To be successful in today's competitive business environment, an organization needs to align its strategic goals to increase top and bottom line improvements while better responding to customers' changing demands. To make that happen, an enterprise needs to effectively capture, manage, and leverage all intellectual property pertaining to its products. Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) is a prudent business strategy that business needs to adopt to improve product quality and stay successful in the market. By implementing a Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) system, companies can simplify and reduce each phase of the product development process. While a PLM system is implemented to support all engineering processes and address challenges with continual new product introductions, there are often budget restraints. Due to these restrains, quality processes are often managed manually with in-house tools such as Excel spreadsheets. Using PLM as a quality platform can help organizations not only address the challenges and provide additional benefits. · Get Accurate Product Information - PLM provides a holistic approach to managing data, and offers an easy and central location to track and manage all product related information. Using PLM as a platform for quality management, helps streamline independent data sources to deliver more accurate product information, improved knowledge sharing, design processes, and better visibility. · Identify Areas for improvement - Using PLM as a quality platform provides accurate product and quality information in real-time across the enterprise. All reporting capabilities for performance metrics and trend analysis can help identify areas of improvement as well as support continuous improvement initiatives. · Stay Compliant - PLM ensures that organizations have the right processes in place. PLM systems facilitate compliance management by storing all compliance data, automatically tracking all product changes, managing all quality items such as CAPAs, and providing the necessary audit reports. · Improve Product Design - While PLM delivers key functionality to streamline each phase of a product's lifecycle, implementing a quality system at the product concept stage in PLM offers visibility into product design that can help avoid potential manufacturing issues. · Reduce Cost of Quality - PLM reduces cost of quality by identifying key problem areas. It also helps adopt improvement practices that result in efficiencies such as higher quality products from suppliers, fewer product returns and shorter time-to-market, which contribute to a lower cost of quality. On the whole PLM Services focuses on reducing time-to-market of products, maintaining engineering efficiency and optimizing plant productivity, as well as improving product traceability and quality. While PLM was intended to manage product data throughout the product life cycle, the right PLM software solution is crucial to offer easy and instant access to product data including specifications, and other parameters and documentation. Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/9315320