Are we PLM yet? A beginners introduction to product lifecycle management for KiCad
The Teardown 2025 schedule is not yet finalized.
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If you’re a maker or hobbyist, you may have come across terms like PDM, PLM, or MRP, and thought to yourself “someone has been eating too much alphabet soup!” Even if you’ve been involved in bringing a hardware product to life, you may or may not have been exposed to these terms and the systems they represent.
These acronyms stand for Product Data Management (PDM), Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), and Material Requirements Planning (MRP). They represent three complementary software systems that work together to manage product information over the lifecycle of a hardware product.
In this talk, we’ll focus specifically on Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) software. We’ll cover what a PLM system is used for and how it differs from PDM or MRP systems. We’ll discuss when and why you might want to consider adopting PLM software as part of your hardware development process, and explore some PLM options available for KiCad users.
Finally, we’ll walk through a concrete example showing how to integrate KiCad with Aligni, a cloud-based PLM software offering a free tier for open-source hardware organizations. This will include a discussion on KiCad database libraries, with specific instructions on how to configure a database library to sync with an Aligni part master database.
Attendees should expect to walk away with the knowledge required to integrate a basic PLM workflow into their KiCad-based development process (using Aligni or another PLM system).