Whereas Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tries to collect all information regarding clients, PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) consists in capitalizing on all information regarding an industrial product.
PLM is an approach similar to Knowledge Management, but revolving around the product. The goal of PLM is to allow the different entities of the company, from production to sales, to share knowledge of the different stages of the life cycle of a product (design, manufacturing, storage, transportation, sales, after-sales service, recycling).
The PLM approach necessarily involves close cooperation with the ERP of the enterprise to gather information related with the manfacturing stages of the product as well as with Customer Relationship Management tools to take into account returns by clients.
