Aligning PLM With Your Business Strategy for Maximum Success
Why should companies align their business strategy with product lifecycle management (PLM)? Product companies are utilizing PLM software to enhance efficiencies and help ensure product development and management initiatives are coordinated with broader business objectives.
Aligning PLM with your business strategy offers numerous benefits—from innovating next-generation products to faster time to market, to synchronizing with global environmental initiatives.
A COMPREHENSIVE APPROACH TO STREAMLINING THE PRODUCT LIFECYCLE WITH PLM
PLM’s primary goal is to help businesses plan and execute the entire product lifecycle. It streamlines product development processes across product design, engineering, manufacturing, and supply chains while improving efficiency, reducing costs, and increasing product quality. PLM creates a collaborative environment where all stakeholders can access the information they need to make informed decisions. This comprehensive approach ensures that products are developed and delivered in line with the company’s strategic objectives.
A powerful convergence that blends business with PLM
The market remains competitive for companies to innovate and develop quality products. To accomplish those objectives, organizations are analyzing future-proof business strategies that encompass digital transformation, cost-reduction ideas, sustainability, and more robust supply chains. As these are essential components of business strategies, PLM can naturally align with any to drive maximum success.
Leveraging PLM for sustainable innovation and circular economies
Research shows that a significant portion of companies are leveraging PLM to drive sustainability initiatives to help reduce their carbon footprint or reinvent their product offerings to be more sustainable. In addition, PLM is helping companies develop circular economies where their products can be recycled, refurbished, or repurposed.
Building resilience amid supply chain disruption
Despite being a trend we would all like to leave behind, it appears that supply chain disruption is here to stay—at least for a while. The National Association of Manufacturers reported that more than 78% of manufacturers consider supply chain disruptions a primary business challenge.1 Many organizations are finding that a PLM and enterprise resource planning (ERP) integration provides many benefits and helps to maintain a resilient supply chain by having an end-to-end view of their supply chain along with closing any information gaps.
Finding ways to overcome supply chain challenges and mitigate risks is a top priority for most product companies. Implementing technologies like PLM helps improve supply chain transparency and agility, enhance collaboration, and strengthen supply chain resilience.
Key benefits of PLM alignment
Mirroring elements of your business strategy with PLM is critical—it ensures your product development processes are optimized to achieve key business goals like faster market entry, cost reduction, improved quality, and meeting compliance.
Benefits:
- Streamlined development processes
- Improved visibility across the entire organization
- Enhanced collaboration with global and remote teams
- Reduced waste/scrap and rework
- Decreased compliance risk
Disadvantages of nonalignment
When companies are not strategically aligned, they typically waste resources by working on projects that are disconnected from the company’s overarching strategy and vision—the work delivered has little to no positive impact on the business, because it does not contribute to the company’s overall strategy.
Lack of alignment results in:
- Poor data quality and inconsistency
- Increased costs
- Lack of visibility into the product lifecycle
- Increased risk
- Missed business opportunities
SCALABILITY, BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE, AND INNOVATION—A NATURAL ALIGNMENT FOR PLM
A PLM solution tied to the business strategy can help facilitate scalability, better decision-making based on real-time business intelligence, and development of innovative products that deliver significant return on investment (ROI).
Enhancing scalability through integrated PLM solutions
Scalability lets companies grow and expand their product line opportunities by integrating other business-ready solutions with PLM like computer-aided design (CAD) or ERP for seamless upstream and downstream processes that improve strategic alignment. Scott Krueger, AMP’s PDM Specialist, said, “We’re a company that’s working towards scaling our products and our solutions. If you’re not fully integrated, that’s not scalable for sure.”
Driving improvement with PLM analytics integration
Integrating business intelligence drives continuous improvement. PLM helps companies uncover gaps and areas of optimization in product processes with advanced analytics and reporting. Companies no longer need to wait until they have fully launched products before collecting data and information to identify opportunities and risks. With PLM analytics, teams can base their decisions not just on instinct or experience but real-time business intelligence that enables quick, proactive execution instead of being reactive.
Studies indicate that information-driven organizations are 23 times more likely to acquire customers, 6 times more likely to retain customers, and 19 times more likely to be profitable compared to their peers.2
Innovation is at the heart of every successful product—yet innovation readiness has declined most sharply in linking business strategy to innovation strategy. Strategy-led innovators achieve a share of revenue from new products 74% higher than companies with just a weak link between strategy and innovation.3
Unifying teams and innovation through PLM
This is where PLM plays a vital role in your company—a well-aligned PLM system breaks down silos, provides a centralized location for information, enables cross-functional teams to collaborate seamlessly, and provides an array of capabilities so teams can innovate next-generation products and quickly adapt to changing market conditions and customer needs.
How cloud-native PLM drives business success
One of the most transformative aspects of modern PLM solutions is the adoption of cloud-native technology. Si-Ware, a deep science technology company that is pioneering advancements in optical micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS), recognized the need to aggregate their information into one system—a cloud-native PLM for better access to product information for their global employees. Tarek Zeinah, Si-Ware Engineering Quality Leader, had this to say about adopting cloud-native: “To be able to combine all our separate development efforts into one thread where you can see the progress of the product—that was the missing piece from our puzzle.”
Cloud-native PLM offers significant business benefits by:
- Reducing IT costs: Removes the need to invest or maintain costly physical infrastructure.
- Facilitating collaboration: Enables external and internal teams to have secure real-time access to product information, updates, and changes in a central location.
- Reducing product costs: Helps support better resource planning, minimize design errors, remove redundant tasks, eliminate scrap and rework, and improve product quality.
- Scaling with your company: Cloud-native PLM is built on a scalable platform to grow with smaller businesses and provides larger firms agility and flexibility.
A catalyst for transformation
Many organizations are deploying modern technologies like cloud-native PLM to help them manage the lifecycle of their products. When combined with the overall business strategy, teams can create streamlined processes while sharing product knowledge across their organization. By adding cloud-native PLM to the mix, teams can document, track, and control all revisions made to the product throughout its lifecycle. The result is broader visibility across all stages of the product development process for faster time to market, more flexibility, and a larger percentage of the market share. Within the current business climate, PLM technology serves as a powerful and strategic response to mounting challenges.
Learn more about how you can align your business strategy and drive significant business value with Arena cloud-native PLM.
Cited Source:
Joseph Prock