Understanding Product Data Management(PDM)

The Challenge is to maximize the time-to-market benefits of concurrent engineering while maintaining control of your data and distributing it automatically to the people who need it - when they need it. The way PDM systems cope with this challenge is that master data is held only once in a secure 'vault' where its integrity can be assured and all changes to it monitored, controlled and recorded.
Duplicate reference copies of the master data, on the other hand, can be distributed freely, to users in various departments for design, analysis and approval. The new data is then released back into the vault. When a 'change' is made to data, what actually happens is that a modified copy of the data, signed and dated, is stored in the vault alongside the old data which remains in its original form as permanent record.
This is the simple principle behind more advanced PDM systems. To understand it more fully, let us look separately at how these systems control raw product data (Data Management and Process Management).