PLM | Manufacturers’ Secret To High Performance

Capgemini found that high-performing manufacturers excel at developing, launching and selling smart, connected products at a rate that outdistances their peers. Today, 25% of high performing manufacturers’ product portfolios are smart, connected products, compared to 19.5% of their counterparts. High performers are also generating more revenue from smart, connected products, with 14.1% of product revenues from smart, connected products for high-performing manufacturers, compared to 8.6% for their counterparts.

• Creating advanced, real-time knowledge sharing and collaboration. These high performers are thinking about how they can break down the barriers keeping them from collaborating more interactively with their global supplier networks, services organizations, sales teams, and aftermarket services providers. The study reveals just how committed these high performing manufacturers are to this by providing examples of how they are sharing access to their PLM systems with suppliers for a clear view of the products being designed.
• Prioritizing collaborative product development using PLM systems. Manufacturers who are excelling at defining, launching and selling smart, connected and, in many cases, configurable products are investing more than their counterparts in end-to-end PLM and digital solutions. Capgemini found high performing manufacturers are spending 10% more on end-to-end PLM and digital solutions with an average annual investment of 3.8% of revenues. Nearly 50% of manufacturers aim to spend more than €100M ($117M) in Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) platforms and digital solutions in the next three years according to the Capgemini study.

With just 17% of manufacturers making significant progress across all six dimensions of engineering transformation maturity, a Configuration Lifecycle Management (CLM) approach to product configuration is needed. These six dimensions: vision, leadership, and transformation plan, nurturing a digital culture, creating and launching smart, connected products, enabling digital continuity and the ability to capture, aggregate, analyze and gain insights from the voice of the product or usage data, are the foundations for excelling at manufacturing smart, connected products.

Successfully growing a manufacturing business that includes configurable products and services must have engineering, production, sales, marketing, and services all relying on the same configuration knowledge. This is where CLM is helping manufacturers grow their configurable products revenue today, by aligning PLM’s product knowledge management and collaboration, ERP’s transaction data, and CRM’s customer data and their preferences for product configurations.

The era of smart, connected products has arrived and with it the need for a more unified approach to managing product configurations. It’s a natural progression to move beyond the limitations of PLM and ERP systems and create an open, scalable platform that will enable future product configuration revenue growth for decades to come.

Smart, connected products are forcing an inflection point in global manufacturing today. The need for greater agility, speed, and scale across production floors, coupled with increased insights needed from analytics, Business Intelligence (BI) and advanced predictive models tracking machinery stability and reliability, all create an entirely new knowledgebase. To manage and make the most out of this knowledgebase, a new approach is needed that extends beyond the limitations of traditional PLM, ERP, CRM, and CAD systems.

Configuration Lifecycle Management (CLM) combines PLM, ERP, CRM, and CAD systems to enable product configurations to scale over their lifecycles, providing time- and cost-saving benefits to manufacturers pursuing new markets with smart, connected products. Not dependent on one system for configuration knowledge, CLM provides an unbiased and complete view of each product’s configuration lifecycle, while also freeing up manufacturer’s IT departments from having to do double maintenance on master data in each system.

As a result, CLM becomes the single source of truth, flexing to provide seamless product lifecycles, reducing product errors and time-to-market for new products, and improving time-to-customer and perfect-order performance.