• The Journal of Information Systems
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• v.31 no.1
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• pp.239-269
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• 2022

Purpose This paper attempts to identify items for improving the usage of PLM(Product Lifecycle Management) systems and suggests ways to prioritize improvement items on the basis of importance. It also tries to find out differences in the importance of improvement items due to the company size, the industry, the job, or the PLM solution. Design/methodology/approach Through a survey from participants to a PLM System Conference, data were collected from a sample of 181 users who had the previous experience in using a PLM system. In order to figure out the differences in the importance among user groups, the F-test with the Scheffe test as a post-hoc analysis was used in case of equal variances and the Welch test with the Dunnett T3 test was used in case of unequal variances. Findings This study sorted out 25 improvement ideas according to their importance assessed by the PLM system users. The top five ideas are improving data consistency, error minimization, fast system response time, enhancing user recognition, and business process improvement. The support group puts higher importance than the general user group in data consistency, fast system response time, enhancing user recognition, business process improvement, dedicated team for data consistency, continuous support from management, hardware performance upgrade, output linkage to other systems, and shortening problem solving duration. The largest company group attaches significantly higher weights than the smallest company group to data consistency, error minimization, fast system response time, business process improvement, dedicated team for data consistency, security with proper access management, output linkage to other systems, and better user interface.