**1. Introduction**

It is recognized that competition is shifting from "firm versus firm" perspective to "supply chain versus supply chain" perspective. Therefore, the ability to optimize the supply chain is becoming the critical issue for companies to win the competitive advantage [1].

Today, it is essential for firms to exploit the benefits associated with supply chain integration and information sharing to improve their supply chain performance [2, 3]. More efficiency can be achieved if this integration is done early in product life cycle particularly in product development process [4].

This has led to the development of systems to manage the technical data of the engineering process. It is in this context that the concept of product lifecycle management (PLM) was

© 2016 The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. © 2018 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

born [5]. We propose a methodology based on PLM to design simultaneously the product and its optimized supply chain. The description of the mathematical models optimizing each element of the supply chain is not the object of this chapter. First, we define the concept of PLM. In Section 2, we explain the need of an interface integration design, production, and supply chain. In Section 3, we present our methodology of designing the product and its supply chain. In the last section, we modeled using unified modeling language (UML) and PLM, our decision support tool for supply chain optimization.
