PLM audit in the telecommunication industry

The telecommunication industry is currently challenged by a strong growth in complexity. Enabled through the ongoing convergence process with the media and ICT industry, lots of new companies entered the telecommunication market challenging the incumbents. Controlling the higher level of complexity becomes crucial for the old-established market player. Taking the lessons learnt from the manufacturing industry, Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) appears as a holistic approach for coping with these challenges. Due to the fact that no common available PLM model exists for the communication service industry and also no standard PLM IT-solution is provided by the software industry, best practices knowledge for PLM is generally not available. Having anticipated this constraint the authors set up an international study on the Status Quo and Perspectives of PLM for illuminating this area. In a preparatory step PLM design elements and targets have been derived from a PLM model for the service industry. These elements established the basis for conducting the survey. Based on the data, three complexity groups have been formed. Within these groups the PLM implementation degree and PLM target fulfillments have been analysed for providing complexity group specific recommendations. These data sets as well as the validated correlation represent a unique database, which can be used for making comparisons between a company and its peer group in order to retrieve specific recommendations in the course of a PLM-audit. In this paper this approach will be described and applied for one company.