Product architecture management - An approach to product life cycle

Today a lot of small, medium and also large companies have a project organizational setup. This means that the major part of the development activities are gathered thru the conduction of a project that at its completion will deliver a new version of the product. In this situation managing versions and resources for some of the product components (subsystems) could be a problem or performed in a non efficient way. This paper shows the approach applied in a company producing machines for the food industry. The methodology is based on the application of PLC (Product Life Cycle) principles aiming at the rationalization of the decisions made during the planning, analysis and implementation phases. The goal of the approach is to help designers and product architects to correlate the needs of projects stakeholders (requirements) with other needs related to the product strategy and roadmap in order to improve efficiency in terms of resource management, product variants and other aspects that affect the life cycle of the product.