Time-to-market meets the flattening of the earth

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Time-to-market meets the flattening of the earth
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Background

• Traditional product lifecycle curves consist of
  two discrete phases which drive a company's
  capital conversion cycle (Investment, ROI,
  Recoup).
• Product Development
• Product Production

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Background
Toward the end of the 20th century, JIT concepts
(along with Y2K) drove investment in Enterprise
class Production applications such as ERP
(physical capital centric), SCM (working capital
centric), CRM (customer centric). With the
exception of highly engineered product -
requiring investment in CAD\CAE\PDM - Product
Development has seen relatively little investment
of enterprise class applications, despite studies
that indicate nearly 85 of a product's cost
structure is defined within that phase.
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Background
The Global Economy and "flattening of the earth"
has allowed businesses to leverage outsourced
business models primarily manufacturing
here-to-for available only to the largest of
enterprises. Many of these businesses have only
recently completed investment in ERP systems,even
fewer in SCM. Nearly all of them manage Product
Development via ad hoc (typically MS Excel ro
Access) methods.
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"Outsourcing operations for a manufacturing
company is like a warm toilet seat in a public
restroom. Nice at first, but it becomes
increasingly un-nerving the more you think about
it"
Surprisingly, most now find themselves "fumbling
for an SIC code" having eschewed their
traditional value-add. During this
soul-searching exercise, the savvy soon
realizes they have morphed from asset based
enterprises into information based enterprises,
and in doing so come to find their ad hoc Product
Development systems are grossly inadequate.
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Business problem

• Key Trends
• Global outsourcing
• Higher SKU counts
• Rapid change

Concept
Design
Source
Deliver

Key Challenges

• Staying on top of new products
• Information accuracy and timeliness
• Document control
• Management visibility into schedules
• Collaboration with remote partners
• Duplication of information

Symptoms of failure

• Time-to-market
• Launch execution

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Information Flow During A Products Lifecycle
A lot of the complexity stems from the iterative
nature of Product Development versus the more
traditional linear paths that Production system
are designed to handle. PLMresearchs
PRODUCTManager is a online repository that helps
global companies deal with this complexity.
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PRODUCTManager provides development partners with
access to what they need

• Participants
• View data
• Edit data
• Copy data
• Receive email change
• notifications

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Everyone is working off the same information
PRODUCTManager

• Key Benefits
• Reduced confusion
• Improved Organization
• Better control of information
• Faster information sharing
• Fewer mistakes

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Development data feeds downstream Production
systems
No hardwareNo software

• Key Benefits
• Faster time to market
• Improved control over designs
• Lower development Costs

• Key Benefits
• Up-to-date online catalogs
• Better support to sales channel
• Lower administration costs

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About PLMresearch

• Founded 2000
• On-line product merchandising solutions for
  mid-sized companies in the home furnishings
  industry
• Selected clients Global Views, John-Richard,
  Montaage, Oriental Accents, and The Uttermost
  Company

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PLMresearch Opportunities

• Established market/need
• 60B home furnishing industry
• Highly fragmented
• Little IT infrastructure
• Hosted pricing model
• Configure engagement
• Monthly subscription
• Open Source development
• Web-based preserves GPL
• PHP leverages existing code
• Phase II development
• Standardized (well supported) architecture
• Robust PHP community (BostonPHP.org and beyond)

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PLMresearch Opportunities (cont.)

• Greenfield
• PLM has not been dominated by traditional s/w
  companies e.g. ERP/CRM/SCM
• Some evangelizing has occurred via big CAD/ERP
  vendors
• Nose under the tent
• PLM setups downstream integration play via RDBMS
  accretation
• Referral sell into OS CRM, eCommerce, liquidation
• Larger markets available
• Lightly engineered, short PLC, high SKU
• Non-durables, consumer/commodity-like

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PLMresearch pipeline

• Active trial
• Progress Lighting division of Hubbell (NSYE
  HUBB)
• CBK division of Blythe (NYSE BLH)
• Maitland-Smith division of Furniture Brands
  (NYSE FBN)
• Department56 (NYSE DFS)

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PLMresearch requirements

• Funding for phase II development
• Software engineers
• Integration engineers
• Operations