The IBM SOA Foundation applied to PLM

Facilitating a service oriented approach to Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) integration, collaboration, and business process management.

Extending the benefits of PLM beyond engineering to the entire value chain requires delivering more than software applications and technology. Executives need a single view of product and project information on which to base business decisions. The infrastructure must be able to adapt quickly to new business models and processes. PLM needs to be integrated with the rest of the enterprise to become a source of product information for all stakeholders involved in product development decisions.

PLM systems enabled by a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) infrastructure can address these needs, treating information and processes as services. The IBM SOA Foundation including industry extensions for PLM provides an IT foundation on which virtually all enterprise applications can operate synchronously—sharing and reusing processes and information, and exposing results in a consistent manner across the enterprise.

SOA provides the glue that integrates product development with other business operations. It helps break down the silos that separate engineering from other organizations by providing a framework for heterogeneous systems and processes to operate in a homogeneous manner. The PLM information and processes are thus exposed and available at the executive level, where the impact of product development decisions on the entire business can be evaluated.

IBM delivers a flexible and scalable SOA-based architecture for product development through the Product Development Integration Framework (PDIF). The PDIF is a set of solution offerings and technology comprised of pre-built use cases, application integration, and portals for role-based access to product development information and processes. The PDIF provides a powerful architecture for extending PLM throughout the globally integrated enterprise.

IBM provides a service oriented approach to PLM integration and collaboration through the following capabilities:

• Requirements Engineering and Management—Enabling processes to ensure that customer needs, and project requirements, are communicated, managed and validated among product development stakeholders across the lifecycle.
• Design Chain Management—Enabling the automation of change management processes within and across engineering disciplines, release to manufacturing processes, bill-of-material transformation processes, PDM data integration that spans enterprise-level PDM, ERP and legacy production management applications, and collaborations for ad-hoc and formal design reviews among project stakeholders.
• Software Development—Enabling integrated processes for software lifecycle management that support modeling, testing, building and delivering software.
• Electrical and Electronics Development—Enabling effective management of EDA and systems development metrics that provides end-to-end traceability from requirements through test results.
• Mechanical Development—Enabling effective management of mechanical design, analysis and simulation processes using product data that is managed by multiple PDM systems.
• Program and Portfolio Management—Enabling process to catalog, search for and re-use parts for engineering, procurement, logistics and service departments. Enabling integration of product performance data with asset management information for better decision support.
• Systems Engineering—Enabling processes for systems-engineering best practices called model driven development that spans the disciplines of software, hardware, and electronics.

IBM understands not only how PLM solutions fit into the entire operational and IT infrastructure, but also the value of complete product information in the context of the business.

• Our breadth of business transformation skills, SOA infrastructure and IT know-how are a proven combination upon which we built the open PLM industry extensions to the IBM SOA foundation.
• We have core competence and experience with SOA and in PLM solutions for virtually every industry in-house or through IBM Business Partners.
• We have PLM Centers of Excellence located all over the world staffed by PLM and SOA experts. PLM software applications from IBM and our partners along with the latest versions of our SOA foundation software are installed there so we can demonstrate integrated PLM solutions that are already leveraging SOA benefits. Or you can discuss your unique requirements with our experts and we can build a proof of concept to demonstrate first hand the benefits you can achieve by extending your PLM infrastructure on an IBM SOA foundation.
• Our PLM R&D is unmatched in the industry—and we’ve used our own solutions to transform our company, implementing PLM in-house and within our own value net.