LLNL, Livermore, California, USA
Product lifecycle management (PLM) is the process of managing the entire lifecycle of a product from its conception, through design and manufacture, to service and disposal. The National Ignition Facility (NIF) can be considered one enormous product that is made up of hundreds of millions of individual parts and components (or products). The ability to manage and control the physical definition, status and configuration of the sum of all of these products is a monumental undertaking yet critical to the validity of the shot experiment data and the safe operation of the facility. NIF is meeting this challenge by utilizing an integrated and graded approach to implement a suite of commercial and custom enterprise software solutions to address PLM and other facility management and configuration requirements. It has enabled the passing of needed elements of product data into downstream enterprise solutions while at the same time minimizing data replication. Strategic benefits have been realized using this approach while validating the decision for an integrated approach where more than one solution may be required to address the entire product lifecycle management process.
