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PLM+ALM: Product Management Evolving into Systems of Systems
Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) software manages the lifecycle of a product, through all phases, including concept, design, manufacturing, and maintenance. PLM systems allow businesses to track the evolution of a product part over the lifecycle and to also manage variations of the parts for different products of the overall product portfolio. PLM systems are designed to manage physical products.
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) software manages the lifecycle of a software product, including project phases like architecture and design, source code, configuration management, quality assurance and testing, change management, and maintenance. ALM systems track variation across time, with tools like configuration management, but typically they do not support the concept of a product line portfolio.
As software increasingly is becoming an integral component of products, it increasingly makes sense to try to bring the worlds of PLM and ALM together. The integration of the two seems inevitable. Both types of software manage product lifecycles, but historically the design and operation of the two types of systems have been very different. Merging the two into a single integrated management system will be difficult.
Gautam Dutta, Siemens India Director of Marketing, said that “when we define ALM it is important to set a context, and the context is this new age of smart products. PLM is about the physical product, a car, a phone or some heavy farm machinery. ALM is about the intelligence or the software applications that drive it. The products are becoming systems of systems… These are multiple subsystems which have to work together as a system… All of them have to work together, and that’s where the ALM comes in. If you treat that subsystem as a part, then ALM is the science behind managing the continuous lifecycle of the software application development or in conjunction with the mechanical equipment.”
