"Which part goes where?" - PLM & KM

Back in a previous life, I used to work with a bunch of supply chain consultants as their knowledge gimp. One supply-chain area that began to get a lot of attention in the late-90s was Product Lifecycle Management and one of the key vendors in this area was PTC. PTC began as an CAD vendor and then moved into the collaborative design & development area that is a key part of PLM. What I didn't know, until I met Gareth Oakes on Thursday, is that PTC had bought Arbortext a couple of years ago to allow them to link the PLM piece to product documentation. PLM is particularly important for very complicated items (cars, planes) and the documentation requirements for these babies are enormous.

Now this ties into issues around knowledge retention. The organisations that looked at this issue first & most intensely tended to have a heavy engineering focus (NASA, Northrop Grumman, TVA). Powerplants and fighter planes tend to be expensive and have long lifespans (as long or longer than the career of individual). Given that a proper understanding of how a complicated product operates takes a long time to build (often 10 years minimum), knowing who knows what around a specific component or assembly is vital. And yet often it is not known.

Do PLM (& maintenance products also) products allows you manage the people & knowledge aspects of product operations? If so, how? If not, then could they?