Product Lifecycle Management Solutions
Accelerate your digital product lifecycle management transformation.
Digital product lifecycle management (DPLM) technologies are transforming how businesses manage product development information. But some companies are reluctant to invest due to unforeseen challenges and cost. Learn how Applix Product Lifecycle Management—a pre-configured solution—can help companies accelerate their PLM transformations.
An alternative approach to digital product lifecycle management
To stay ahead of the competition, business leaders often think they need stronger, more effective, and cohesive management across specific areas like product development, manufacturing, finance, and technology. But many manufacturers whose products date back several years are unable to keep up with new processes and technological advancements. Often, their product development processes, and information are managed within silos. The result? Their processes and systems are strained, and they struggle to meet goals. They often lack the engineering efficiency, speed, and flexibility that could make an impact on improving their bottom line.
To innovate, structure, and manage product development information more effectively, many organizations are exploring the use of PLM technologies. But some organizations are hesitant to undertake this transformation because of the complexity, the pitfalls, the unknowns, and the cost involved. The initiative presents the challenge of committing resources and stretching them to yet another long-term project, while still trying to keep the business humming along.
To remedy this, Applix has constructed an alternative approach. We offer Applix Product Lifecycle Management (DPLM), a pre-configured solution that can help companies accelerate their PLM transformations.
Our digital product lifecycle management transformation approach
Applix has a multi-phased approach to enable a client’s PLM transformation:
- Assessment. We help the client define and scope their vision, assess the organization’s current state capabilities, identify improvement opportunities, and define the future state supported by a phased, multiyear PLM roadmap and business case.
- Implementation. The business case drives executive buy-in on implementation and lays the foundation for deployment. We have created strategic tools for the assessment phase and developed DPLM that is used for a cost-effective and efficient implementation phase.
DPLM: A pre-configured solution
DPLM is an “out-of-the-box” pre-configured software solution that leverages Applix’s deep experience in lean engineering-focused process design, technology enablement, organizational change, and program management.
Specific elements of DPLM include:
- Capability maturity model
- Integrated predefined processes: new product introduction, project management, requirements management, change control, bill of material (BOM), design for X, and document management.
- Business and functional requirements
- Test cases and scripts
- Use cases, roles, and responsibilities
- Conference room pilot (CRP) material
- Key performance indicators (KPIs)
- Preconfigured data model: objects and attributes
- Preconfigured process maps for each capability area
Potential benefits of the Applix Product Lifecycle Management solution
- Implementing DPLM can provide the following potential benefits to your organization:
- 15 percent to 30 percent average reduction in implementation timeline (increased reduction based on further complexity reduction of processes and configuration)
- 25 percent to 50 percent savings in data migrations effort and final cutover time
- 30 percent to 50 percent savings in implementation costs
- 10 percent to 20 percent improvement in engineering efficiency
Other potential benefits:
- Improved engineering effectiveness and quality of the end product
- Increased adoption of leading practice-enriched process design
- Enforced process standardization across the organization
- Improved ability to focus on continuous improvement by monitoring performance metrics
Getting more from PLM
Digital product lifecycle management business transformation is a major commitment, regardless of how small or large a change you are making. Here are a few things we have learned that can help:
- Focus on catalysts. Approaches like DPLM can be tailored to specific business processes and designed to have the capacity to accelerate performance
- Get leaner and smarter. Take the time to look at how you can better streamline your processes to achieve effective and efficient worker performance and improve productivity
- Stay on target. DPLM can help reduce implementation time and costs and help drive value for your business
- Invest in an out-of-the-box solution. DPLM can be adapted to fit your company’s requirements, potentially saving you time and money in the long term
Data Migration Accelerator (DMA)
Typical PLM data migration for a PLM transformation comes with many challenges and risks. It’s also often an underestimated high-risk factor in delaying the implementation, thus increasing overall costs.
Pure traditional approaches are too costly to address all migration risks and challenges. DMA process and technical templates help mitigate unknown risks and bring efficiencies, innovation, and productivity improvements to enable cost and time savings. DMA provides tools and methods to move data into and from PLM systems in a highly efficient manner (1M objects per second) and support visualization, searching, analytics, and collaboration.
Critical success enablers for transformation
The Applix Product Lifecycle Management Solution process models incorporate Applix’s lean engineering leading practices and include major PLM processes to accelerate blueprinting. Our digital product lifecycle management approach:
- Begins with out-of-the-box processes, configuration, and modifications (approximately 20 percent) where necessary to meet client specific needs
- Next, the processes are identified based on the initial assessment. Depending on the product mix, we bring together process maps from multiple industries to create the initial set of base processes
- Then, we start aligning to meet the client-specific requirements. These processes have requirements, roles, and security definition, and the use case is tightly linked to provide a detailed requirement for the configuration
Transformation toolkit
Based on experience with large transformations, we’ve developed a library of templates and tools that can accelerate the process to mature and deploy the base DPLM solution as per client need. Artifacts that are part of the toolkit include:
- Requirements library
- Design decision templates
- End-to-end use case scenarios and test scripts
- Training modules for core capability
- Deployment and security validation tools