05-30, 13:40–14:20 (America/Los_Angeles), Theater
Have you ever wondered how product teams manage BOMs, revisions, releases, and specifications over the lifecycle of a hardware product?
In this talk, you’ll learn the basics of Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) software and explore some of the available options for KiCad users. We’ll finish up by showing how to integrate a KiCad database library with Aligni, a cloud-based PLM software offering a free tier for open-source hardware organizations.
If you’re a maker or hobbyist, you may have come across terms like PDM, PLM, or MRP, and thought to yourself “someone has been eating too much alphabet soup!” Even if you’ve been involved in bringing a hardware product to life, you may or may not have been exposed to these terms and the systems they represent.
These acronyms stand for Product Data Management (PDM), Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), and Material Requirements Planning (MRP). They represent three complementary software systems that work together to manage product information over the lifecycle of a hardware product.
In this talk, we’ll focus specifically on Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) software. We’ll cover what a PLM system is used for and how it differs from PDM or MRP systems. We’ll discuss when and why you might want to consider adopting PLM software as part of your hardware development process, and explore some PLM options available for KiCad users.
Finally, we’ll walk through a concrete example showing how to integrate KiCad with Aligni, a cloud-based PLM software offering a free tier for open-source hardware organizations. This will include a discussion on KiCad database libraries, with specific instructions on how to configure a database library to sync with an Aligni part master database.
Attendees should expect to walk away with the knowledge required to integrate a basic PLM workflow into their KiCad-based development process (using Aligni or another PLM system).
Chris has over a decade of experience designing low-power embedded systems for the Internet of Things, and four years of product management experience in PCB assembly manufacturing.
He’s taken IoT hardware products from prototype to production at companies ranging from early-stage startups to Fortune 100 companies.
If you bump into him at the water cooler, ask him about the first IoT hardware he worked on that was donated to the Smithsonian by Vint Cerf.