Product Lifecycle Management

PLM book review:
This is excellent, seems to me that this is the first time when some one has put all the basics of PLM in one cover. As I see it, the real PLM problem or challenge is really not the PLM software implementation project. The real issue is to know what to implement! The concept of PLM is still much fuzzier than f. ex. the area of ERPs. In my company we discussed for ages about certain details of PLM, its contents and the selecting of the SW vendor. However the real big thing was that there were no clear goals for the whole PLM development project. I think we missed our opportunity here because all the discussions and the definitions of PLM were held in very different levels and everybody had very different understanding of PLM within our organization. We all should have read something like this before we launched our PLM initiative in our company. This book really gives you good and clear view into PLM. I recommend!

Easily earned money ...:
This book is a big disappointment; I am actively working in the PDM/PLM market for over 15 years and I have given many training and educational workshops; I was leading the ESPRIT RapidPDM project. Even though I reviewed the book from an educational perspective, to my opinion the book is nothing more as a summary of topics; the authors have not succeeded in getting their 'thing' and experience transferred to the pages. There are better books and even better articles around (e.g. Gartner, Cimdata, Forrester, John Stark to name a few). So why 2 stars you might ask: well that's because the authors have included metrics and that's an important fact!

Perfect fit for me!:
This book was fine reading. I like this kind of business books; most important points are easy to pick, not too scientific, clear and lots of new ideas - it was a perfect fit for my current needs. (I'm a director responsible for business development in my company (manufacturing services SME) My business is to bring in new concepts to help our business and couple the possibilities of modern IT-systems to our processes. The book was very well written with good summaries at end of each chapter. One specific thing that I really appreciated was the point that the book as whole gives a good end-to-end view to the whole PLM area - from building a product strategy to supporting it in daily business with PLM information systems. And one other thing that I would like to point out is the use of terminology, it is so important; all terms are well explained in this book. After reading this it will be much easier for me to discuss about these matters with engineers etc.