MatrixOne Inc."s Global Customer Conference in Nashville next week is being staged against a backdrop of continued growth and increased competition in the market for product life-cycle management (PLM) software. But some familiar issues, including the difficulty in measuring return on PLM investments and the lack of clear executive sponsors for such projects within large companies, continue to pose major challenges to adoption.

Consequently, much of the focus at this year"s conference is on how companies can show a demonstrable ROI from PLM projects, said Mike Segal, a senior vice president at MatrixOne in Westford, Mass. "With PLM becoming more of a strategic initiative for most companies, people are looking at how to measure returns," he said.

The topic is especially important because PLM projects are cross-functional in nature and are thus often funded by multiple business units, he said.

When it comes to PLM investments, "there are lots of cooks in the kitchen," said Kevin O"Marah. an analyst at Boston-based AMR Research Inc. "And that means a lot of people debating over where the business value is coming from and who deserves credit for it." The interdependencies also make it hard to calculate the ROI of PLM installations, O"Marah said.

Even so, the market for PLM software is expected to grow 14 percent this year and maintain that growth rate for the next three years, according to AMR. Much of the demand is coming from nontraditional buyers, including consumer goods manufacturers, the apparel industry and food and beverage makers.

O"Marah said users often look to PLM tools to help shorten time to market for new products and to increase their ability to reuse materials.

One example is Ping Inc., a Phoenix-based maker of sporting equipment that has been using PLM software from Parametric Technology Corp. for the past two years. In that time, Ping has shortened its time to market from 24 months to less than nine, doubled its on-time product introduction rate and quadrupled the number of new products it delivers each year from three to 14.

"For us, it has not been very difficult to capture ROI metrics," said Dan Shoenhair, Ping"s engineering business manager. "The measures we use are pretty self-evident."