PLM maturity assessment

Implementing Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) is a strategic issue in high-tech and electronic industry. Because PLM is an approach supported by an enterprise IT-system, it is difficult to assess how far a particular company has proceeded on the road to full implementation or what the relative position is compared to other companies in the branch. Maturity assessment methods have been developed and applied in other IT areas seem attractive for PLM too. This paper describes how a PLM Maturity assessment method has been applied in some 20 companies by students, who also added an open interview to the assessment questionnaire, such that the assessment scores can be related to background information of the company. This leads to some critical notes on the idea of maturity assessment.