A vision upon plm as strategic instrument for concurrent engineering and for sustainable product design

Abstract

A lot of specialists, both academia and industrials, agree that nowadays Romanian manufacturing industry is forced to unprecedented transformations, determined by the complex present conditions of European integration. Of course, trends like globalization and products complexity growing, in the sense of their variety, have important impacts upon production and upon all its support functions. Productive companies such as machine manufacturing enterprises usually have to manage a great number of variants in their product portfolios and they also must be agile and achieve short delivery times, as long as most of the customers ask for specific, individually developed solutions, within a fast changing market environment. The present paper comes to emphasize a vision upon PLM as a strategic instrument for concurrent engineering and for sustainable product design, basing on the results of a research experiment of implementing a PLM solution within a network composed of technical universities, research institutes and productive enterprises. In this context, PLM is outstood as a sustaining pillar for the discrete manufacturing in the productive company, entirely able to help in solving the above mentioned problems, no matter that there still exists considerable confusion among the specialists from enterprises as IT users, concerning the usefulness of the related software applications. On the other hand, there is presented in the paper that the concept of Sustainable Product Design must be considered in relation with Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) and with the Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR). The concepts of Reducing, Reusing, Recycling and Recovery of material resources are also nominated as being very important in providing Sustainable Product Design.