Aras KPIs offer means of measuring impact on product development
By Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 2/1/2005 7:00:00 AM
Product life-cycle management (PLM) software has proven itself as a tool for improving productivity. Now vendors are enabling solutions to measure exactly how much they can improve product development processes. The hope is that by offering ways of quantifying PLM's benefits, more users can be persuaded to do more than just establish PLM vaults.
"Having a PLM vault prevents recreating new information when developing new products," says Paul Gilmartin, VP of product management for PLM vendor Aras. "That can justify the cost of basic PLM vaulting, but it doesn't give companies a reason to go beyond that."
Gilmartin says that will change for companies that use the key performance indicators (KPIs) embedded in the latest version of the Aras package. "We sat down with industry experts to discuss KPIs for product development," he says. "They came up with five that we built into our solution."
Those five KPIs are:
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Product Innovation, measuring how many corrective actions have to be taken whenever a product is changed.
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Engineering Efficiency, tracking how fast new products, and product changes, move through engineering.
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Design to Goal, calculating how long or how much it costs to complete a design.
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Engineering Optimization, tracking the numbers of parts reused across products.
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Time to Manufacturing, measuring how long it takes to move products from design into the marketplace.
"These KPIs are viewed through scorecards and dashboards that display ongoing business activity," Gilmartin says. "The product innovation dashboard shows what percentage of changes were corrective actions, and what percentage was for product improvement. A greater percentage of product improvement changes points to a more innovative organization."
Varian Semiconductor Equipment Associates, Gloucester, Mass., has found multiple ways to apply the Aras KPIs, according to Jim Sutton, IT manager of PLM development. Varian's use of the Design to Goal metric is the most obvious example.
Before installing Aras, Sutton says, people were combing multiple databases to determine whether the company was on schedule to meet customer delivery dates. "With Aras," says Sutton, "we have a single database that gives us an exact picture of where we stand in regard to customer commitments."
