Lightweight product lifecycle information management for small enterprises

In an increasingly competitive and global market, small enterprises can benefit just as much from Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) as larger enterprises. However, the software currently available to support PLM is aimed at larger enterprises and does not entirely suit the more flexible business processes and heterogeneous systems environment of smaller enterprises. We argue that some of the most important benefits of PLM may be achieved by small enterprises using the combination of a full-featured CAD system with lightweight visualization formats and a system of overlaid annotations that may be applied to a model regardless of its format. We outline a proof-of-concept implementation of these ideas and indicate where further work is needed.