Product development process reform is one of the most critical issue in the manufacturing industry where global business expansion has become the major challenge. Many manufacturers are promoting globalization of manufacturing process from the planning and engineering phase for the purpose of localization with the aim of transforming Product Oriented approach to Market Oriented approach. The PLM has become more important as product information sharing platform, in response to the trend of such globalization.

In our previous columns, we have explained about the “Integrated BOM to realize collaborative design beyond the organizational boundaries”, “Standardization of business processes and code systems to respond flexibly to the market changes”, “Planning BOM to manufacture the product that can be sold in emerging countries”, “Top-down reform procedures to minimize the IT system cost and achieve total optimization” etc as the requirements for a global PLM system that can execute the product development process reform successfully.

In this column, we will summarize some other points that need to be considered as the requirement of PLM system for global business expansion.

The number of companies that are taking measures to prevent the leakage of their technologies as a challenge at the time of global business expansion are increasing significantly. Many companies are paying close attention to measures that prevent the internal leakage of technical information such as leakage of technical information and confidential data due to employee retirement.

Unlike the times, when drawings and specifications were operated on the paper, currently they are mainly managed and operated on electronic data. In case of electronic data, risk of leakage of large amount of data at once is extremely high in addition to the fact that data leakage is difficult to identify. Especially, in the case of IT system that uses the database to manage the centralized data, necessary security measures need to be considered carefully during implementation phase. Furthermore, it can be said that measures to prevent the leakage of product technical information is the most important point that needs to be considered carefully in the PLM that handles the intellectual property of manufacturers such as drawings, specifications, recipes.

User will need to retrieve the confidential data from the database server to client PC and edit it at the time of sharing technical data globally by using PLM. Confidential data retrieved from database to client pc needs to be prevented from the malicious users within the company who will try to take out the confidential data outside the company by copying it to USB device, taking printout by printer, attaching with email. Only by strengthening the security measures to prevent the leakage of internal data outside the company, information can be shared globally by using PLM.

Furthermore, in recent years cyber-attack by external sources targeting on confidential data of the companies and cyber terrorist attack using ransomware software have an upward trend. In addition to conventional internal measures, it is also necessary to strengthen the security with vendors and external partners engaged in SCM and ecosystems.