Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) is the process of managing the entire lifecycle of a product from its inception through the engineering, design and manufacture, as well as the service and disposal of manufactured products.

Goals of a PLM system are:

• Long-time archiving and traceability of data.
• A single source of truth and improved data quality.
• Store, exchange and present the data in a uniform way.
• Use data in business processes.

Very important aspects of PLM systems is that we store not only documents, but also a lot of interesting metadata along the documents, e.g. different versions, approval processes, comments, discussions etc.

The PLM systems at CERN focus mainly on the engineering documentation created during the "design" phase.

At CERN PLM collaborate with EAM systems in order to provide the full "cycle".