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Strategic Product Lifecycle Management: Bringing Innovation to Every Installed Asset

In fast-moving industries, product innovation often outpaces the installed base. While new products launch with advanced features, thousands of existing units in-the-field remain unchanged. As equipment ages and technology advances, organizations face mounting maintenance costs, quality issues, and compliance risks. Yet customers expect their investments to remain efficient, safe, and up to date for longer periods.

This widening gap between innovation and field usage makes strategic Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) essential. Innovating at the factory is no longer sufficient; companies must proactively extend improvements to their installed assets.

The Challenge: Keeping the Installed Base Current

Organizations typically encounter four main obstacles when managing products in the field:

Innovations Rarely Reach Existing Units. New engineering breakthroughs benefit new products, but these updates seldom reach assets already in use, causing a divide between potential and actual customer experience.
Modernizations Must Start from “As Maintained,” Not “As Built”. Service changes often rely on outdated “as built” records. In reality, assets have been serviced or modified, and lacking accurate “as maintained” data makes modernization risky and costly.
Quality Issues and Recalls Demand Full Installed Base Visibility. Companies need instant insight into the location, configuration, and ownership of affected units during recalls. Without this, recalls are slower and more expensive, risking brand damage.
Lifecycle Optimization Requires Real World Product Behavior. Engineering relies on intended performance, but real-world feedback is crucial to avoid repeating issues and stagnating designs.

Consequences include higher maintenance costs, safety incidents, dissatisfied customers, and shrinking margins.

The Solution: A Connected, Insight-Driven PLM Loop

Modern closed-loop PLM systems like ServiceMax close these gaps by providing complete visibility, robust field change management, and structured project execution for upgrades, recalls, and modernizations. Key capabilities include:

Full visibility into every installed asset
Orchestration of upgrades, recalls, and engineering change execution
Project management for lifecycle campaigns across multiple assets
Closed-loop integration with engineering PLM systems
Support for the full Problem → Investigation → ECR → ECN process

This unified approach connects data from engineering to field operations, ensuring innovation reaches both new and existing equipment.

The Impact: Higher Performance, Lower Cost, Safer Operation

With better data and connected workflows, organizations realize four key benefits:

Improved Product Lifetime Performance. Comparing real-world performance with design intent enables continuous improvement, proactive modernization, and extended asset life.
Deeper Product Understanding. Feedback between service and engineering leads to better designs, fewer recurring issues, and accelerated innovation cycles.
Strategically Informed Portfolio Management. Insights into service costs guide smarter investment, product phase-out, and redesign decisions.
Maximized Asset and Market Value. Strategic lifecycle management increases asset lifespan, protects investments, reduces obsolescence and warranty costs, improves specs, drives modernization revenue, and lowers ecological footprint.

The result is a resilient, customer-centric service and engineering ecosystem.

Key Lifecycle Strategies for MLUs, Retrofits, ECRs, and Recalls

Lifecycle excellence involves structured processes and upgrades. Four major strategies include:

Mid Life Upgrades (MLUs): Modernize systems halfway through service life, replacing obsolete components and refreshing capabilities at lower cost than buying new. Examples include digital cockpits and AI-enabled systems.
Retrofits: Add functionality to older systems for efficiency or regulatory compliance, often reducing emissions and costs. Aviation retrofits using used materials can cut CO₂ by up to 90% compared to new parts.
Engineering Change Requests (ECRs): Formal proposals capturing the rationale and assessment for design changes, preventing costly errors and preserving decision history.
Recalls: Remove or repair unsafe products, protecting public safety and brand reputation. Modern PLM systems help identify risks early, reducing recall frequency and cost.

Why Strategic Lifecycle Management Matters Now More Than Ever

Products remain in the field longer while technology evolves quickly and sustainability requirements intensify. Customers expect ongoing improvement, not stagnation. By enabling upgrades, retrofits, and engineering changes for all assets, organizations can deliver innovation well beyond the initial sale, extend equipment life, reduce environmental impact, improve safety and compliance, and unlock new revenue.Strategic lifecycle management ensures innovation continues throughout every asset’s life, not just at the factory.

The Value of an Asset Data Foundation for Service and Engineering

In today’s rapidly evolving industrial landscape, organisations face mounting pressure to deliver products to market faster, maintain high quality, mitigate costs amidst supply chain volatility, and comply with increasingly complex global regulations. These challenges are intensified by the need to compete in global markets and discover new sources of revenue.

Companies that design, manufacture, operate, and support physical products are seeking ways to maximise asset performance, reduce costs, and generate value in innovative way.

Asset Data Reality

Let’s imagine your company has three product lines designed at separate innovation centres and manufactured in plants across the US, Europe, and Asia. Products are sold both directly through national sales organisations and indirectly via importers, dealers, and resellers. Over a decade, you’ve pushed $5 billion worth of products into the market. And recently, the CEO announced an acquisition, adding a fourth product line with its own sales channel and a $1 billion installed base.

Service providers and asset owners now face the challenge of maintaining a total installed base of $6 billion while anticipating a generation of more complex and digital products. Despite various business applications, the core issue is fragmented product lifecycle data, varying in completeness leading to sub-optimal decision making.

Fragmented lifecycle data

Traditional systems such as ERP, MES, PLM, IoT, and field service management often face integration challenges, resulting in data inconsistencies, operational inefficiencies, and suboptimal decision making that negatively affect cash flow and EBIT.

While many organisations have implemented MDM and BI tools, these solutions frequently lack the necessary context and user accessibility for broad adoption, leading to slow and costly insight generation.

As a result, executives are often required to make decisions in volatile environments without dependable data, which can impede their ability to drive product innovation or deliver efficient and profitable services.

Impaired decision making

When considering our sample company—featuring four product lines, an installed base of $6 billion, and a product lifecycle spanning 10 years—the volume of data generated is both substantial and continually increasing.

“We are surrounded by data, but starved for insights”
— Jay Bear —

Examples of poor decision making caused by fragmented lifecycle data for executives:

Design: Lacking insights from previous versions hinders product improvement.
Sales: Unclear product performance makes it hard to assess portfolio relevance or identify top and underperforming products/customers.
Quality: Incomplete field data prevents verification of product performance and timely corrective actions.
Service: Inefficient maintenance results from missing As-Designed prescriptions and As-Built records.

A different approach to achieving an asset data foundation

When traditional ERP, MES, PLM, and FSM systems are too complex to integrate, and MDM or BI tools lack context, businesses can turn to a modern alternative: an AI-powered Asset Data Foundation managing the product lifecycle data holistically.

The AI-powered Asset Data Foundation establishes an integrated layer between various system-of-records for product lifecycle data and an application platform. This enables users across design, sales, quality, and maintenance functions to access comprehensive data, supporting informed operational, tactical, and strategic decision-making.

The Asset Data Foundation recognises the different forms data takes at its original sources, understands the context, and is equipped to clean and validate this data, creating a more reliable and enhanced source of truth.

To facilitate real-time insight extraction and support informed decision-making from comprehensive and unified datasets, maintaining optimal performance and responsiveness is essential. Consequently, data vectorisation is incorporated within the Asset Data Foundation layer to provide advanced data processing capabilities.

Business value for Engineering and Service

While several business functions within an enterprise can gain from an Asset Data Foundation throughout the product lifecycle, Engineering and Service are the primary contributors. Engineering is responsible for setting the product’s intent during its digital lifecycle, whereas Service oversees its real-world performance during the physical lifecycle.

Organizations frequently invest significant resources in the design and development of high-quality products, which are subsequently introduced to the market. In a sell-and-forget business model, establishing an asset data foundation may not be a priority. However, when shifting to a sell-and-service approach, a robust asset data foundation becomes essential.

In our example company, $6 billion in products are introduced through various go-to-market channels. Achieving complete visibility of asset location, condition, and usage via the asset data foundation would enable Service to reach world-class standards in installed base monetisation. Additionally, the asset data foundation would offer access to design intent details, supporting efficient and proactive service delivery.

At our sample company, four different product lines are developed across four separate locations and produced in three different regions. By leveraging asset data regarding visibility, condition, and usage from the same installed base, Engineering can more efficiently and effectively drive innovation for both new and existing products.

See also PTC blog: The power of a strong data foundation

Sustainability by Design: How Service Lifecycle Management and Digital Thread Drive Efficiency

At this year’s 21st service management forum, ASAP will feature “the servitisation revolution for sustainability.” While both keywords attract attention, the road to action is less obvious. I find it positive to see a growing consensus on the ‘why’ and ‘what’ of sustainability. However, I detect a more hesitant dynamic when addressing the ‘how’ and ‘who.’ Hence, I will deliver a keynote, “Sustainability by Design,” on October 25th, sharing practical approaches to help you deliver on your sustainability ambition.

Sustainable product design

For just over 30 years, I have worked in the service domain. When I ask service leaders and technicians about the serviceability of products, it feels like poking a bear. “What did engineering have in mind when they designed this product? It is difficult to both diagnose and repair.”

By nature, service technicians are a mix of firefighter and magician: they will get the work done, one way or another. Whether that work is done efficiently, cost-effectively, or profitably is a different story. But is it sustainable? Definitely! Repairing a product is more sustainable than buying a new one.

For years, iFixit.com has been giving repairability scores to B2C products. Its purpose is to change the consumer mindset regarding sustainability. Today, sustainability awareness is embedded in right-to-repair legislation (both in the EU and the U.S.). See the iFixit Repair Manifesto here.

Shifting to the B2B world of your technicians, they could write a book on the challenges of repairability:

Why do I need two hours of labor to disassemble a product to replace a $5 component?
Why do I need special tools just to open the product?
Why does the repair kit contain parts I never use and/or cannot reuse?

These challenges are embedded in the product’s design, which brings us to the topic of design-for-service, or perhaps we should say design-for-operation. Meaning: how easy and sustainable is it to use products?

Now, we arrive at a branch:

How do we make existing products more sustainable?
How do we make new products more sustainable?

For the latter, we could start from scratch and act upon the guidelines for sustainable product design. For the former, we must accept historical/sub-optimal design decisions and establish mitigating strategies in the domain of service lifecycle management (SLM).

Service lifecycle management (SLM)

When I visit OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers) as a service persona, my favorite opening phrase is, “You design and build great products, and then they go into the field.” This “going into the field” will happen regardless of whether design-for-serviceability and sustainability concepts are applied during the engineering process. What I’m saying is that SLM can and should apply its own design-for-sustainability paradigm when defining processes and tooling. By doing so, the service function will achieve two goals:

The current installed base will be serviced as sustainably as possible, within product design constraints.
Data collected from the existing installed base will feed sustainability improvements for the next generation of products.

An example of a simple, efficient, and powerful way to drive sustainability is by using the mean-time-between-failure (MTBF) metric in a plan-versus-actual approach.

Suppose Engineering designs a component with an expected MTBF of 10,000 hours. This is the plan. We then produce a batch of 100 units, which go into the field. Each of those units will have a unique service lifecycle, generating live data. This is the actual. When a unit fails, Service typically repairs the component reactively. But when you start using the MTBF to predict and identify outliers, you become more sustainable:

Planned interventions are both cheaper and more sustainable than unplanned work.
Comparing actual vs. planned MTBF will help identify unplanned downtime and sustainability issues early on.
Capturing actual MTBF is a critical data point for sustainable product design.

If the actual MTBF deviates from the planned value, it doesn’t always mean Engineering was wrong. Sustainability also involves a customer component. Acting on the discrepancy may lead the OEM to advise the customer on better usage and product management.

By design

In the previous two paragraphs, I’ve addressed two facets of Sustainability by Design: a product-design facet and a process-design facet. Combining the two will boost your sustainability benefits, making 1 + 1 = 3.

Two additional concepts come into play. You could see them as building blocks of your sustainability agenda:

Digital thread: The flow of product information through all stages of its lifecycle. In other words, a thread from as-designed, as-built, as-sold, as-installed, as-maintained, and as-decommissioned.
Product Passport: The system-of-record for products in the field, capturing the data from all touchpoints over its service lifecycle.

Where the digital thread anchors product lifecycle information from engineering to service and vice versa, the Product Passport captures the service lifecycle information of each product instance in the field. Together, they create an actionable closed loop regarding a product’s health and performance. These insights help the product owner, OEM, and service organization make informed decisions about three important lifecycle choices affecting sustainability:

When to maintain a product.
When to upgrade a product.
When to replace a product and recover the residual value of the old one.

Whether sustainability is your primary or secondary driver, the technology to realize your ambition exists today. Digital Thread and Product Passport address the ‘how’ and ‘who.’ If you want to learn more, visit us at ASAP Service Management in Brescia, Italy, on October 24th and 25th, or contact us.

Published on PTC Blog.