India’s defence and aerospace manufacturing ambition under the Make in India initiative is significant. The government’s target of 35,000 crore in defence exports by 2025, the increasing indigenization mandates across military procurement programs, and the growing participation of private sector companies like Tata, Mahindra, L&T, and Bharat Forge in defence manufacturing represent a genuine structural shift in how India approaches its defence industrial base.
The challenges in executing on that ambition are multiple and well documented. Supply chain development, technology transfer complexity, regulatory processes. But one factor that receives less attention than it deserves is the state of product lifecycle management capability within India’s defence manufacturing ecosystem.
In simple terms: India’s defence and aerospace programs are running on digital infrastructure that is not equipped for the scale and complexity of the programs they are being asked to deliver.
A defence program involving a complex platform like a rotorcraft, a missile system, or an armoured vehicle involves thousands of components, hundreds of engineering changes during development, multiple supply chain partners, and a regulatory approval process that requires complete traceability of design decisions and test results.
When this is managed without a proper PLM system, the cost shows up in specific, painful ways. Engineering teams working from different versions of the same drawing. Change notices issued by email that not everyone receives before parts are manufactured to the old design. Test data living in individual engineers’ laptops rather than in a controlled system. When something fails in qualification testing, reconstructing the exact configuration of the tested item becomes a significant effort.
These are not hypothetical scenarios. They are the daily reality for a significant portion of India’s defence manufacturing supply chain, including some companies that are prime contractors on major programs.
Boeing, Airbus, Lockheed Martin, BAE Systems, and the major European and American defence primes have been running integrated PLM environments, most of them on Siemens Teamcenter or PTC Windchill, for 15 to 20 years. Their Tier-1 and Tier-2 suppliers are required to interface with those PLM environments. The data continuity from design to manufacturing to in-service support is a competitive and contractual requirement.
Indian companies seeking to participate in global aerospace supply chains as genuine manufacturing partners rather than just low-cost machining providers are increasingly running into the requirement to demonstrate PLM capability. Without it, the work they can access is limited to non-controlled parts where drawing version management is not a compliance issue.
The encouraging development is that the recognition of this gap within India’s defence manufacturing community has increased significantly over the last two or three years. The Aeronautical Development Agency, certain DRDO labs, and some private sector prime contractors have moved to or are actively implementing PLM environments that are aligned with international standards.
For Tier-1 and Tier-2 Indian defence and aerospace suppliers, the window to build PLM capability before it becomes a customer requirement for major program participation is narrowing. Companies that invest in this now, while there is time to implement properly and train their teams, will have a competitive advantage over those that scramble to do it under customer pressure later.
The implementation complexity for defence PLM, which requires configuration management and traceability capabilities beyond what standard commercial PLM deployments need, means that the partner you choose for implementation matters as much as the software platform you choose.
