Wai M Cheung | Northumbria University (original) (raw)

Papers by Wai M Cheung

In the last decades, environmental footprint of the product manufacture has emerged as an importa... more In the last decades, environmental footprint of the product manufacture has emerged as an important public concern, causing manufacturers to re-assess their product’s environmental impacts. Responding to global outcry on global warming, world leaders have agreed to limit global temperature rise to less than 2°C above the temperature in pre-industrial times. As a result, governments and industrial leaders around the world have proposed a roadmap for 80% emissions reduction by 2050. The aim of this work develops a novel approach of linking Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and Lean manufacturing to reduce the negative environmental impacts of a plastic injection
moulded product. Products that use plastic as their primary source of raw materials are mainly produced by plastic injection processes. Although plastic injection
moulding has many benefits such as ‘high production rates’, there is a lack of through investigation on the effects of this process has on the environment such as
climate change, ozone depletion etc. This paper proposes a novel cross-functional mapping approach of linking lean-thinking and LCA. The implementation case study has been presented with the view to re-assess carbon footprint of an existing plastic product. The reported implementation work demonstrates that the adaptation of lean thinking and LCA could significantly minimise negative environmental impacts of a
plastic injection product. A case study indicates that the overall environmental impact has been reduced by approximately 40% in climate change, human toxicity, photochemical oxidant formation, acidification and eco-toxicity.

Product Data Management (PDM) systems and manufacturing models operate independently does not con... more Product Data Management (PDM) systems and manufacturing models operate independently does not constitute powerful solution in a distributed and collaborative product development and manufacturing environment. In addition there is also lack of research issues addressing the implementation of conceptual design and process planning stage to utilise PDM system, which offering collaborative development in a World Wide Web. To ensure competitive advantage, comprehensive system integration is needed in order to support and enhance the product development and manufacturing activities. This paper focuses on research concerned with providing this level of support through the use of an in-house manufacturing model and a commercially available PDM system. In particular it focuses on fundamental concept of the overall system integration ideas and methodologies. The manufacturing model and PDM system are based upon, respectively, the CAPABLE Aggregate Process Planning System developed by Design and Manufacturing Group, University of Durham and PTC Windchill.

The European Union implemented the End-of-Life Vehicle directive to deal with an estimated 6 mill... more The European Union implemented the End-of-Life Vehicle directive to deal with an estimated 6 million end-of-life vehicles each year. Existing literature describe the processes to deal with the waste at end-of-life of different products but there is a lack of information on the costing of these options. These costs remain a concern to automotive manufacturers. This paper therefore reports the end-of-life costs of vehicle components and also demonstrates how these costs can be predicted at the design stage. The proposed approach should help to decide whether the automotive parts are viable for remanufacture, refurbishment, recycling, or disposal from an economic perspective. Two different automotive parts have been selected as case studies to validate the approach. Assumptions were made during the development of the technique and based on the results, the proposed approach could potentially provide vehicle manufacturers a method of estimating the cost of end-of-life recovery processes of vehicle components.

Keywords: The early wind farm design stage Cleaner energy Environmental impact reduction Return o... more Keywords: The early wind farm design stage Cleaner energy Environmental impact reduction Return on investment a b s t r a c t This paper reports the development of a quantitative analysis system for selecting a greener and economically sustainable wind farm at the early design stage. A single wind turbine produces a limited amount of carbon emissions throughout its lifecycle. By taking a broader view, such as wind farms, collectively such an application would have a greater impact upon the environment and cost. Recent research on wind farms tends to focus on wind flow modelling to enable accurate prediction of power generation. Therefore, this paper presents a quantitative approach to predict a wind farm's lifetime (i) carbon emissions and intensity; (ii) potential energy production; (iii) return on investment and (iv) payback time from an early design perspective. The overall contribution of this work is to develop a quantitative approach to enable the selection of 'greener' designs for reducing the environmental impacts of a wind farm with hub heights between 44 m and 135 m while still considering its economic feasibility assessment. This newly developed system could potentially be used by top-management and engineers of wind turbine manufacturers and wind energy service providers for cleaner energy provision.

As the use of web-centric technology matures within the current market, one of the most widely us... more As the use of web-centric technology matures within the current market, one of the most widely used standardized data exchange formats is XML (Extensible Markup Language). This is due to the fact that XML-wrapped data can be used and understood by any application that is XML-enabled. This is one of the main factors this paper aims to exploit in order to tackle the problem of improving manufacturing product development in a distributed and collaborative environment within the WorldWide Web. The objective of this paper is to investigate how XML and the proposed standard XMI (XML Metadata Interchange) can be used as the mediation for associating a commercially available Product Data Management (PDM) system and a manufacturing system, which consists of manufacturing and design domains. In particular, the focus of this paper is to emphasise the way in which systems interoperate and deliver data solutions to enterprise information challenges.

This paper reports on a distributed design environment under development for product knowledge ma... more This paper reports on a distributed design environment under development for product knowledge management and information exchange. The system is able to use the company's existing base of knowledge and to push the manufacturing knowledge higher up into the design chain to reduce the need for costly and time consuming reworks and engineering changes. The design environment uses a knowledge based system Protégé and enables data/knowledge exchange through International Standards for Product Model Exchange (ISO STEP) and the Resource Description Framework.

Synopsis This paper reports on the progress of an investigation into, and development of, new met... more Synopsis This paper reports on the progress of an investigation into, and development of, new methodologies and techniques for the management of knowledge in a distributed and collaborative design environment at the conceptual stage. The paper briefly covers existing tools and techniques for collaborative design and knowledge management and proposes methods for overcoming the shortcomings of present techniques. A brief description of an application in the process of implementation is presented, along with a proposition for future development.

During the past three decades, cost estimation systems have experienced some major technological ... more During the past three decades, cost estimation systems have experienced some major technological innovations and paradigm shifts both in industry and academic research. There are numerous papers available reporting on research findings and the techniques used in cost estimation. This paper presents a review of current academic work and an evaluation of the available commercial cost estimation systems. However, there are few publications available covering current research and commercial applications, in particular in the area of cost estimation in product development. The aim of this paper is to provide the reader with an understanding of cost estimation techniques from the perspective of the past and present, their applications and commercial practice to support the product development processes.

Static system modelling for a manufacturing organisation does not closely reflect the manufacturi... more Static system modelling for a manufacturing organisation does not closely reflect the manufacturing process. A dynamic model more closely simulates the processes involved, and can provide a richer model. This also applies to cost modelling, where some operational details are assumed or obtained from other systems. In order to provide a holistic modelling system, an experimental system has been built to closely couple a generative cost modelling system and a discrete event simulation. This paper describes the system, its advantages and shortcomings, and the results obtained for the planning of an assembly process.

Cost estimating is a business process that is critical to the defence sector, where many products... more Cost estimating is a business process that is critical to the defence sector, where many products have low volumes and long life cycles. The nature of a defence system is often unique (for example, a naval platform) which consists of a number of subsystems and components. For the design of such a system cost estimating is a critical task, in particular the requirement to predict the cost throughout the system's lifetime. The aim of this paper therefore is to discuss an integrated approach that provides a general framework for through life costing in defence systems via the development of: (1) a generic data library to support designers and cost estimators, (2) data searching and transfer mechanisms to support a top-down and bottom-up hybrid cost modelling approach, (3) capturing reliability data to support product services. The paper is divided into several sections, first, a review of relevant research projects concerning integration and data capture for cost modelling. This is followed by a section, which highlights problems of performing cost estimates for low volume products, and subsequently the proposed solution, methods of cost estimation and example applications. Perhaps most importantly, the methods created in this research are able to enhance decision-making and accelerate the responsiveness of the business bidding process.

International Journal of Production Research, 2008

1. 'Advanced product development integration architecture : an out-of-box solution to support ... more 2008) 'Advanced product development integration architecture : an out-of-box solution to support distributed production networks.', International journal of production research., 46 (12). pp. 3185-3206.

International Journal of Computer Integrated Manufacturing, 2006

This paper discusses the theoretical aspects and applications of a novel methodology for exploiti... more This paper discusses the theoretical aspects and applications of a novel methodology for exploiting a knowledge management editor tool to structure organisational knowledge and integrate it with product development activities. An organisational knowledge framework for capturing and representing manufacturing know-how has been developed using an ontological approach. The captured knowledge is converted into the industrystandard eXtensible Mark-up Language (XML) and then shared within a web-centric Product Data Management (PDM) system to support a collaborative and distributed product development environment.

Computers in Industry, 2005

This paper reports on a collaborative product development and knowledge management platform for S... more This paper reports on a collaborative product development and knowledge management platform for Small to Medium Enterprises. It has been recognised that current Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) implementations are document oriented, have a non-customisable data model and inter-enterprise integration difficulties. To overcome these, an ontological knowledge management methodology utilising the semantic web initiative data formats was added to a PLM and an opensource alternative. Shortcomings of centralised architectures are highlighted and a solution using a de-centralised architecture proposed. This is implementable at low cost, the scalability increases in line with user numbers. Ontologies, rules and workflows are reusable and extendable.

This paper discusses the theoretical aspects and applications of a novel methodology for exploiti... more This paper discusses the theoretical aspects and applications of a novel methodology for exploiting a knowledge management editor tool to structure organisational knowledge. An organisational knowledge framework for capturing and representing "manufacturing know-how" has been developed using an ontological approach. The delivery mechanism for the application of the captured knowledge makes extensive use of web-based technologies. The captured knowledge is converted into an industry-standard format and then shared within a web-centric, Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) environment. The integrated knowledge encapsulation and knowledge distribution and management approach is used to support collaborative and distributed product development global basis.

The recent development of communication technology and hardware devices has made it possible for ... more The recent development of communication technology and hardware devices has made it possible for messages to reach anybody, anywhere at anytime. One such technology is Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networking. The use of this technology however, is limited to mobile phones and swapping music in the internet for home users. To deploy this development into industry, there is a requirement to improve to sharing information in a collaborative and distributed product developing environment. The aim of this paper is therefore to discuss the development of a framework to enhance the integrity of data sharing and efficiency of network communication for the collaboration of Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) and Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs). The main technologies used in the framework are the P2P decentralized network together with workflow technology and Product Life Management System (PLM). In addition, the paper is also highlighted the security issues arise to implement the P2P applications within the framework.

International Journal of Computer Integrated Manufacturing, 2003

Product Data Management (PDM) systems and their offspring, Collaborative Product Development and ... more Product Data Management (PDM) systems and their offspring, Collaborative Product Development and Product Lifecycle Management technologies, aim to bring engineering enterprises together, allowing seamless interoperability between different departments and throughout the extended enterprises. However, there are a number of shortcomings in the current crop of commercially available systems, such as the lack of design knowledge sharing, links with Enterprise Resource Planning systems, knowledge management tools and a generic standard for PDM system implementation. This paper presents a proposed software solution to some of the above problems. In particular, the paper describes methodologies being developed that are aimed at overcoming the lack of analysable product information at the conceptual stage of product design and manufacturing evaluation, along with the integration of such a concept design tool within a distributed environment. A leading PDM system is used to manage all the information and knowledge that is made available to internet/intranet users in a controlled manner. The international standard for exchange of product data model (STEP) is implemented to enable the integration of the design environment with manufacturing and enterprise resource management systems. In addition, the paper also introduces three other recent/ ongoing projects, being carried out at Cranfield University, in the application of PDM, knowledge management and STEP standard for integrated manufacturing businesses.

Current working methods and techniques in collaborative, distributed and knowledge intensive engi... more Current working methods and techniques in collaborative, distributed and knowledge intensive engineering design environment have a number of problems. Applications and techniques for m anaging the knowledge within the lifecycle are either too inflexible, and so remain unused, or completely uncoordinated resulting in the use of incoherent documents and filling systems to store information in an ad-hoc manner. This ongoing project, working with industrial partners, aims to provide a middle-ground application and methodology to enable users to define their ontologies from building blocks of Resource Description Framework schema based components. This project also includes the use of STEP Application Protocol-224 models within the knowledge base to define the feature and geometry of the designed component and aims to integrate the process element using XML Process Description Language into the knowledge base in the future.

Books by Wai M Cheung

While most SMEs in general are willing to invest into PLM systems, many are still apprehensive to... more While most SMEs in general are willing to invest into PLM systems, many are still apprehensive to the sometimes large initial investment to be made in terms of both software cost and the time needed to implement and integrate such system into their digital enterprise technology infrastructure. In light of this, it is crucial for their decision makers not only to understand the current PLM market, but also to become familiar with emerging trends and future developments in order to select a PLM solution that best fit the needs of their enterprise. In this chapter, the authors summarize a detailed analysis of the PLM market with the aim to provide educators, students, and decision makers in industry with an
overview of the current PLM market as a whole. In addition, emerging trends and future developments are addressed.

In the last decades, environmental footprint of the product manufacture has emerged as an importa... more In the last decades, environmental footprint of the product manufacture has emerged as an important public concern, causing manufacturers to re-assess their product’s environmental impacts. Responding to global outcry on global warming, world leaders have agreed to limit global temperature rise to less than 2°C above the temperature in pre-industrial times. As a result, governments and industrial leaders around the world have proposed a roadmap for 80% emissions reduction by 2050. The aim of this work develops a novel approach of linking Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and Lean manufacturing to reduce the negative environmental impacts of a plastic injection
moulded product. Products that use plastic as their primary source of raw materials are mainly produced by plastic injection processes. Although plastic injection
moulding has many benefits such as ‘high production rates’, there is a lack of through investigation on the effects of this process has on the environment such as
climate change, ozone depletion etc. This paper proposes a novel cross-functional mapping approach of linking lean-thinking and LCA. The implementation case study has been presented with the view to re-assess carbon footprint of an existing plastic product. The reported implementation work demonstrates that the adaptation of lean thinking and LCA could significantly minimise negative environmental impacts of a
plastic injection product. A case study indicates that the overall environmental impact has been reduced by approximately 40% in climate change, human toxicity, photochemical oxidant formation, acidification and eco-toxicity.

Product Data Management (PDM) systems and manufacturing models operate independently does not con... more Product Data Management (PDM) systems and manufacturing models operate independently does not constitute powerful solution in a distributed and collaborative product development and manufacturing environment. In addition there is also lack of research issues addressing the implementation of conceptual design and process planning stage to utilise PDM system, which offering collaborative development in a World Wide Web. To ensure competitive advantage, comprehensive system integration is needed in order to support and enhance the product development and manufacturing activities. This paper focuses on research concerned with providing this level of support through the use of an in-house manufacturing model and a commercially available PDM system. In particular it focuses on fundamental concept of the overall system integration ideas and methodologies. The manufacturing model and PDM system are based upon, respectively, the CAPABLE Aggregate Process Planning System developed by Design and Manufacturing Group, University of Durham and PTC Windchill.

The European Union implemented the End-of-Life Vehicle directive to deal with an estimated 6 mill... more The European Union implemented the End-of-Life Vehicle directive to deal with an estimated 6 million end-of-life vehicles each year. Existing literature describe the processes to deal with the waste at end-of-life of different products but there is a lack of information on the costing of these options. These costs remain a concern to automotive manufacturers. This paper therefore reports the end-of-life costs of vehicle components and also demonstrates how these costs can be predicted at the design stage. The proposed approach should help to decide whether the automotive parts are viable for remanufacture, refurbishment, recycling, or disposal from an economic perspective. Two different automotive parts have been selected as case studies to validate the approach. Assumptions were made during the development of the technique and based on the results, the proposed approach could potentially provide vehicle manufacturers a method of estimating the cost of end-of-life recovery processes of vehicle components.

Keywords: The early wind farm design stage Cleaner energy Environmental impact reduction Return o... more Keywords: The early wind farm design stage Cleaner energy Environmental impact reduction Return on investment a b s t r a c t This paper reports the development of a quantitative analysis system for selecting a greener and economically sustainable wind farm at the early design stage. A single wind turbine produces a limited amount of carbon emissions throughout its lifecycle. By taking a broader view, such as wind farms, collectively such an application would have a greater impact upon the environment and cost. Recent research on wind farms tends to focus on wind flow modelling to enable accurate prediction of power generation. Therefore, this paper presents a quantitative approach to predict a wind farm's lifetime (i) carbon emissions and intensity; (ii) potential energy production; (iii) return on investment and (iv) payback time from an early design perspective. The overall contribution of this work is to develop a quantitative approach to enable the selection of 'greener' designs for reducing the environmental impacts of a wind farm with hub heights between 44 m and 135 m while still considering its economic feasibility assessment. This newly developed system could potentially be used by top-management and engineers of wind turbine manufacturers and wind energy service providers for cleaner energy provision.

As the use of web-centric technology matures within the current market, one of the most widely us... more As the use of web-centric technology matures within the current market, one of the most widely used standardized data exchange formats is XML (Extensible Markup Language). This is due to the fact that XML-wrapped data can be used and understood by any application that is XML-enabled. This is one of the main factors this paper aims to exploit in order to tackle the problem of improving manufacturing product development in a distributed and collaborative environment within the WorldWide Web. The objective of this paper is to investigate how XML and the proposed standard XMI (XML Metadata Interchange) can be used as the mediation for associating a commercially available Product Data Management (PDM) system and a manufacturing system, which consists of manufacturing and design domains. In particular, the focus of this paper is to emphasise the way in which systems interoperate and deliver data solutions to enterprise information challenges.

This paper reports on a distributed design environment under development for product knowledge ma... more This paper reports on a distributed design environment under development for product knowledge management and information exchange. The system is able to use the company's existing base of knowledge and to push the manufacturing knowledge higher up into the design chain to reduce the need for costly and time consuming reworks and engineering changes. The design environment uses a knowledge based system Protégé and enables data/knowledge exchange through International Standards for Product Model Exchange (ISO STEP) and the Resource Description Framework.

Synopsis This paper reports on the progress of an investigation into, and development of, new met... more Synopsis This paper reports on the progress of an investigation into, and development of, new methodologies and techniques for the management of knowledge in a distributed and collaborative design environment at the conceptual stage. The paper briefly covers existing tools and techniques for collaborative design and knowledge management and proposes methods for overcoming the shortcomings of present techniques. A brief description of an application in the process of implementation is presented, along with a proposition for future development.

During the past three decades, cost estimation systems have experienced some major technological ... more During the past three decades, cost estimation systems have experienced some major technological innovations and paradigm shifts both in industry and academic research. There are numerous papers available reporting on research findings and the techniques used in cost estimation. This paper presents a review of current academic work and an evaluation of the available commercial cost estimation systems. However, there are few publications available covering current research and commercial applications, in particular in the area of cost estimation in product development. The aim of this paper is to provide the reader with an understanding of cost estimation techniques from the perspective of the past and present, their applications and commercial practice to support the product development processes.

Static system modelling for a manufacturing organisation does not closely reflect the manufacturi... more Static system modelling for a manufacturing organisation does not closely reflect the manufacturing process. A dynamic model more closely simulates the processes involved, and can provide a richer model. This also applies to cost modelling, where some operational details are assumed or obtained from other systems. In order to provide a holistic modelling system, an experimental system has been built to closely couple a generative cost modelling system and a discrete event simulation. This paper describes the system, its advantages and shortcomings, and the results obtained for the planning of an assembly process.

Cost estimating is a business process that is critical to the defence sector, where many products... more Cost estimating is a business process that is critical to the defence sector, where many products have low volumes and long life cycles. The nature of a defence system is often unique (for example, a naval platform) which consists of a number of subsystems and components. For the design of such a system cost estimating is a critical task, in particular the requirement to predict the cost throughout the system's lifetime. The aim of this paper therefore is to discuss an integrated approach that provides a general framework for through life costing in defence systems via the development of: (1) a generic data library to support designers and cost estimators, (2) data searching and transfer mechanisms to support a top-down and bottom-up hybrid cost modelling approach, (3) capturing reliability data to support product services. The paper is divided into several sections, first, a review of relevant research projects concerning integration and data capture for cost modelling. This is followed by a section, which highlights problems of performing cost estimates for low volume products, and subsequently the proposed solution, methods of cost estimation and example applications. Perhaps most importantly, the methods created in this research are able to enhance decision-making and accelerate the responsiveness of the business bidding process.

International Journal of Production Research, 2008

1. 'Advanced product development integration architecture : an out-of-box solution to support ... more 2008) 'Advanced product development integration architecture : an out-of-box solution to support distributed production networks.', International journal of production research., 46 (12). pp. 3185-3206.

International Journal of Computer Integrated Manufacturing, 2006

This paper discusses the theoretical aspects and applications of a novel methodology for exploiti... more This paper discusses the theoretical aspects and applications of a novel methodology for exploiting a knowledge management editor tool to structure organisational knowledge and integrate it with product development activities. An organisational knowledge framework for capturing and representing manufacturing know-how has been developed using an ontological approach. The captured knowledge is converted into the industrystandard eXtensible Mark-up Language (XML) and then shared within a web-centric Product Data Management (PDM) system to support a collaborative and distributed product development environment.

Computers in Industry, 2005

This paper reports on a collaborative product development and knowledge management platform for S... more This paper reports on a collaborative product development and knowledge management platform for Small to Medium Enterprises. It has been recognised that current Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) implementations are document oriented, have a non-customisable data model and inter-enterprise integration difficulties. To overcome these, an ontological knowledge management methodology utilising the semantic web initiative data formats was added to a PLM and an opensource alternative. Shortcomings of centralised architectures are highlighted and a solution using a de-centralised architecture proposed. This is implementable at low cost, the scalability increases in line with user numbers. Ontologies, rules and workflows are reusable and extendable.

This paper discusses the theoretical aspects and applications of a novel methodology for exploiti... more This paper discusses the theoretical aspects and applications of a novel methodology for exploiting a knowledge management editor tool to structure organisational knowledge. An organisational knowledge framework for capturing and representing "manufacturing know-how" has been developed using an ontological approach. The delivery mechanism for the application of the captured knowledge makes extensive use of web-based technologies. The captured knowledge is converted into an industry-standard format and then shared within a web-centric, Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) environment. The integrated knowledge encapsulation and knowledge distribution and management approach is used to support collaborative and distributed product development global basis.

The recent development of communication technology and hardware devices has made it possible for ... more The recent development of communication technology and hardware devices has made it possible for messages to reach anybody, anywhere at anytime. One such technology is Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networking. The use of this technology however, is limited to mobile phones and swapping music in the internet for home users. To deploy this development into industry, there is a requirement to improve to sharing information in a collaborative and distributed product developing environment. The aim of this paper is therefore to discuss the development of a framework to enhance the integrity of data sharing and efficiency of network communication for the collaboration of Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) and Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs). The main technologies used in the framework are the P2P decentralized network together with workflow technology and Product Life Management System (PLM). In addition, the paper is also highlighted the security issues arise to implement the P2P applications within the framework.

International Journal of Computer Integrated Manufacturing, 2003

Product Data Management (PDM) systems and their offspring, Collaborative Product Development and ... more Product Data Management (PDM) systems and their offspring, Collaborative Product Development and Product Lifecycle Management technologies, aim to bring engineering enterprises together, allowing seamless interoperability between different departments and throughout the extended enterprises. However, there are a number of shortcomings in the current crop of commercially available systems, such as the lack of design knowledge sharing, links with Enterprise Resource Planning systems, knowledge management tools and a generic standard for PDM system implementation. This paper presents a proposed software solution to some of the above problems. In particular, the paper describes methodologies being developed that are aimed at overcoming the lack of analysable product information at the conceptual stage of product design and manufacturing evaluation, along with the integration of such a concept design tool within a distributed environment. A leading PDM system is used to manage all the information and knowledge that is made available to internet/intranet users in a controlled manner. The international standard for exchange of product data model (STEP) is implemented to enable the integration of the design environment with manufacturing and enterprise resource management systems. In addition, the paper also introduces three other recent/ ongoing projects, being carried out at Cranfield University, in the application of PDM, knowledge management and STEP standard for integrated manufacturing businesses.

Current working methods and techniques in collaborative, distributed and knowledge intensive engi... more Current working methods and techniques in collaborative, distributed and knowledge intensive engineering design environment have a number of problems. Applications and techniques for m anaging the knowledge within the lifecycle are either too inflexible, and so remain unused, or completely uncoordinated resulting in the use of incoherent documents and filling systems to store information in an ad-hoc manner. This ongoing project, working with industrial partners, aims to provide a middle-ground application and methodology to enable users to define their ontologies from building blocks of Resource Description Framework schema based components. This project also includes the use of STEP Application Protocol-224 models within the knowledge base to define the feature and geometry of the designed component and aims to integrate the process element using XML Process Description Language into the knowledge base in the future.

While most SMEs in general are willing to invest into PLM systems, many are still apprehensive to... more While most SMEs in general are willing to invest into PLM systems, many are still apprehensive to the sometimes large initial investment to be made in terms of both software cost and the time needed to implement and integrate such system into their digital enterprise technology infrastructure. In light of this, it is crucial for their decision makers not only to understand the current PLM market, but also to become familiar with emerging trends and future developments in order to select a PLM solution that best fit the needs of their enterprise. In this chapter, the authors summarize a detailed analysis of the PLM market with the aim to provide educators, students, and decision makers in industry with an
overview of the current PLM market as a whole. In addition, emerging trends and future developments are addressed.