The management of the Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) systems: A research agenda

Product lifecycle management (PLM) is one of the major strategic reorientations of organisational processes enabled by the development of information and communication technologies (such as customer relationship management (CRM) or supplychain management (SCM)). The objective of PLM is the creation of an integrated information environment on products of enterprise, in order to support the decisionmaking for product design and technical modification. Academic research on these systems is currently mainly focused on technical issues. Our understanding of human and managerial dimensions of these systems is still low, which is an obstacle to the ability of companies to improve design decisions by leveraging these technical and applicative evolutions. In this paper, we review the literature on PLM and we offer a research agenda with 14 research avenues on managerial issues of such PLM systems. We hope to encourage some of our colleagues to engage in these.