More than managing your product lifecycle

Some would argue that PLM (product lifecycle management) software is only relevant to maybe 1,000 companies in the automotive/aerospace sectors. This may be true as a generalisation, but every company, large or small, has their own subset of PLM requirements. PLM is an IT-based business strategy whose goal is to transform intellectual property (IP) from ideas to profits. The business mission is to enhance and accelerate innovation. But while PLM contains several new and extended technologies, the underlying philosophy is at least equally important. "A company's most valuable asset is the wealth of information about its products: how they are configured, built, maintained and evolved in the face of changing market demands," says Jordi Portella, director of analyst CIMdata in Europe. "By integrating people, processes and data, PLM forms the product information backbone." Successful PLM requires product knowledge to be accessible to, and interoperable with, all users and applications. A key characteristic is a flexible data model, which allows users to format data easily in their own context. Its collaboration model extends the older PDM (product data management) from asynchronous information sharing to synchronous knowledge synthesis – whereby ideas and data are not just viewed and shared, but aggregated and propagated. This is precisely the motivation behind Proctor and Gamble's (P&G's) implementation of MatrixOne's PLM. In the consumer packaged goods sector, product development begins with creating a technical spec, which includes data on its material, packaging, artwork, analytical standards and process standards. In total, P&G now has more than 600,000 such specs world-wide. P&G's history throughout the mid-1990s focused on growth and globalisation, so having functionally similar products with significant variations in specs between regions was commonplace. In addition, the company had multiple legacy systems functioning across regions. Also, much of the work was in hard copy, so sharing and collaboration were minimal. "We were losing significant revenue due to a lack of scale and leverage, and even worse, we weren't fully capitalising on what was already known or developed to cut down initial time to market," says Dan Blair, director of technical standards and systems for P&G. P&G's challenge was to develop a world-class specification management system. "Beyond having all the specs in one system, early on we also realised the need for getting to a common content scheme in order to fully exploit opportunities," says Blair. And the firm also wanted to take internally developed systems, couple them with the data model planned for the second phase of its specification system (structured data) and deploy these across P&G. It needed a partner to provide technology for workflow, a product data model, an open architecture and a proven validation history. "The MatrixOne application rated well against a number of others we evaluated," says Blair. "One key consideration was its flexibility. As our requirements have changed and matured, the solution has done a good job of supporting these evolving needs." P&G developed its Corporate Standards System (CSS) with MatrixOne, based on the Matrix collaborative PLM platform. P&G teams worked with MatrixOne and the Sogeti (US) division of Cap Gemini to develop the functionalities. "We're now at a very fulfilling stage when we hear our users sing [its] praises," says Blair. PLM like this is relevant to every company interested in innovation, minimising investment and maximising revenue at all stages of the product lifecycle.