Today, embedded software is at the core of vast numbers of manufacturing products, from cars to heating pumps to industrial machinery and more. As such, manufacturers today face an increasing demand to take on the role of software engineers and application developers as well.

This isn’t a new trend, but it’s rapidly proliferating. Demand from customers for more customization and personalization options continues to grow, and with it, demand for new consumption models.

This is fundamentally changing the processes related to the manufacture of configurable products. Today’s discrete manufacturers need to rethink not just how they make a product but also how they’ll be able to service it in the future and make upgrades, changes or repairs.

Customers expect upgrades to be applied quickly and easily, with little impact to their business; that piece of industrial machinery, for example, can’t be offline for hours for upgrades. Unplanned downtime can cost manufacturers thousands of dollars an hour. Software requirements may impact the various configurations of a product that a manufacturer can offer. This adds further complexity, requiring manufacturers to keep track of the different software modules and so on.

Today’s manufacturing organizations have to find a way to manage all of this, and this is where application lifecycle management (ALM), product lifecycle management (PLM) and configuration lifecycle management (CLM) all come together.

Software upgrades and configurations

It’s becoming increasingly harder to find a modern physical product that hasn’t been digitized with embedded software, which allows for configurability and customization. This has increased complexity: products that once had a limited number of variations can now have millions of potential configuration options due to combinations of hardware and software features. Today, people expect that most products can be upgraded, serviced and then supported.

Servicing a product is not only about replacing hardware parts anymore; it’s getting the software on the existing hardware to work. There’s enormous complexity in this: you need to keep track of what versions you have, what kind of compliance you have with different software modules, whether your physical hardware supports your different systems when you add software, and so forth.

Upgrades are now lifecycle configuration events

Software upgrades change the definition of what “serviceability” means. The upgrade itself becomes a structured change that must be validated against the product’s “as built” state (i.e. the hardware plus software plus market requirements). Upgrades will need to be treated like controlled configuration decisions and not ad hoc field interventions.

Every unit in the field might have a different combination of hardware options, software options and update history. This creates a new burden of knowing what can be upgraded, what should be upgraded and what can’t be upgraded due to constraints. Regulatory and market requirements add to this complexity. Customers expect upgrades with minimal downtime and disruption; for industrial customers, upgrade time equals business risk.

Bringing ALM, PLM and CLM together

PLM alone can’t suffice when software becomes central. It remains critical, but software introduces faster iteration cycles. ALM is a necessary but incomplete factor. Modern products require software traceability: requirements, code, versioning, releases and patches. Software lifecycle governance must be aligned to physical lifecycle governance.

CLM bridges this divide. A manufacturer needs configuration logic to answer questions like:

• Is this upgrade compatible with this unit’s current configuration?
• Which variants are eligible for this set of features?
• What changes if a component is replaced or superseded?

Requirements management become a shared language across functions. Requirements increasingly drive variance (market rules, environmental reporting, regulatory compliance and customer options). That makes requirements traceability relevant across engineering, manufacturing, and service—not only product design.

Beyond parts management

Software is the core of so many products today, from cars to industrial machinery and much more. This means manufacturers today are increasingly becoming software engineers and developers as well. With software running so many products, customers expect upgrades to be applied quickly and easily, with little to no impact to their business. This implies that software upgrades need to be a key part of the configured manufacturing process – ensuring that the software can easily be upgraded, changed and patched along the way.

To meet this era’s demands, manufacturers need to design for “upgradeability” upfront; formalize upgrade constraints the same way you’d formalize configuration rules. Engineering teams need to evaluate downstream consequences of a change across a combinatorial product space before it becomes a service cost problem. This enables better decisions on whether to introduce new components/modules, rationalize options, or constrain certain combinations.

A practical goal is to ensure the organization can answer, quickly and consistently, “What do we have in the field, and what can we safely change?” The manufacturers that win won’t just ship configurable products; they’ll ship maintainable, upgradeable configurations at scale.