How many Lifecycles do we need?

Yesterday, two separate article got my attention and brought me to think about Lifecycle. Alternatively, even more, about number of systems claims different lifecycle support. Jim’s Brown thought about QLM Quality Lifecycle Management and TEC article “What keeps EAM/CMMS away from PLM“. Why I choose these two is because they are presenting a complimentary story, in my view.

Jim claims Quality is a complimentary process to Product Lifecycle. Manufacturers these days cannot take risks and afford quality issues rising up, so QLM processes need to be adjusted and/or work together with Product Lifecycle. At the same time, Jim mentioned that many of today’s PLM systems doesn’t have QLM capabilities and some hybrid PLM/QLM would be probably interesting combination, we can offer to customers. I’d agree with Jim – with PLM system capable of manage overall product lifecycle, we’d better had Quality related processes connected and working together.

If I read correctly TEC, Kurt Chen presents in his article need to tie PLM and EAM systems together and analyze possible ways to do so. These processes represent both sides of product-related activities. First- from a product development side, second- from side of purchasing. What I liked is presenting of “two-sides of the story” of the same lifecycle.

I thought, these two stories is excellent examples to stop considering product-related processes as a something separate. Today’s organizational goals can be achieved only if we will be able to establish single lifecycle to manage all product-related activities in organization across department, divisions and cross-organizational boundaries. The siloed approach won’t work anymore. And I think demand on customers today is to establish such approach.

So, that’s what I thought about “lifecycles”. What do you think? What is your opinion? Do you have similar discussions and/or thoughts coming from your organizational experience?

Best, Oleg