Developing the Requirements of a PLM/ALM Integration: An Industrial Case Study

Abstract

The digitization of the industry, the drive towards smart factories as well as the Internet of Production (IoP) require rising smartness of products and services. Smart physical products are often mechatronic products that include increasing amounts of software. The development of software, however, comes along with new challenges for companies specialized in developing mechanical, electrical or electronic products. Some of these challenges address the product lifecycle management (PLM)-related business and work processes. The management of software lifecycles requires a much more rigorous requirements management. Furthermore, special solutions for management of source code in distributed development teams are needed. The build-process and testing activities need to be conducted in a systematic manner. The generation and provision of different licensing models need to be mastered and finally the issue of security needs to be addressed for any product that can be networked—which by the way is a strategic target of nearly any product developing company. Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) covers many of the above-mentioned issues. IT solutions for ALM are comparable to traditional PLM solutions, but focus particularly on software as a product. Thus, these systems have become widely used by software companies in the same manner as PLM solutions belong to the standard enterprise IT environment of companies developing physical products. With software penetrating traditional physical products, product managers, product developers, manufacturing staff etc. need to work with both, PLM and ALM, since neither solution is able to cover both domains sufficiently. However, ALM and PLM solutions feature redundant functionality. Thus, best practices for the systematic integration of ALM and PLM are required.