Towards an Alternative Foundation for Managing Product Life-Cycles in Turbulent Environments

With the deregulation of the markets and the introduction of new technologies, the need to manage diversification, change and complexity in product development has become crucial. To cope with this situation an alternative foundation for PLM is needed in which organizational issues are considered alongside with more traditional technical ones. Such a major reorientation of PLM needs to be informed by a theoretical perspective which integrates social and technical issues into a coherent framework. In this paper we propose the Activity Domain Theory for this purpose. This theory has been used as a guide at the Ericsson telecommunication company in order to suggest an alternative foundation for PLM. Preliminary results are the enhancement of the organizational language with the construct of activity domains, a clean-up of fundamental categories in information management, a multi-domain product structure concept, an alternative business process model, an information system managing core information elements and a strategy towards balancing centralized and decentralized control.