Why Product Lifecycle Management is Crucial to the Success of the Semiconductor Industry

Reducing the cost of a formulation or design is a crucial benefit achieved by deploying PLM. With the advancements in PLM, capabilities expanded to include workflow, program management, and project control features that standardize, automate, and speed up operations. Today's PLM solutions empower companies to manage all the information about their products, from initial concept to production, within a single information environment that links product-related data and processes across a company's value chain of customers, employees, partners, and suppliers. All product data elements are incorporated and tied to internal and external teams' critical processes and tasks.

For many products, development doesn't end with delivery to customers. It requires continuous improvement and maintenance to complete a product lifecycle. PLM tools can greatly aid in improving aftermarket product management and enhance transparency. By capturing users' feedback from users, companies can utilize that data to enhance product development capabilities. PLM facilitates design & process modifications in the entire process to run at the same time. For instance, when a product is in the design and engineering phase, PLM permits changes to happen as the design is being tested. The ability to design in real-time accelerates the completion of a final product, which in turn speeds up time-to-market and subsequently profit margins.

The semiconductor value chain relies on a large number of materials and equipment suppliers spread across the globe. While the industry has adopted supplier relationship management (SRM) practices, these programs don't prove beneficial to a greater extent. Gaining visibility into such an extended hierarchy has been challenging for most industries, and it has become a nightmare, especially for semiconductor companies. An end-to-end PLM system dramatically enhances visibility into their supplier base, drives real-time decision-making for optimized capacity, and proactively manages semiconductor supply chain risk and resilience. When we talk about supplier & part compliance, Bill of materials (BOM) management takes center stage, forming the core of a PLM. Through PLM, companies can receive accurate product definitions, source information, manufacturing data, documentation, and pricing through BOM. BOM management encompasses engineering design, design collaboration, sourcing and procurement, and go-to-market strategy. Semiconductor companies need to ensure that BOM management also incorporates external collaboration with partners, suppliers, and sales channels to succeed in the market.

Gathering and scrutinizing the data sets across a semiconductor company's global supply chain permits employees from operations, engineering, and executive management to create several key metrics to achieve the semiconductor company's manufacturing goals intended to improve yield and quality, and productivity. PLM stands tall among enterprise applications because of its ability to integrate product design & development information and processes across the enterprise systems. PLM offers the processes and workflow for successfully managing products throughout the complete innovation lifecycle and across dispersed locations, within the company and throughout the value chain.

In a highly price-competitive electronics & semiconductor market where unit cost is an important decision factor in a high-volume contract, cost analysis, management, and visibility are critical to securing sourcing opportunities while maintaining profitability. PLM offers an integrated product cost management platform to help companies develop accurate and repeatable costing models that take into account multiple costing factors from materials, tooling, manufacturing processes, and the value chain. For instance, by actively supervising internal and external supply chain costs in the product design phase, companies have significantly reduced the cost of their products, and this has been made possible by deploying an integrated PLM system. Besides, cost transparency enhances a firm's profitability, and modern PLM software offers greater accuracy and cost savings that might otherwise get missed out on by semiconductor companies. Cost management helps gather information early on, letting manufacturers assess and avoid possible delivery or cost issues and preventing product launch hiccups.

Data management capabilities are often viewed as the foundational element for an effective PLM system, which comprises the main semiconductor product record. The functionality for this product record can be used to logically link all information related to a product and manage changes to that information over time, providing a single version of the truth across the value chain of customers, employees, partners, and suppliers. Capturing technical specifications, design definitions, production schedules, test reports, sourcing plans, quality inspections, etc., an effective PLM makes life simpler for semiconductor companies by capturing the right set of data and interpreting it to their business advantage. The real power of PLM data can be gained once combined with real-time data from IoT. By utilizing analytics to product design and product field data, companies are able to bring in product performance optimization, create new products, manage quality issues before the product is released to the market, etc.