the fashion industry."
Demographics, Environment, and Energy to Define Growth The changing demographics of both industrialized nations and the emerging economic regions will drive significant portions of the market for technology and the consumer demands for certain sectors of national, regional and global populations. This is creating a critical demand for knowledge capture across all domains of the product lifecycle including design, manufacturing processes, and general domain expertise. Moreover, knowledge reuse will be essential as companies seek to maintain and improve their products and services, as well as establish ideation and innovation as a component of their end-to-end product development process.
A number of interesting trends have emerged that are supported by PLM technologies. Design communities are emerging that will enable both professional and non-professional designers to engage and exchange concepts and designs. Also, PLM solutions are being adopted in business sectors such as CPG, consumer goods and retail. 3D modeling has reached states where entire virtual environments can be created that represent not only products but the stores and retail outlets. The convergence of PLM and MES has been taking place for some time as manufacturers realize the benefits of linking their production operations execution data and completed records with PDM systems to validate their product design and manufacturing processes with the as-built data from their production systems. PLM providers are forging partnerships with, and in some cases making acquisitions of MES software suppliers.
