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* Welcome * Welcome to 2PLM, an e-zine distributed about every two weeks. This issue includes :
by John Stark Springer Publishers has requested a new edition of Product Lifecycle Management: Paradigm for 21st Century Product Realization . If you have read this book, your feedback on how to improve it would be appreciated. Please send it to pdm@2pdm.com. If you haven't read Product Lifecycle Management: Paradigm for 21st Century Product Realization, your thoughts about useful content for a PLM book would be appreciated. Please send your feedback to pdm@2pdm.com. Input from readers in other categories should be sent to pdm@2pdm.com. 
* Life's too short! * by David Potter The life of a product does not end once it has been conceived, designed and produced. Yet how many PLM solutions, and to what extent does current PLM thinking, take proper account of the entire life of the product? Right now, the "life" in PLM is too short! Concern for the environment is continually increasing both regulatory pressure and voluntary efforts to reduce materials consumption and waste in the drive for sustainable products. But it is not enough for products simply to be designed and produced in a more environmentally friendly way; sustainability must also be ensured by actively managing products during the middle of their lifetime and at the end of it. Active management during middle and end of life need not be an overhead. There is plenty of scope to increase competitive advantage and create new business opportunities through better stewardship throughout all phases of a product's life. Therefore "whole-of-life" Lifecycle Management is a reality that we will be driven to deal with. A product's life may be long, and other lifecycles, such as supply chains and service schedules, will intersect and impact the life of the product. During this series, I have argued that Closed Loop Lifecycle Management (CL2M) is the way forward for whole-of-life PLM and lifecycle management in general. "Closing the Information Loops across All Phases of All Kinds of Lifecycles" is the way to provide the information exchange and infrastructure that is pre-requisite to address both the challenges and considerable opportunities of whole-of-life Lifecycle Management. Does this mean that traditional PLM solutions and thinking are becoming obsolete? Of course not; however "traditional" PLM suppliers and practitioners should examine how their offerings need to adapt, not only to become information providers to enable more effective middle and end of life management, but also to be able to exploit information from those later phases in order to further improve the beginning of life processes. So, what is standing in the way?
David Potter is Chief Technical Officer, Promise Innovation International Oy., and former Chairman of the Project Steering Board of the EU PROMISE Project. "Life's too short!" was written as the seventh and final part of a series of articles on Why CL2M is of significance to PLM practitioners.
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