Perspectives of Users and Service Providers on Deployment Maturity Assessment: A Study of Product Lifecycle Management Systems (PLMS)

Product lifecycle management (PLM) is the activity of managing a product throughout its lifecycle – “from cradle to grave,” “from sunrise to sunset” (Stark J (2005) Product Lifecycle Management – 21st Century Paradigm for Product Realization. Springer, London). The management of product lifecycles is important since it involves all entities that exist along the value and supply chains of firms. Product lifecycle management systems (PLMS) have emerged as a potent resource used by firms to manage multiple activities required to develop, model, track, and manage manufactured products, including sales, maintenance, and product retirement. This research has been motivated by the massive investments (in the order of several million rupees) on acquiring PLMS and launching PLMS initiatives by various organizations in India, and the consequent need to analyze and assess their PLMS deployment maturity. Obviously, they (organizations) should want to know their PLMS deployment maturity with respect to both their present standing and relative to the industry. Assessment of PLMS deployment maturity of an organization serves as a good reference point to rate the success of its operations and the quality of its products. Venugopalan et al. (2009. A framework for assessing the maturity of product lifecycle management practices. In: Proceedings of PDMA India IV annual international conference NPDC 2009: new product development – challenges in meltdown times, Chennai, India, December 17–19 2009. pp. 159–171) have proposed a framework for assessing the deployment maturity of PLMS, and the same has been adapted for this study. It has been used to assess the perspectives of PLMS deployment maturity between PLMS users and PLMS service providers by means of preparing and administering a custom-designed questionnaire, and collating and analyzing the responses using appropriate statistical techniques. This will also enable organizations to benchmark their PLMS deployment maturity relative to others. This work analyzes the deployment maturity of PLMS components of 29 Indian organizations using nonparametric statistical tests.