PLM and Lean: two complementary pillars for the company

Faced to a constant evolving environment, enterprises install tools derived from methods which aim at increasing operational agility. These methods have shown their relevance by promoting axes of improvement in specific sectors without however measuring the global impact of the modifications on the rest of the enterprise. In this article, we focus on two approaches, Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) and Lean, in order to analyze their complementarities regarding this search of agility. If the contribution of Lean to the agility is obvious, that of PLM is less. First, because PLM evolves in a world different from that of Lean (Production world for Lean / Engineering world for PLM). Second, because of current vision and industrial practice of PLM, restricted to PLM tools which are heavy to deploy, deeply structuring even fossilizing information assets. The aim of this paper is to show how the PLM contributes to the enterprise agility. To approach the question, and since that Lean is obviously contributing to enterprise agility, we analyze the complementarities between Lean and PLM.