Social Media Product Data Integration with Product Lifecycle Management; Insights for Application of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) faces challenges for adaption to the global economy. These challenges range from strategic restructuring of product involved departments, to leveraging novel technologies like smart devices and Machine Learning. Social media on the other hand is recognized as a strong source for exploring knowledge from customers and product users. However, this domain is not explored for its potentials in relation with PLM framework. Today’s state of Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning techniques, in addition to ever falling computational costs, provide inevitable opportunities for mining customers’ product related data. This paper aims to understand and analyze the patterns of PLM’s evolution with social media integration. It is intended to identify a possible extension for PLM architectures enrichment by leveraging the social media domain. The paper will introduce some of the most relevant PLM definitions, followed by a literature review of domain experts. Consequently, it will analyze the findings and evaluate the possibility of social networks domain integration in the current PLM. Finally, it will highlight the evaluation perspectives for the benefits of proposed solutions against current literature solutions.