Establishing A Process to Enable Improved Product Life Cycle Management

This thesis focuses on establishing the product life cycle management process at the case company. The objective is to create immediate and transparent product identification and traceability for a manufacture company of power supplies. The study discusses the topic from a perspective of after-sales services. The study based on the action research methodology, which has similar study methods as a case study methodology. The action research notifies the influence of company business and individual aspects to the topic, where biases of the interviewees and author himself was reduced interviewing several stakeholders of the case company during CSA and proposal stages. This study revealed challenges of the product management. The product information is not supporting the product life cycle assessment or product structure identification in a product maintenance process; therefore, product data management is investigated over products life cycle process and business process. The result of this study indicates the meaning of good process design, where once created process data can be directly utilized in other processes to achieve cost efficiency in products life cycle. The PDM / PLM process is described for the case company. It is recommended to develop product life cycle management on the business processes. The company is operating in the business area, where product information is well instructed by regulations and standards. The outcome of this study provides an order of subprocesses in perspective of product life cycle. It defines parameters and tools to the product traceability in a customer service and product maintenance in cases of product crisis. A knowledge about the employees’ responsibility in product traceability process is worth to increase throughout the company processes, where this study can be used as reference