Faster, Better, Cheaper

Faster, better, cheaper: It was and always will be the way to compete. Revolutionary technology advances and processes mean leaders have to spot new trends, initiate new products and embrace new markets with lightning-speed. To keep up with rapid industry changes, fierce competition, and short windows (time) of opportunity, companies must adapt quickly to the demands of the marketplace.

Businesses must constantly seek out operational strategies that will give them an absolute competitive advantage over their competition. Successful businesses have little interest in sharing the market—they want to dominate it. They must either bring products to market faster, be more innovative, improve quality, and/or find ways to further reduce operating costs—just to name a few—in order to maximize their profit.

Clearly, Speed-to-market is a key prerequisite to this success. In fact, operational efficiency today is the enabling of integrated project management, design, engineering, manufacturing, production, purchasing, product planning, plus the casting off of non-core competencies—all with unerring speed-to-market. At the same time, businesses must manage and utilize the following core assets strategically, responsibly, and wisely: the organizations’ information workers (people = the experts), business processes (business flow that is created and executed), and intellectual property (knowledge assets = product data) are at the center of every decision.

Product Data for Anyone, Anywhere, Anytime (a.k.a. Data Democratization)

So the strategic question is how can your business leverage these three core assets for maximum speed, quality and profitability? Simply put, your business must be able to collaborate with anyone, anywhere, anytime. This means businesses must streamline the flow of product data between all information workers throughout the extended enterprise (business, suppliers, and customers) and not just the engineering group. The business must allow for dynamic, automatic, and repeatable enterprise processes, all while ensuring your product information is secure both internally and externally.

Until now, the only alternatives have been expensive, complicated legacy CAD/PLM systems. Though these legacy systems serve a tightly structured purpose, outside that purpose they stifle the business. These systems have proved prohibitive for most businesses outside of engineering’s power users due to high cost, inflexibility (rigid processes), required extensive training, and the need for dedicated resources and complex infrastructure.

Due to these reasons, industry studies show that less than 10% of organizations information workers are given access to these systems and even fewer employees, users, vendors, customers are willing to adopt the use of these complicated tools. The key point is that without user adoption, no system can return results and hence cannot deliver any return on investment.

Would you guys agree?