What is worth reading in PLM.
Books, papers and articles on PLM, new product development, innovation, configuration management and modularization — each with a brief summary and our editorial judgment on who should read it and why.
Product design and business model strategies for a circular economy
Nancy M. P. Bocken, Ingrid de Pauw, Conny Bakker, Bram van der Grinten · 2016 · Journal of Industrial and Production Engineering (Taylor & Francis)
This widely cited open-access paper builds a framework that links circular product design strategies with business model strategies for a circular economy.
Our verdict: Worth reading — free. A concise, practical framework that connects circular design choices with business models; a good bridge between sustainability goals and product development decisions.
Read the full review →Organizational Culture and Leadership
Edgar H. Schein, Peter A. Schein · 5th edition · 2016 · Wiley
Schein's foundational work on organizational culture explains how culture forms, how leaders shape it, and how underlying assumptions drive behavior in organizations.
Our verdict: Recommended reading. Useful for examining established assumptions about information ownership, functional autonomy and collaboration that may affect PLM adoption — the cultural layer beneath process and tool change.
Read the full review →Six Myths of Product Development
Stefan Thomke, Donald G. Reinertsen · 2012 · Harvard Business Review, May 2012
The article challenges six common assumptions about product development: that high resource utilization improves performance, that processing work in large batches is efficient, that development plans should be followed strictly, that work should start as early as possible, that more features are always better, and that projects succeed when teams are fully loaded.
Our verdict: Recommended reading. A short, accessible summary of Reinertsen's flow economics — the fastest way to understand why overloaded development organizations are slow, and a good article to hand to skeptical managers.
Read the full review →Design Structure Matrix Methods and Applications
Steven D. Eppinger, Tyson R. Browning · 2012 · MIT Press
A comprehensive treatment of Design Structure Matrix (DSM) methods for modeling and analyzing dependencies in product architectures, organizations and development processes.
Our verdict: Recommended reading for architects and method specialists. The standard work on DSM: rigorous but practical, and directly applicable to modularization, interface management and development process analysis.
Read the full review →Leading Change
John P. Kotter · 2012 edition, with a new preface by the author · 2012 · Harvard Business Review Press
Kotter's classic on organizational change presents an eight-step process for leading transformation: establishing urgency, building a guiding coalition, creating a vision, communicating it, empowering action, generating short-term wins, consolidating gains and anchoring change in the culture.
Our verdict: Recommended supporting reading. A general change-leadership framework — useful for PLM sponsorship, a shared direction and maintaining organizational momentum. It is not PLM-specific.
Read the full review →Closed-loop PLM for intelligent products in the era of the Internet of things
Dimitris Kiritsis · 2011 · Computer-Aided Design, Vol. 43, pp. 479–501
The paper describes closed-loop PLM: using information gathered from products during use, service and end of life to support decisions across the whole lifecycle.
Our verdict: Worth reading for the vision. An early, influential statement of connecting PLM with field data from products in use — the foundation for today's IoT-enabled PLM, service lifecycle management and digital twins.
Read the full review →Engineering change: An overview and perspective on the literature
Timothy A. W. Jarratt, Claudia M. Eckert, Nicholas H. M. Caldwell, P. John Clarkson · 2011 · Research in Engineering Design, Vol. 22, pp. 103–124
A comprehensive review of the engineering change literature, covering the change process, change propagation, change prediction and the factors that make changes to released product information difficult and expensive.
Our verdict: Recommended reading for anyone working on change processes. The best single overview of engineering change management: it explains why changes propagate and what makes them costly — the problem that PLM change workflows exist to control.
Read the full review →Product lifecycle management – from its history to its new role
Sergio Terzi, Abdelaziz Bouras, Debashi Dutta, Marco Garetti, Dimitris Kiritsis · 2010 · International Journal of Product Lifecycle Management, Vol. 4, No. 4, pp. 360–389
Written after broad consultation among the authors and with scientists and leading actors in the PLM field, the paper discusses PLM as a reference term for a set of developments in the industrial community.
Our verdict: Worth reading for context. A well-cited academic overview of where PLM came from and what it consists of — useful background for anyone writing or teaching about PLM.
Read the full review →The Principles of Product Development Flow
Second Generation Lean Product Development
Donald G. Reinertsen · 2009 · Celeritas Publishing
Reinertsen adds an economic and flow perspective to product development, applying queueing theory and lean thinking to the management of engineering work.
Our verdict: Recommended reading for anyone managing development capacity. It changes how you think about utilization, batch sizes and queues in engineering — dense, but the most rigorous treatment of why development work stalls.
Read the full review →Product Lifecycle Management
Antti Saaksvuori, Anselmi Immonen · 3rd edition · 2008 · Springer
A compact introduction to product lifecycle management (formerly, in a narrower sense, product data management) for companies in manufacturing, high technology and service industries facing shorter lifecycles and pressure to bring products to market faster.
Our verdict: Worth reading as a foundation. A clear, compact introduction to product structures, PLM systems, integration and deployment — good for building a shared vocabulary, though the technology examples predate cloud PLM and the digital thread.
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