Get products to market faster and cheaper

More businesses are turning to product lifecycle management (PLM) solutions to help them innovate complex products from concept to production. At the core of PLM software is the ability to centralize and manage product information throughout the entire lifecycle.

To meet delivery timelines, companies need sophisticated PLM software to optimize team visibility and collaboration. This is due to increasing product complexity and outsourcing to manufacturing partners.

Here we review PLM software capabilities that are essential to effectively drive the entire new product development and introduction (NPDI) process.

BOM Management

The bill of materials (BOM) is the foundation of the product record or product definition and must be adequately controlled and managed throughout the entire lifecycle. A well-defined BOM helps manufacturers improve quality control and cost management, simplify regulatory compliance, reduce errors and waste, and expedite the launch of new products.

PLM software offers intelligent BOM management capabilities to create, import, change, share, compare, and approve complex multilevel BOMs. Managing BOMs in PLM streamlines BOM management processes and provides all product teams and supply chain partners access to the latest BOM revisions. 

Benefits of BOM Management With PLM:

• Faster product release cycles: Easier BOM creation and revision control.
• Greater accuracy: Structured assembly relationships offer greater accuracy. This means that the relationships between different components and subassemblies are clearly defined and organized, reducing the likelihood of errors and improving the accuracy of the final product.
• Better visibility: Provides better visibility with reporting for single, multilevel, and consolidated (flattened) BOMs. Users can generate reports for different types of BOMs, providing a clear and comprehensive view of the product structure and its components.
• Improved search: Centralized BOMs deliver faster search results to find components, subassemblies, and top assemblies.
• Reduced errors: BOM management with PLM streamlines processes, enhances accuracy, and reduces the risk of errors, leading to more efficient and cost-effective product development and manufacturing.
• Enhanced component and supplier management: Creating and managing approved manufacturer lists (AMLs), approved vendor lists (AVLs), and approved supplier lists (ASLs) gives design engineers visibility to determine which suppliers are suitable for new and mass-produced products.

Efficient BOM management can significantly impact the success of new product development and introduction (NPDI). By incorporating best practices, such as a standardized BOM structure, PLM software can help organizations optimize workflows and reduce product errors.

Engineering Change Management

It takes the work of many teams and people to move a product from concept to commercialization. Changes throughout the early stages of the product’s lifecycle are inevitable and need to happen quickly to keep things moving. Engineering change management (ECM) helps define the processes in which teams collect, analyze, document, and implement the change requests that become apparent during new product development and introduction (NPDI).

With formalized and controlled engineering change management (ECM), organizations can manage the complexities of design revisions and keep a streamlined and productive engineering process by establishing an efficient engineering change process.

Benefits of Engineering Change Management With PLM:

• Minimizes errors and rework: Helps minimize costly rework and ensures final product meets specs and quality standards.
• Maintains project schedule and budget: Better estimation of impact of changes on project timeline and budgets.
• Shortens engineering change cycles: Automated signoff workflows and visibility keep engineering change approvals on track.
• Ensures compliance and regulatory requirements: In strict regulatory frameworks, ECM is crucial for ensuring compliance. PLM provides required documentation, traceability, and processes to help organizations adhere.

PLM software automates the engineering change order (ECO) and engineering change request (ECR) process to help internal teams and supply chains review and approve changes rapidly anytime and anywhere.

A key advantage of a PLM solution is to make information sharing between internal product teams and external supply chain partners easy, collaborative, and secure. Supply chain collaboration integrated with PLM helps companies efficiently and securely collaborate around the latest design, engineering changes, documents, and drawings, and ensures all teams are referring to the latest BOM. This helps supplier performance and quality while reducing errors, scrap, and rework.

Benefits of Supply Chain Collaboration With PLM:

• Enhances supply chain collaboration: Creates a centralized location for data and information that’s connected directly to the product. Uses an open standard format to share build packages during request for quote (RFQ), prototype, and production ramp processes.
• Reduces cost and confusion: All partners have secure global access. Eliminates the frustration, effort, and loss of continuity of disconnected collaboration methods such as email, file sharing, faxing, and spreadsheets.
• Removes barriers to access for entire supply chain: Allows intuitive features with an integrated commenting stream tied directly to the product design package. Scales your review process with entire supply chain by allowing direct partners to invite their partners as needed.

Whether you have a small, local supply chain or a large, global one, everyone can participate. With this degree of collaboration, companies can ensure information accuracy and speed to market. PLM not only drives supply chain efficiency but also empowers supplier management to provide efficiency and transparency that allow organizations to benefit from consistent data communication and strong supplier relationships.

Managing product documentation can be daunting. Traditional methods of storage such as file cabinets or local servers are no longer capable of handling the sheer volume of documents or the expeditious retrieval needed. These methods do not offer the flexibility or scalability required in today’s fast-paced manufacturing environment. Another consideration: Most documents need to be shared, reviewed, and approved by multiple departments— consequently, certain documents may be restricted or saved in various locations.

PLM allows for the centralized storage of all product and quality documentation as well as the establishment of revision controls and audit trails. Teams can easily track and retrieve documentation associated with the product record that includes:

• Quality policies
• Product specifications
• Training records
• SOPs
• Assembly instructions
• DMRs, DHFs

Benefits of Document Management With PLM:

• Centralized storage: All documents related to projects, products, parts, and processes are stored in one location. With instant access to project assets such as drawings, flowcharts, standard operating procedures (SOPs), marketing material, and more, teams have everything at their fingertips to help improve or innovate new products.
• Enhanced collaboration: Global, remote, home office teams have access to work on documents simultaneously. By eliminating the need to switch between different applications, PLM systems streamline workflows and enhance team productivity.
• Revision and version management: PLM solutions manage document revisions and provide watermarking to ensure teams always have access to the correct version.
• Reduced time, waste efforts, costs, and redundancies: Documents and products stay linked and in sync with engineering changes and processes to help ensure schedules are met and quality is maintained throughout.

Manufacturing businesses can better prepare for challenging product deadlines and meet regulatory requirements by managing product and quality documentation with a PLM system.

Getting a new product development project off the ground can be challenging, especially if you’re relying on traditional project management resources that are disconnected from the product record. Successfully bringing products to market requires speed, organization, strategic management, and most importantly, collaboration.

Project management connects your tasks to the product record of documents, items, and parts so teams can work collaboratively with a traceable audit trail.

Benefits of Project Management With PLM:

• Speed: Accelerates the product development process, helping to accelerate new product introduction (NPI) and product enhancements. Sends automatic notifications when tasks are assigned—teams get immediate status updates and project progress.
• Visibility: Provides visibility among product record, related processes, and project deliverables.
• Empowerment: Aligns teams around tasks, phase-gates, and milestones. Facilitates collaboration with both internal teams and global supply chain partners.

Project management capability within PLM streamlines your NPDI project execution so you can define, create, collaborate, and deliver your products to market faster.

Product development companies and manufacturers that want to avoid product failures, especially in the NPD phase, need reliable product management processes like requirements management. Requirements management features integrated into modern PLM software enable teams to manage more effectively and across various roles, business processes, and sectors.

Teams are empowered to create, specify, verify, and validate each part of the product through requirements management and validation. This is vital to mitigating risk and ensuring customer and stakeholder satisfaction.

Requirements management provides end-to-end traceability, built-in change and configuration management, and standards-based cooperation between teams, suppliers, and supply chains.

Benefits of Requirements Management With PLM:

• Better collaboration: Helps minimize errors, track changes, and communicate updates with stakeholders and teams throughout the project.
• Traceability: Enables teams to get immediate insights into why a particular requirement exists, what’s changed, and whether it’s complete.
• Customer satisfaction: Ensures product development aligns with customer needs and project objectives to deliver high-quality products that meet customer expectations.
• Reduced human error: PLM systems reduce the risk of mistakes or changes by centralizing requirements and providing a clear process for managing them.
• Improved productivity: By streamlining the requirements management process, PLM systems help achieve quicker, more streamlined product development along with smoother workflows.

Managing requirements within PLM allows your company to decrease overall costs, boost customer satisfaction, enhance success rates, and accelerate time to market by providing clear, easy-to-manage, and fast requirements traceability throughout the full product lifecycle.

Compliance management keeps you out of trouble. It’s designed to maintain an organization’s compliance structure functionality. It’s the process you use to create your policy handbook, oversee professional growth and training, and gather the documentation necessary to satisfy government regulators and accrediting bodies. It guarantees that companies are aware of, comprehend, and abide by those laws, rules, and regulations.

The methods and resources used by the compliance management system include technology applications, reports and documentation, security controls, internal and third-party audits, and security audits. Compliance management mitigates risk and builds a culture of compliance.
An essential component of any organization’s success is compliance management. Creating a policy and procedure manual is one thing, but without a means of enforcing those rules and regulations you run the risk of facing fines, legal action, and other legal repercussions from the government.

A well-planned, implemented, and maintained compliance program will prevent or reduce regulatory violations, provide cost efficiencies, and is a smart, sound business step.

Benefits of Compliance Management as a PLM Capability:

• Facilitates integrated end-to-end compliance traceability and reporting.
• Accelerates time to compliance.
• Enables companies to capture and manage regulatory requirements from concept through disposal.
• Reduces risk and costs associated with noncompliance.
• Shortens product development cycles by requiring fewer design iterations.
• Helps enterprise compliance status and reporting.
• Replaces hard copy documents with secure electronic information.
• Easily integrates globally dispersed compliance activities into a single seamless, easy-to-use system.

Product development and innovation are becoming increasingly complex. As devices become smarter and more sophisticated, coupled with customer demands, product customizations, and multidimensional supply chains, companies need the ability to manage, analyze, and report analytics to better understand their product lifecycle outcomes.

Analytics within a PLM solution can help companies identify risks, evaluate KPIs, optimize product design, measure process performance, reduce costs, shorten time to market, and improve product quality.

Key Benefits Include:

• Optimized products and processes: Monitor trends and better understand the outcome of why behind something that happened.
• Empowered teams: Share insights about product changes, quality changes, operations, and projects.
• Reduced risks: Evaluate process bottlenecks, gaps, opportunities, and risks. Analyze items, requests, changes, suppliers, supplier items, projects, quality, and training.
• Driving continuous improvement: Take data-driven actions across the entire organization—to view trends, gain visibility into projects, see root causes, track quality process status, monitor KPIs and suppliers and state of the supply chain.

Companies no longer need to wait until they have fully launched products before collecting data and information to figure out what’s valuable. 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 reactive.

With technology constantly evolving, and finicky consumer demands, companies need to turn to PLM solutions as a prerequisite for driving product innovation and delivering tangible business value. With PLM’s key capabilities, companies can encourage adoption of circular design principles along with meeting the complexity of today’s product requirements, especially in the rapid global economy. Aligning PLM with business goals streamlines product development, boosts innovation, and ensures efficient, sustainable growth in a competitive market.

An effective PLM solution maximizes all aspects of product development, reduces costs, improves product quality, accelerates time to market, and enhances customer satisfaction by providing a single source of truth for all product-related information and processes—everything companies need to be product innovators.