Product Lifecycle Management System for Telecommunication Industry

Abstract

This thesis is aimed to present the project work carried out to explore the possibility of developing a product lifecycle management system that will help product managers in the lifecycle management of the product. This software development was focused on the telecommunication industry. But the knowledge gained through the development can be applied to any service sector industry. There are softwares called “product lifecycle management systems” in the market but mainly focused on the product development process of the manufacturing industry. Many tools available for service sector industries are analytical tools that can analyse the market behaviour mathematically. But such tools do not have inbuilt knowledge to analyse the market dynamics based on marketing, product, and business perspective. Therefore, product managers have to use analytical tools to analyse the market dynamics in the mathematical domain and map them to the marketing domain to interpret the results. This mapping is depending on the skills of the product manager. The key objective of this project is to demonstrate the advantage of building this domain mapping capability into the software tool to ease the work of the product managers. The solution was designed using software design tools after carefully analysing the user requirement. The web-based solution was developed according to the design using the “CodeIgniter” framework with MySQL database. Developed software includes dashboard, data input portals, decision support system, and report generating capability. The system was tested during the development period using the “IntelliJ IDEA” testing environment and evaluated by the users. The challenging part of the project was the development of the algorithm for the decision support system which requires significant knowledge on product management and sufficient datasets to evaluate and validate the same. The accuracy of the outcome of the system depends on this algorithm. In this project, the basic level algorithm was developed to demonstrate the function, but there’s more space to improve further with the assistance of domain experts. Further, the scope of the project was narrowed down by excluding the system integration part from the project. This area also can be considered for further improvement. Finally, the knowledge gained through this project can be used to develop a more sophisticated product lifecycle management system for any service industry.