Now PLM pioneer Michael Grieves offers everyone from Six Sigma and lean practitioners to supply chain managers, product developers, and consultants a proven framework for adopting this information-driven approach. shows you how to greatly enhance your firm's productivity by integrating the efforts of your entire organization. Most companies are seeing the returns of their efforts in lean methods diminishing, as the most fruitful applications have already been addressed. Here, Grieves reveals how PLM gives you an opportunity to make improvements both within and across functional areas in order to increase agility, optimize efficiency, and reduce costs across the board. He gives you the most comprehensive view of PLM available, fully outlining its characteristics, method, and tools and helping you assess your organizational readiness. There's also proven examples from the field, where PLM is being widely adopted by leading companies, including General Motors, General Electric, and Dell, that are widely adopting the approach. You'll see how PLM has saved these companies in unnecessary costs and shaved as much as With this book you'll learn how to: Lean manufacturing can only take your organization so far. To bring your productivity to the next level and save remarkable amounts of time, money, and resources, is your one-stop, hands-on guide to implementing this powerful methodology.