Pick a Business Initiative to Support

One approach to picking the first (or the next) place to apply PLM is to understand what current business initiatives are under way, and support it. The benefits will likely go well beyond that initiative, but it can provide a rallying point for the PLM implementation. It may also provide some funding. What types of initiatives make sense? Most companies today have some initiatives focused on product innovation. And PLM is the natural solution to help both capture and execute on innovation ideas.

Strategic Initiatives

Many of the strategic initiatives we see recently have to do with innovation, time to market, customer centricity, or profitable growth associated with them. There may be others as well, but we see these relatively frequently. Some common strategic initiatives seen in companies today fit well with PLM, including:

• Lean Product Development
• Open Innovation
• Global Product Design
• Product Portfolio Management

Practical Initiatives

Not all initiatives are as glamorous and as glitzy as those focused on terms like innovation. Some are continuous improvement, address a customer complaint, solve a current problem or just make good plain business sense. These can be related to quality or efficiency, or often aimed at aligning a process across multiple departments or organizations. We will touch more on picking a process to improve in a later post.

Participate in Aberdeen Group research to learn more about strategic initiatives on innovation, take a survey on global design chains and I'll send you a free copy of the report when it is published.

I look forward to your comments.