System life cycle management

The digitization and networking of physical products, software and services within the framework of Industry 4.0, is increasingly leading to the creation of complex product systems. They must be constantly equipped with new functions during their development and sometimes very long life cycles. In order to ensure smooth operation and to be able to effectively implement smart engineering concepts, it is crucial to have a continuous life cycle management, which ensures safe and efficient access to consistent and up-to-date product data over the entire product life cycle. 

In this case, the increasing proportion of software in products, as well as its impact on user interfaces, networking, communication and complex reaction patterns, makes a further development of approaches from product life cycle management (PLM) to system life cycle management (SysLM) necessary. The core objective of SysLM is to create the conditions for better, more effective and efficient cooperation across divisional and company boundaries. The SysLM concept is based on the integration of different authoring systems along the entire life cycle of a product system and extends classic PLM to include the multidisciplinary consideration of the early phases of product development. 

System life cycle management solutions are responsible for product models and system models and processes. All development phases and the resulting models are included and networked, which allows the achievement of end-to-end traceability. The problems of product data management in different silos (e.g. ALM, PLM, or ERP) and in different organisational units and development processes taking place with different IT systems are thus overcome. In particular, the focus is on the following strategic SysLM action fields: 

• Integration of ALM, PDM and ERP systems
• Implementation of the digital master model (digital master and digital twin)
• Systems engineering (SE) and model-based systems engineering (MBSE) 
• Interdisciplinary variant, configuration and change management
• Collaborative PLM processes and organisational structures
• Agile product development processes and modular PLM architectures