It is widely accepted that PLM represents a competitive edge for manufacturing enterprises. Time-to-market reduction and increased reactivity to market’s demand are PLM most known fall-outs. A local project on aerospace and defense sector demonstrates a substantial interest of CAE and CAT management regarding PLM opportunities: implement a long term repository, enable data and documents collaboration and sharing between Test Center and Engineering Department, facilitate the correlation analysis between CAE and CAT data, support and drive the experimental process across the Product Development Process. Authors deal with the problem analyzing reasons and solutions, thus highlighting and clarifying PLM advantages in the enterprise context. The first step towards the development of such solution is the enterprise model proposed in the paper.