CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive

29 March 2007

Product News

PTC Launches Product Development Process Framework That Links PLM Investments to the Achievement of Critical Business Objectives

PTC announced the availability of a comprehensive process framework that consists of industry-specific product development process landscapes. The intent of this framework is to help discrete manufacturers in multiple industries understand the linkage between product development process improvements, PLM technology investments, and business value.

One of the most daunting challenges for a product development organization today is how to achieve the maximum benefit from its limited technology budget. This is especially true for organizations in highly competitive and highly regulated industries that have intense pressure on cost reduction, time to market, and compliance. Further complicating this equation can be the question of how, when, and where to deploy investments in technology in order to best realize specific business initiatives and gain true competitive differentiation. While the primary benefit from PLM technology is process optimization, organizations that lack a deep understanding of internal process improvement goals risk making unfocused technology investments that can lead to frustration and fail to achieve their full potential.

Over the past 20 years, PTC has worked with leading product development companies in a variety of vertical industries to achieve a wide range of business goals. As a result, PTC recognizes that in addition to sensible technology investments, the most successful organizations have also developed best practices and sound business processes in critical product development areas. Subsequently, PTC has developed a tool based on decades of experience that helps customers realize value from PLM. Using the tool, PTC helps companies align and prioritize business and product development goals with industry-specific process improvements. The result is a rational technology adoption path that is tailored to each individual organization's objectives. The central communication vehicle for our process framework is the new PTC Value Roadmap. The Value Roadmap is a fully configurable, interactive software application that matches an organization's unique goals with vertical industry best practices and delivers a dynamically created, customer-specific report.

"At Emhart Glass, we are committed to delivering the highest quality equipment, controls, and parts to our customers so that they can meet their business objectives. While maintaining this focus, we must also continue to improve our speed and efficiency in the development of new products. Therefore, when making PLM technology decisions, we need to consider more than just new features," said Steven Pinkerton, vice president of RD&E, Emhart Glass. "We need to think about how to improve our product development processes. With help from PTC's Value Roadmap, we can focus our investments on those areas that will have the most impact on our business goals."

Currently, PTC has created 7 industry/audience-specific process landscapes with plans for 2 additional in the coming months. Each of the 7 process landscape incorporates between 11 and 24 critical product development processes. These detailed process landscapes contain comprehensive information about typical product development processes, including a model used to indicate a company's current level of maturity for a given process as well as the targeted maturity level they would like to achieve.

"Aligning technology investments to best practices and process improvements is a key strategic focus for our customers," said Jim Heppelmann, executive vice president and chief product officer, PTC. "We have developed this comprehensive set of process-oriented information, inter-relational value drivers and a complex configuration tool as the result of years of research. Technology investments represent potential value to a customer, however we have found that customers who properly align process and technology optimization can more readily realize that value and achieve significant competitive differentiation and industry leadership."

Interactive demonstrations and consultation sessions are currently available for product development practitioners to learn more about the Value Roadmap at http://www.ptc.com/solutions/global_product_development/value_roadmap.htm .

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