PLM (Product Lifecycle Management): a key to manage supply chain complexity

The ability to optimize the supply chain is becoming the critical issue for companies to win the competitive advantage. Furthermore, all members of a given supply chain must work together to respond to the changes of market demands rapidly. PLM enables a supply chain to become much more competitive by an effective collaboration among customers, developers, suppliers and manufacturers at various lifecycle stages of a product.
Our work contributes to the field of integrated engineering, specifically the integrated logistics in the early phases of the product lifecycle using PLM.
The supply chain is a complex system and like any complex system, solutions are found by compromise.
In this paper, we proposed conceptual models to solve formally the compromise between PLM and mathematical models to optimize the supply chain.
With the proposed approach, we have avoided the global optimization of the supply chain (high time solution, approximate solution, complex models, unrealistic hypothesis…) The complexity was treated part by part by local optimization, the solution will be evolved to be more realistic by a continuous optimization.