PLM opportunities and weaknesses to support collaborative engineering.

International audienceThe aim of this paper is to discuss the opportunities and the weaknesses of Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) technology to support collaborative design process. Whereas Product Lifecycle Management tools are deployed in many firms, only few studies highlight their impact on design processes. Engineering literature focus on the technology itself (and not on processes) and management literature does not deeply investigate this matter. The study is based on a 3 years analysis of a PLM system project in a large French company, int the sector of small domestic appliances. The research design is based on a single case study which corresponds to a business unit dedicated to Linen Care product family. In the first part, we highlight how PLM offers functionalities that facilitate the stakeholder coordination during the design process (Stark 2004). This IT tool offers a structured framework for collaborative Engineering and fosters the definition and standardisation of workflows and intermediary objects that are produced and used during the design process. In the second part of the paper, we discuss the weaknesses of that technology to support the day to day collaboration and the creation of new objects. We show that PLM enables to share elaborated design information whenever it fails to support data elaboration process. Social aspects of collaboration like confidence, engagement are not taken into account in the PLM systems. Finally, we highlight that the implicit model of coordination in PLM exclude cooperation. This case study allows us to discuss the necessity fort different collaborative workspaces which refer to different design collaboration needs