Products must be engineered in parallel with the needs of customers and suppliers. But to do this requires new concepts like engineer-to-order, engineer-to-cost (i.e., meet a predefined cost goal), and engineer-to-manufacturing. There is also a need to produce many more choices for the customer, driving a more targeted and flexible product line.
Managing the life cycle from introduction and beta to end-of-life, as well as managing to achieve aggressive timelines across departments and partners, is a big pressure facing the consumer goods industry. Products and configurations that allow for sales variations, compliance, and localization need to be defined explicitly. At the same time, the ability to reuse design information across the extended enterprise helps lower design and manufacturing costs. While differentiating between products that use common components can be quite complicated and time-consuming for manufacturers, Today's competitive global marketplace demands that manufacturers bring products to market in a shorter time and at a lower cost-and also make them easier to service.
Solution
The dramatic changes brought on by globalization, technological advances, and the mergers and acquisitions of the last decade have left many production organizations with a variety of disparate systems. As a result, they lack streamlined processes, which means that decision making is often delayed. And without early alerts to potential threats, producers often operate reactively, finding it difficult to control costs and improve product quality and service. To resolve these issues, production teams today seek dynamic new solutions.
Microsoft and its partners provide solutions that can help people identify potential threats underlying the production process, gain insight into these threats, and take action quickly.
A people-ready Product Life-cycle Management (PLM) solution built on Microsoft software uses an integrated approach that amplifies the efforts of your employees by giving them freedom to create ideas. Microsoft software is familiar and easy to use, widely supported, and simple to integrate. And while technology alone can't solve business problems, given the right tools, people can.
Product Life-cycle Management solutions enable more proactive enterprises | Business Challenges | Solutions |
|---|
Outsourced and geographically distributed teams with varying technology platforms Communication gaps across internal design and development teams, customers, suppliers, and partners Inability to reuse design information across differentiated products Difficulty monitoring and tracking the product development timeline across different departments and partners | CollaborationFacilitate unified global collaboration to engineer, find resources for, and manufacture new products. Create competitive, differentiated, high-value products by managing the innovation process. |
Lack of tools to track key product data such as component parts and materials, manufacturing procedures, and published product information Finding resources to design and manufacture new products Limited ability to identify issues before they become risks Difficulties with process compliance due to insufficient information and poor flow | Product development and investment managementHelp reduce new-product development cycles, improve role-based productivity, and reduce product cost. Enable engineers to coordinate with suppliers and manufacturers to assure right-the-first-time product development and manufacturing. Leverage knowledge management capabilities to drive intelligent business decisions, streamlined development processes, and high product quality. Assess proposed new product innovations against corporate business objectives to determine the most effective investment scenarios. |
