Dis)similarities of PLM and Lean Thinking

In the last decades, the global challenges pushed companies to adopt new manufacturing technologies and management systems. "Lean manufacturing" is the result of such pressure for the production improvement. The success of this practice promoted its application to other industrial and managerial areas. Today "Lean thinking" principles are well entrenched in the engineering profession. Under the same competitive stress, the industrial design area developed the Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) to improve the design processes. PLM deals with the creation, modification and exchange of product information throughout the product's lifecycle reducing waste due to duplicated or missed information. PLM operates on the three main dimensions in the enterprise: people (Who), product data (What) and time (When). Moreover, PLM final goal is to establish a fourth aspect: the knowledge management (How). Despite these benefits, the concepts of PLM are not yet fully understood by the industry. Since 2007, Politecnico di Torino started didactic programs based on PLM to support the adoption of PLM processes in design, manufacturing, engineering and management. Today we understand that PLM is an outcome of the Lean thinking approach, and such knowledge helped us in overrunning the problems of PLM diffusion and implementation. The analogies between Lean thinking and PLM are thoroughly discussed in this paper since they facilitate the transfer of methods between the two approaches