Product Lifecycle Management
Product lifecycle management (PLM) refers to the handling of a good as it moves through the typical stages of its life: development and introduction, growth, maturity/stability, and decline. This handling involves both the manufacturing of the good and the marketing of it. The concept of product life cycle helps inform business decision-making, from pricing and promotion to expansion or cost-cutting. Manage Your Product Lifecycle
Why invest in Product Lifecycle Management?
Sound product lifecycle management gets the product to market faster, puts a higher quality product on the market, improves product safety, boosts sales opportunities, and eliminates errors and waste. Specialized computer software is available to assist with PLM through functions such as document management, design integration, and process management.
PLM can help your organization with following benefits
Improved product quality and reliability
Reduced prototyping costs
Savings through the re-use of original data
Quick identification of sales opportunities
Reduced wasted & increased revenue contributions
An ideal framework for product optimization
Stages of Product Lifecycle Management (PLM)
New Product Design & Development
New product development goes through a few stages & organisations MUST find answers at each stage before launching a product. The stages are: Discover, Define, Design, Develop, and Deliver. At each stage, there are product specific challenges and we help you with the right consulting on research and development, consumer testing, and the marketing needed to launch the product.
Market Development
Bringing a new product to market is fraught with unknowns, uncertainties, and frequently unknowable risks. Generally, demand has to be “created” during the product’s initial market development stage. How long this takes depends on the product’s complexity, its degree of newness, its fit into consumer needs, and the presence of competitive substitutes of one form or another. Hire us to launch your new product successfully.
Market Growth
Demand begins to accelerate and the size of the total market expands rapidly. It might also be called the “Takeoff Stage.” The usual characteristic of a successful new product is a gradual rise in its sales curve during the market development stage. At some point in this rise a marked increase in consumer demand occurs and sales take off. The boom is on. Grab the advantage.
Market Maturity
Demand levels off and grows, for the most part, only at the replacement and new family-formation rate. This new stage is the market maturity stage. The first sign of its advent is evidence of market saturation. This means that most consumer companies or households that are sales prospects will be owning or using the product. Sales now grow about on a par with the population.
Market Decline
The product begins to lose consumer appeal and sales drift downward, such as when buggy whips lose out with the advent of automobiles and when silk loses out to nylon.
When market maturity tapers off and consequently comes to an end, the product enters Stage 4—market decline. In all cases of maturity and decline the industry is transformed. Few companies are able to weather the competitive storm. A few companies do indeed weather the storm, sustaining life through the constant descent that now clearly characterizes the industry. Production gets concentrated into fewer hands. Prices and margins get depressed. Consumers get bored.