Integrated PLM-BI Analytics Offer Powerful Business Insights

To develop modern electronic products, innovative companies rely upon product lifecycle management (PLM) solutions to enable engineering and manufacturing teams and their extendeded supply chains to speed prototyping, reduce scrap, and streamline supply chain management.

To address increasingly complex product design challenges, PLM capabilities have evolved to include more supply chain teams and extended aspects of the product process, such as compliance and supplier collaboration.

The result of more mature PLM capabilities is that product and process information stored in the system has become increasingly rich with potentially tremendous business value.

So, smart manufacturers, I ask you to lift up your pickaxes and get ready to mine the data stored within your Arena PLM repository with a PLM-integrated Business Intelligence (BI) solution.

There is product knowledge gold in them-thar hills. Gold that can provide rich insights into projects and new product introduction (NPI) processes that can solve everyday issues as well as translate into a strategic vision for the future. Know the past and the present trends so well it will help you see into the future—in fact change the future.

Business intelligence moves far beyond the value of helping companies simply manage their bill of materials (BOMs), change orders, and data specifications. BI provides the ability for companies to gain visibility into reports on a range of product design issues. Examples would be component availabilities, potential quality risks—basically, anything in the design process that can either delay or accelerate time to market and reduce product errors.

Arena recently launched Arena Analytics (powered by GoodData), a BI solution that enables companies to build meaningful insights into how their product-related business processes are performing.

Leveraging Arena PLM data integrated with the GoodData BI platform, organizations can create dashboards comprised of customized key performance indicators (KPIs) and reports that measure their business process performance. Arena Analytics reports are displayed directly in the Arena PLM dashboard and can be shared with other Arena PLM users.

Arena Analytics provides the key performance indicators (KPIs) that companies need to make informed business decisions. With Arena Analytics, everyone in your organization benefits:

• CxOs love having insights into the big picture to make better decisions

• Project managers can identify and resolve bottlenecks to stay on schedule

• Product teams are empowered to take actions sooner and reduce risks before risks become damages

Manufacturers can not just choose a best of breed BI siloed solution and expect it to bring value to their PLM system. An effective BI solution needs to be seamlessly integrated into the PLM system and designed with knowledge of the engineering and product development domains alike. Arena Analytics allows organizations to create insightful dashboards with reports that focus on key areas such as product development cycle time, product quality trends, project performance and supply chain health.

Final Thoughts

Companies often do not understand what to focus on and how to get the most out of PLM. Or alternatively, they drown in data as opposed to focusing on the precious few KPIs that truly drive their business. These factors often make it challenging to focus on the proper insights and visibility of design processes to ensure efficient and economical development.

BI solutions helps companies maximize their investment in a PLM system with comprehensive tracking and monitoring of PLM processes, managed information, and product design initiatives. BI tools are critical for organizing and structuring large amounts of data, while analytics provides insights into the benefit of decision-makers.

Up until recently, smart manufacturers have used their PLM solution in a relatively narrow capacity to better manger solely their product data, such as reducing issues with their bill of materials , version control and ensuring “one source of truth.” An integrated PLM-BI solution helps identify design issues, manage and improve processes with visibility into strategic trends that translate into business value.

BI is essential for companies to realize the full potential of PLM.