Tag: PLM

Defining Value for PLM Solutions: What to Measure

PLM Value

While countless companies across industries have realized tremendous payback on their investments in Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) software, they often don’t reap the full value for years after the first phases of go-live. Part of the challenge is simply deciding what and how to measure, especially since PLM is often a multi-year, multi-phase initiative that strives to improve a set …

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Quality Lifecycle Management: Striking a Balance between Product Reliability and Over-Design

Quality Lifecycle Management

When it comes to product design, companies must balance four competing goals: cost, time to market, feature set, and reliability. The key is to get the right mix and create the greatest customer satisfaction with the product. Too often, however, companies downplay the importance of reliability when weighed against the other three goals. They prioritize cost, time to market, or …

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Adding Review Cycles to Accelerate Product Development

Global Product Development_Supply Chain

It seems counterintuitive, but putting more review cycles in the development process can actually help get products to market faster. A large consumer products manufacturer shows why this can work. Like many manufacturers trying to get more efficient in product development, the company had invested in multiple design centers around the world along with a large network of suppliers to …

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Designing for Reliability: Why a Closed-Loop Process Works Best

Product Reliability_Closed Loop Process

Product reliability goes a long way toward ensuring customer loyalty. When products fail we feel annoyed and inconvenienced – or worse. If failure results in injury or even loss of life, the response is outrage and the impact to the manufacturer can be incredibly damaging. Consider the lawsuit Toyota found itself dealing with after acceleration problems caused crashes, injuries and …

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PLM and Process Improvement: Building Bridges to Ensure Enterprise Value

PLM Process Improvement, Photo: Robert Nunnally, Flickr

When working to improve product lifecycle management, companies often struggle to gain full value from their initiatives because they fail to focus on cross-enterprise change. For example, companies seeking to accelerate product development often focus on improving tools and processes for collaboration. But they put most of their energy into changes within individual departments instead of also looking across them. …

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Achieving Faster Product Development with Integrated PLM

Integrated PLM, Photo: flickr.com/photos/35577089@N00/

Getting new products to market faster is typically a top priority for manufacturing firms, and the companies that respond more quickly to the latest market trends and demands usually come out on top. But accelerating time to market is not so easy when companies are developing increasingly complex products, such as those featuring embedded software. This is especially true when …

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10 Ways PLM Helps Reduce the Risk and Cost of Counterfeit Parts

PLM_Counterfeit Parts, Photo: flickr.com/photos/sybot/

In a previous post, I likened counterfeit parts to a disease that must be vaccinated against.  There is no single fool-proof counterfeit prevention, but a combination of Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), careful testing/inspection, and advanced labeling technologies are a powerful formula to reduce the occurrence of counterfeits in manufactured products. Of these three, PLM is often over-looked, as its processes …

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Customized, Role-Based Learning in PLM Adoption

PLM Adoption & Training, Photo: US Army, Flickr

When an enterprise is rolling out new software, it’s doing more than just introducing new technology into the environment. It’s affecting the way people do their daily work, sometimes quite dramatically. Some people move quickly to adopt new tools and processes, but many do not. Resistance to change is natural, and the basic approach companies often take with software rollouts—a …

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Auto Manufacturer Highlights Three Keys to PLM Adoption

PLM Adoption, Photo: BUICK REGAL, Flickr

What does it take to ensure successful adoption of PLM software within a global enterprise environment? Research suggests that high performing companies are much more likely to invest in a comprehensive, role-based adoption program. But what does that actually look like in practice? For one global automotive manufacturing company, three specific elements are essential to success: Staffing a global team for …

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Shortcuts to PLM Adoption? You’ll Pay More in the End

PLM adoption

User adoption of new technology solutions like PLM is a key driver of the ultimate return on these significant corporate investments. Yet enterprise learning and adoption programs, so essential to solution success, are typically subject to budget cuts as cost overruns in earlier phases of the project drive a frantic search for later stage savings. The unfortunate reality is that …

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