Product Performance Intelligence is Critical to Successful Product Lifecycle Management
Recently, the Omneo solution for product performance intelligence from Siemens PLM Software received a Frost & Sullivan Best Practices Award. In this guest blog post, Frost & Sullivan’s Mike Jude, Ph.D., explains below why products like Omneo are critical to a successful PLM strategy to improve product performance.
Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) is a great idea, but most companies focus more on the P and L than they do on the M. There is an old truism that you can’t manage what you can’t see and this is true with PLM as much as any process. In order to implement PLM processes, a company needs a management framework that is based on metrics and analytics: metrics because a company needs a measure of performance and analytics because metrics are meaningless unless a company knows what the metrics mean. Yet, most companies do not have the tools to adopt true PLM. For this reason, the new frontier for business is in the area of advanced analytics. This does not mean traditional business intelligence, where business performance reporting was automated and routinized to provide operational data. It is a quantum leap from reporting to using data predictively: that is, to use data to inform on the outcome of the processes involved. Transcending the “what” of data to the “why” of data and ultimately evolving the capacity to predict the “where to” of business processes is the purpose of advanced, or predictive, analytics.
Stratecast | Frost & Sullivan is very interested in this space and has been tracking the evolution of advanced analytics for a while now. There are many technology companies that are currently working to deliver advanced analytics to the market (in fact, Stratecast has identified at least 400 that claim to, to one extent or another), but there are few that have taken the time to map analytics to specific business needs. One that has is Siemens PLM Software which has focused on the product management lifecycle and asked the fundamental question of how can analytics improve the design, production, delivery and support of products. This seems like a rather obvious place to focus analytics, but the market, so far, has mainly been focused on the overhead functions of a business ( the cost side) rather than the production functions of a business (the revenue side).
One area, in particular, where the application of advanced analytics is poised to deliver substantial value to enterprises is in the analysis of production quality. That is, analytics can tell us a great deal about how well production processes are doing in terms of how well a product performs once it is shipped. By building a virtual representation of the product – a virtual twin – one can then compare the simulation to the actual performance of the product. This can provide essential insights into both the design of the product as well as its overall quality. In fact, PLM is an essential outgrowth of the, by now, ancient notions of Deming TQM (total quality management) and the more modern notions of Six Sigma. PLM enables one to see immediately if a process is in or out of statistical control and, furthermore, provides insights into what one can do to correct a process that is out of control.
For these reasons, Stratecast | Frost & Sullivan is bullish on analytics as a real growth industry. Over the next five to ten years, we predict that analytics, based on big data foundations, will come to dominate most industries. For those companies, such as Siemens PLM Software, who are providing this technology and expertise to industry, the future looks very bright.
To learn more about the award Siemens PLM Software received for the Omneo solution for product performance intelligence, head over to the Big Data Blog.
About the author:
Mike Jude, Ph.D. is a program manager with Frost & Sullivan with over 30 years of experience in Telecommunications and IT including technology application, market research, consulting, and operations management with expertise in decision analysis, market and business analysis and developing innovation and encouraging creativity. His industry expertise covers a broad range of sectors, leveraging long-standing working relationships with leading industry participants’ Senior Executives in network automation technology and local exchange telephone service providers and service automation. He received his B.S.E.E. & M.E.E.M from University of Colorado and Ph.D. from Walden University.
