Below is a three month price history chart comparing the stock performance of NAK, versus RVM and PLM.

FORBES: NAK Crosses Critical Technical Indicator

Its chief competitor, UGS PLM Solutions, was spun off recently from EDS to a group of financial investors, including Bain Capital.

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Called "product lifecycle management, " or PLM, the software links manufacturers with their suppliers and customers to share data about a product--from conception to junkyard.

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In so doing, PLM can have an even larger impact on business performance than ERP: innovation delivers added value, which drives revenue and profit growth.

FORBES: PLM and the Bill of Materials

Called "product lifecycle management" or PLM, the software links manufacturers with their suppliers and customers to share data about a product--from conception to junkyard (see table above).

FORBES: 7 Digital 7

"PLM has been perceived as a big, expensive technology akin to an ERP-scale effort, " she says, referring to enterprise resource planning, another alphabet-soup software that tries to unite a company's operations on one computer system.

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Since the dawn of the modern era of business software, companies have spent huge amounts of time and money entering data into applications like ERP, CRM, SCM, HR, PLM and then struggling to get it out.

FORBES: The Technology Of SAP's Open Strategy