Lifecycle Change and Configuration Management are the foundation for a high level of product and process development and mirror themselves against the quality of the product and the ecomonicalness of the production process.

Lifecycle Change Management supports all central logistics processes, from the development process through production right up to the maintenance of the delivered product. At the same time reduced development processes place high demands on the change processes that are implemented in the early development and design process as well as in the production process. The SAP system makes the smooth transfer of design changes into the operative areas of the logistics chain possible.

PLM offers you the functions with which you can achieve the following aims:

• You can specially define these phases for your product or project as as engineered, as planned, as built, for example.
  All configurations of a product or project are cumulated from all life cycle phases into a configuration definition. Assigned configuration folders contain the objects that consistently describe the status of the product or project in a specific life cycle phase, for example, materials with reference to a serial number, documents or project information.
  In this way, the wealth of information that describes the product or project is restricted to the necessary quantity for each life cycle phase.

• You can keep essential changes to product data in Baselines for a clearly defined length of time. Consequently, this product configuration can be reproduced at any time.

• Configurations from produced assemblies (As-Built configurations) can be generated and documented from existing production data. For example, you can assign a serialized component to a serialized assembly by confirming a production order. At the click of a button, the system generates an As-Built configuration from this data, which you can then transfer to the object list of a configuration folder.

Various areas of the company that are more deeply involved in individual phases of the product lifecycle, work with selected product data instead of with the all the data.

• The product structure browser gives you an overview of all configuration folders and Baselines through all life cycle phases of a product or project. Using a filter, you can restrict the quantity of data to be evaluated for the current business process.
• The overview structure of the display of predecessor/successor relationships between the configuration folders and the generated Baselines guarantees a complete documentation of the development phases.

• Additional functions make the reporting of product data easier. You can compare product structures according to different principal points , for example, determine extra or changed objects.

• You can forward the related product information to colleagues or external partners via the internet.
• Should errors occur by a project deviation, for example, with regard to dates or to planned costs, you can keep the problem under control with Claim Management. The naming of a person responsible and the initiation of follow-up activities are some of the activites that can help you to solve problems

The use of Lifecycle Change and Configuration Management minimizes the extent of development costs and supports the inter-disciplinary collaboration in the development process as well as the correction of errors and omissions.

The following graphic shows the processing process of product and project data in various phases of a life cycle.

Documentation on these functions can be found in the SAP library in the following documents: