Use of an open-source PLM solution to improve teamwork performance in product design courses

As Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) strategies are getting more and more common worldwide, developing countries have the increasing industrial need of engineers trained on these technologies -- This is motivating academic institutions to tackle this issue by integrating PLM in their curriculums -- This paper describes a pilot implementation of a PLM strategy in a Product Design Project Course at EAFIT University -- The PLM strategy is used to support the development of the design process and teamwork performed by students -- During two consecutive academic periods the course was analyzed, a PLM strategy was prepared and executed, and monitoring was carried out to obtain comparative data on the success of the implementation -- An evaluation was performed on the role this implementations can have in improving drawbacks that usually arise during the development of collaborative design projects amongst students -- Open Source PLM Software was employed to facilitate future application of these tools by the students themselves in their future employment