As the pendulum swings from past decades of customized PLM to a far more flexible, highly-configured version, organizations need to borrow a page from modern software development and embrace automated testing as part of routine deployment.
PLM, like most enterprise platforms, has evolved from a monolithic system with rigid controls and lengthy release cycles to a series of continuously-updated modules that can be configured in any number of different combinations. However, along with the flexibility to configure the system to meet the specific requirements of any particular business comes the reality that there are endless permutations of workflow, processes, and software settings that simply cannot be adequately tested and vetted by any single PLM vendor.