Organizations generate an abundance of product data throughout the product lifecycle critical for decision making, business system data exchange, and various product efforts. This data often resides in formats and locations that inhibit collaboration and the ability to keep this data current, meaningful and accessible.

Enterprises also desire to institutionalize best practices, compliance procedures, and lean processes throughout the organization and capture metrics for process improvement.

Enterprise Data Management is the digital backbone environment for PLM solutions enhancing collaboration and coordination among contributors and business systems in the product lifecycle. EDM allows enterprises to:

• Establish standards, security and formats, that enhance the capture, management, transformation and sharing of data while keeping it current for all users of the data
• Institutionalize best practices, lean processes, and compliance procedures with metrics for continuous improvement
• Permit the access and utilization of product data within the context of the task at hand such as:
  • Designing in context in a multi-cad environment
  • Establishing an Enterprise BOM containing the whole product definition (mechanical, electrical/electronic and software) and all product configurations and variants
  • Allowing after sales product support and services feedback to engineering.
• Establish enterprise level change management to ensure incorporation of changes from any source into the full product lifecycle efforts.

Enterprise Data Management is the core of an affective PLM solution that ensures organizations can establish, optimize, and execute from a single source of product data and processes that will support innovation and collaboration across all elements of the value chain.