**6. Conclusion**

The competitiveness of a product on the market no longer depends on the company that assembles or sells it, but to all companies involved in the manufacturing process of this product and thus its entire supply chain. Therefore, the complex management of supply chains has increased the need for information exchange, sharing, and archiving.

Our work contributes to the field of integrated engineering, specifically the integrated logistics in the early stages of the product life cycle using PLM. Concretely, PLM enables a supply chain to become much more competitive by an effective collaboration among customers, developers, suppliers, and manufacturers at various lifecycle stages of a product.

In this chapter, we proposed a framework combining PLM and mathematical models to design the product and its related supply chain.

In our work, we defend the idea that the structure of the supply chain must be defined at the level of the product design that is to say at the level of the digital mockup. We then proposed a methodology based on the PLM approach for product design and its optimized supply chain.

Our approach takes into consideration, as a first step, the supply chain elements that already exist; their constraints must be integrated into the digital mockup. In a second step, designing new links must satisfy the digital mockup and the existing logistics network.

This approach combining PLM and mathematical models is based on three aspects:

• Organizational through the integration of the constraints of all the supply chain partners, responsible for main stages of the product life cycle.


In our future work, we will implement the proposed methodology in two types of industries with different specifications: the agro-food packaging industry and the automotive industry.
