Abstract. PLM encompasses a wide array of expertise, from designing green products to digital factories, with perspectives ranging from an IT standpoint to business strategies, encompassing products, processes and services. Hence, identifying the contours of PLM as a science through the themes, trends and clusters of its scientific literature is very challenging. At the same time, being able to portray PLM will benefit the PLM community, including researchers and practitioners, and should help foresee its future. This work examines PLM research bibliometric trends over the last ten years. We review the scientific literature published in English from 2005 to 2014 in peer-reviewed journals and conferences. Paper keywords are analyzed so as to identify trends and reveal the clusters of related themes based on the occurrences of words and the frequency of associations between them. Amongst the findings we observe that PLM coverage is both very large (2847 keywords being used over a decade) and very thin (2134 of these keywords appear only once in the decade). We also observe that the keyword showing the highest increase is Building Information Modeling (BIM).

Purpose -In today's globalized economy, distributed collaboration in engineering is important. Participants of engineering teams, with their specific knowledge situated in different locations, must be able to work together as efficiently and as comfortably as possible to provide an optimum contribution to product development. This paper aims to improve the effectiveness of internet based communication. Design/methodology/approach -Analysis of the current situation was carried out from different perspectives. First, an in-depth state-of-the-art study of existing hardware and software concepts was done. Second, these tools were evaluated by collaboration experiments. Finally, a concept for improved internet collaboration was elaborated and implemented. Findings -The main technical method used in this concept is a data overlay which allows different interactive information levels to be mapped on top of a video stream. In addition, eye-to-eye video conferencing hardware and a perceptive user interactions system are combined in an integrated system. Practical implications -An application framework was developed, which integrates the different technologies. Using this framework, three application scenarios were implemented and tested. One focusing on brainstorming using the metaplan-technique, second is used to build function-structures and the third allows engineers to plan a plant on 2D, while it is shown in 3D. Originality/value -Participants can now interact with digital information objects, yet being able to directly face their colleague and discuss simultaneously with the use of gestures such as pointing on objects. Users are free to adjust dynamically their focus between digital information and video by choosing transparency levels.

Looking back at the past 20 years of experience in implementation and customization of PLM applications, it can be observed that the technological complexity of the systems has increased dramatically, but it does not match the growing complexity of the business. These observations are discussed in research as well as in the PLM blogger community. Vendors implement the new technologies primarily on the upper application levels, which produces on one side applications with the latest technology, that represent the latest research trends. On the other hand, on the lower levels of the architectures often use the same (old) technologies. The increasing number of integrated capabilities creates more diverse PLM-systems. And thus, creates a broader customer base. However, this brings the individual company and existing customers only a limited benefit. In contrast, systems increase in complexity, which is barely manageable-from the vendors and especially from the customer's perspective. The result is little added value and at the high price of lost flexibility. This increase in system complexity, does not coincide with the increase of complexity of enterprises, which is mainly driven by growing organizational complexity (collaboration, decentralization) and increasing product complexity. Industrial companies require a deeper and better support of their existing processes and greater flexibility in adapting the tools to a changing business environment. These findings result from a structured review of more than 30 PLM projects in various industries, from SME's to globally active large companies, 6 primary cases will be presented in this article.

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With the uprising discussion around digitization, the value of product data has reached a new level. Product Lifecycle Management aims to play a core role in enabling the digital transformation in industry. The focus of PLM has traditionally been on the management of processes and data to define product types while many concepts of digitization rest upon individual product instances. In the context of current PLM implementations, this new perspective is not yet widely understood. A model that explains the interaction of product type and its instances along the business processes is missing. This essay suggests a PLM reference model that separates the lifecycles of product types and product instance. Four phases in a closed loop process explain the interaction between type and instance and how they are connected to the business processes of a company. The model results from a series of workshops with industrial experts and was applied in several industrial projects.

Product lifecycle management (PLM) encompasses a wide array of expertise, from designing green products to knowledge representation techniques. This paper characterises PLM as a research domain through the themes and clusters of a decade of scientific literature. Authors' keywords from 1,390 research papers published from 2005 to 2015 are analysed. The co-occurrence of these 2,947 normalised authors' keywords, connected in pairs via 11,289 edges, indicates how PLM research themes relate to each other to form communities-or clusters. These communities are revealed by filtering the network according to the weights of the network's edges. The PLM core cluster, the PLM global cluster and the PLM overall cluster are distinguished based on the level of filtering, thus unveiling increasing levels of detail. The four major communities composing the PLM global cluster are 'interoperability', 'ontology', 'product data management' and 'lifecycle assessment'. The PLM overall cluster also reveals the 'intelligent product' community, which relates to the Industry 4.0 phenomenon. The BIM community is revealed as well, but remains isolated from the PLM overall cluster.

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