Product lifecycle management approach to design a product and its optimised supply chain

This paper deals with two major issues for current manufacturing organisations: the product design and the supply chain design. These problems are usually solved separately, but in recent years, approaches were proposed to tackle these two issues together. Integrating product and supply chain optimisation is relevant. Indeed, the design decisions made in the early phases of product design will have significant impact upon future manufacturing and logistical activities. In this paper, we investigate more precisely the role of product lifecycle management (PLM) as an integrating element and a supply chain optimiser. PLM is a business strategy that aims to collaboratively manage the product centred activities during the whole product lifecycle and through the extended enterprise. In fact, PLM enables a supply chain to become much more competitive by an effective collaboration among all its partners throughout the product lifecycle, particularly, their involvement in the early phases of product design. We propose a methodology based on PLM approach to design simultaneously the product and its optimised supply chain.