Life cycle data management: first step towards a new product lifecycle management standard

Nowadays, companies need to focus on efficiency problems, assuring, at the same time, products to be compliant with quality standards, providing a full product support and managing suppliers' and customers’ relationships. According to these needs, product is reassuming a central role as enterprise value creator. In literature, many authors agree that a correct and effective management of the product lifecycle could reduce costs by gaining, meanwhile, a higher customer satisfaction and brand loyalty. This kind of approach needs an integrated management of all product-related information and calls for a wide standardisation activity. Today, a data model, capable of collecting all the information regarding the product along its lifecycle, is still missing. This article aims at providing a concrete answer to this urgent industrial need, presenting the steps taken towards the creation of a new product lifecycle management standard, named life cycle data management. The development of this new standard is an effort to provide an effective and reliable information model to manage all product lifecycle data and information.