A study focusing on the three factors of product lifecycle management (PLM) is being presented. The selected factors are maturity of adoption, systems’ architectures and product lifecycle (PLC) related businesses. The research material comes from six globally operating companies. The applied data collection method is the synthesis of interviews, benchmarking, and peer-reviewing the case companies. The material is analyzed with the application of comparative case study method. Modern PLM systems manage the data of fixed product items and the configuration knowledge of product families. Thus, companies with the most mature PLM approach are able to enhance the product configuration oriented business processes with legacy PLM architectures. Most of the studied companies are transforming their to single source architecture. This may be a challenge for some of the businesses. Another challenge is the increasing share of service related PLC businesses, which is also supported by the most mature PLM approaches.