From my experience in a more complex product, total product cost ownership lies with either a Product Manager or Program Manager. A good design engineer is aware and responsible for all costs related to design/development and production of his/her part(s)including regualatory, quality… As you say, most of these costs are recorded in the ERP system either in the manufacturing or finance modules, after the fact. The real challenge is having a “system” that can be used to predict, analyze and strategize what the costs will be before they are too committed. This is still a gap in my opinion.

The remaining costs of sales and marketing and projecting sales and profitability is a whole other piece of the puzzle that still needs addressing.

I would not call cost management collaborative as much as I would call it distributed. The data comes from multiple sources. The collaboration comes when one area can’t hit their cost target and other areas pitch in to help. This assumes the use of some sort of target costing approach and the ability to roll the data up to see where things are at. Historically, this has not been a strength of PLM or ERP.

I imagine there are other product attributes there are just like cost. What about quality and inspection procedures and inventory levels and requirements? Are all these things highly collaborative or should I say “people centric” versus file centric?

I am not sure I follow your last post. Perhaps it was my previous post was not that clear so let me clarify in no particular order.
1. Data comes from multiple sources. Consider an assembly made in Plant A which uses parts from your Plants B & C and well as outside suppliers. In many cases, determining the cost for parts from Plants B&C is the responsibility of the plants or component divisions. Costs for purchased components comes from Purchasing/Procurement. Costs to do the assembly in Plant A may come from Plant A or Assembly division.

2. PLM applications have not been involved in the cost management arena as long as they have been with engineering. Cost/Finance types do not think the same way engineers think. They often structure their data differently. Just like Design Engineers often think and structure their data differently than manufacturing engineers. It is not as simple as hanging some cost fields off of the EBOM. Until PLM providers think and develop apps the way Finance/Cost guys think then short of corporate mandate, Excel will prevail.
3. What is the problem to be solved? A solution for a 12 part assembly is probably different from an offering comprised of 120 End Saleable configurations with 1200 parts. A Target Costing/Design to cost process requires a different solution than a back end roll-up. Going back to part of your original post topic Business Process (not necessarily workflow) needs to be understood before automation solution has enough benefit to move beyond the Excel kingdom. In my opinion, PLM providers are not there yet.

1. Is it really so cheap, to manage BOM cost in Excel on the long term?
2. How to make PLM experience adjusted to that?

and the last one – I’m sure BOM cost analyzes make a lot of sense for the long term. When PLM approach allows you to make these analyzes and see what decision was and what are outputs and impact, the MS Excel approach is very fragmented. You cannot handle excels and corresponded decisions for long term (ah… you can say – SharePoint does)…

So, my bottom line. Value of PLM in cost analyzes is obvious. Approach sounds like NO.

Best. Oleg