• Korean Journal of Computational Design and Engineering
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• v.18 no.1
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• pp.28-35
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• 2013

Product Life cycle Management (PLM) is an indispensable tool for manufactures to develop competitive products in an efficient way. This enlarges the number of participants for product development who should understand PLM for their supporting activities. However, burdens for developing example products, maintaining complex PLM systems and training prerequisite skills for engineering tools such as CAD systems prohibit an efficient introductory course to PLM. This paper proposes a comprehensive introductory course to PLM that bases on general product development process. In addition, it enables participants to build their example products with familiar Lego blocks and to construct 3D CAD assembly models by using predefined 3D elements. The PLM system for the course provides an intuitive and simple user environment for participants to specify their parts lists, associated 3D CAD models, and product structure of example products. Experiences on a class of the course show it is a valid and efficient education and training method for the PLM introduction.