The product innovation platform, with PLM as its core, essentially ties together all enterprise applications, data, and tools used to design, develop, manufacture, and service products in one system. This includes extension into the front end of innovation to sense demand and manage intellectual property, the value chain of knowledge inside and outside the company for new product ideas, the supply chain for collaboration and rapid time to market, and manufacturing for rapid production, accuracy, and quality.
Perhaps the biggest benefit of a product innovation platform is that the development of products, the lifeblood of a company, can be tied to strategic business goals and multiple product, sales, and marketing efforts. Why embark on this multiyear journey to establish a true global, cross-enterprise platform to design and develop products? In summation, here are some of the key benefits:
- Enabling more rapid collaboration across the value chain: customers, engineering, manufacturing, supply chain, and service.
- Collaborative manufacturing — engineering and design work closely with manufacturing from the beginning of the product life cycle resulting in fewer errors, higher quality, and better products.
- Full view of data to provide the opportunity for product life-cycle analytics.
- Integration of service information (product failure modes, customer feedback) for product improvement.
- Enabling more rapid response to quality issues as well as product and software updates.
- Unification of information on complex products, whether, for example, heavy equipment that requires a systems engineering view or consumer packaged goods that have process and discrete (i.e., the packaging) requirements that need to come together.
The key components and elements of the product innovation platform that we think you need to keep in mind as you consider extending your product development process are discussed in the full report.
This report provides detail on the building blocks for the product innovation platform: the planning approach, the framework, and the reference model, as well as reinforcing the value of this enterprisewide approach to designing, engineering, and manufacturing products.
