The Future of PLM in Cloud

Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) is no longer a discipline hidden in the product engineer's toolbox. PLM evolved from Product Data Management to Product Lifecycle and Process Management, to managing the entire product lifecycle.

As the demands of the supply chain increased and IT budgets shrunk, traditional PLM lacked the flexibility needed to respond quickly to a changing business landscape. Looking at the potential value of implementing PLM, many companies mistakenly think that they can establish additional manual controls, heavy customizations, upgrades and integrations on top of the traditional PLM system. Attempts to do these enhancements resulted in increasing IT costs and complexity, without tangible business improvements. In addition, the PLM implementations could take months, even years, with lots of upfront costs for maintenance and support.

In today's complex business environment, enterprises are looking for a systematic approach to quickly improve product development functions and integrate them across the end-to-end product value chain, to make it more agile and adaptive.

This led to the evolution of cloud, a suitable digitally connected PLM platform across three domains of the modern product value chain as defined by Oracle: Innovate, Develop and Commercialize (I2C), the best fit of profitable products.

Companies with a comprehensive strategy for innovation and Product Lifecycle Management are streamlining their costs and operations by transitioning from on-premise PLM systems to cloud based services. This allows them to more quickly innovate, develop and commercialize products for accelerated time to market, cost reduction, and improved quality.

The PLM Cloud solutions enables an organization to transform fragmented product development processes into a complete integrated PLM solution with 360-degree visibility into product information, common data model, modern user experience, real-time embedded analytics and social cross-functional collaboration across the entire product network. It takes a systematic approach to managing the entire lifecycle of a product from selecting and translating the best ideas, requirements, and concepts into development portfolios and projects, through to the product development and release process.

PLM Cloud enables better collaboration between manufacturers and their global supply chains by making product data accessible globally.

PLM Cloud also enables companies to grant limited viewing and editing access to specific users, protecting sensitive intellectual property without the hassle of firewalls and workarounds. Companies who outsource parts or assembly can also benefit from PLM Cloud systems because they are able to instantly update product data for suppliers around the world and be confident that suppliers are working off the latest version of the BOM.

From technical standpoint, on-premise PLM has an expensive and time intensive integration process which requires software licenses and a significant infrastructure investment. On the other hand, PLM Cloud offers many advantages over traditional on-premise product lifecycle management, including lower total cost of ownership, no hardware to purchase or servers to maintain, no upgrades or associated delays due to redeployment, faster implementation and secure access anytime, anywhere globally.

The PLM Cloud solution suite is built on an integrated platform designed to rapidly innovate, develop, and commercialize profitable products and includes Oracle’s Innovation Management, Product Development, Project Execution Management, and Product Hub Cloud solutions, with embedded analytics.

Swetha Makineni

Principal Lead - PLM Cloud at Birlasoft

Swetha Makineni is the Principal Lead - PLM Cloud at Birlasoft. She has over 15 years of extensive Oracle PLM experience in transforming business processes of High Tech, Pharmaceutical, Medical Devices, Food, Chemical and Polymers