SAP unveils road map for product lifecycle management
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SAP says it intends to extend its PLM (product lifecycle management) application’s reach across businesses “to help spark innovation and accelerate delivery of new products and services”.
Over the next three years, its extended application will build on existing SAP PLM capabilities to provide an end-to-end solution that helps companies accelerate and simplify the business end of products, says the company.
With this road map, SAP says it will help users to drive PLM beyond the engineering department and into “all relevant business areas throughout the company and beyond”, enabling them to tap into greater business potential.
“PLM has evolved from a technology used mainly by engineers to one that enterprise heads know they need to adopt across their manufacturing operations to remain competitive,” observes Marc Halpern, research director at analyst Gartner.
“A growing number of manufacturers are adopting PLM to help them to drive business through greater product and process innovation and improved execution, driving new products to market successfully in an environment of shortening product life cycles and small windows of high margin,” he adds.
Based on SAP ERP, new releases of SAP PLM look set to appear as flexible, service-enabled applications aimed at enabling collaboration throughout extended business networks of suppliers, customers and partners across disparate IT systems.
It’s all due to start this year, with the first in a series of quickly deployable composite applications. Then in 2008, SAP says it will focus on further simplifying the PLM user interface, with an intelligent role-based offering for information display.
Following that, in 2009, SAP says it will release a PLM enhancement package, enabling users “to drive business acceleration through improved integration of all relevant processes into product development”.
New capabilities will allow the management of all product-specific information, such as ideas, design, requirements, variant configuration and maintenance structure in one integrated system and will optimise data consistency as well as process flow from the design and engineering departments to manufacturing, sales and service, according to the company.
