Communicating product data across an organization is complex. Let’s talk about how to make it easier.
Different departments gather product data from a variety of systems including Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) Systems, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Systems, Manufacturing Execution systems (MES), and Quality Management Systems (QMS) and more, how do we know our organizations are making the most out of all this information?
Just think about it for a second. Our systems speak different languages, AND our departments often aim for different goals.
With an estimated 90% of the world’s data created in the last two years alone (Conner, n.d.), it’s no wonder that companies are having a hard time using it all. The IDC estimates that just 0.5% of the data companies produce is ever used. It’s time to change that.
Here are 9 Ways Your Business Will Benefit From Connecting Your Data systems.
1. Increased Usability
Data experts believe that if Fortune 1,000 companies increased the amount of data they used by just 10%, they could realize over $65 million in additional net income (Marr, 2015). Not only are these numbers huge, they also help make my case about the critical importance of data usability.
The truth is – any one specialized system is often too complex for many non-specialized roles to navigate, find, and transfer the right information. This often leaves separate departments accountable for storing and sharing uncontrolled, out of date versions of product data. It’s not because they don’t WANT to use the right information. It’s because system complexity and interdepartmental gates make it hard to consistently get the right information.
So how do we make product data more usable?
A) Consolidating product data from disparate sources into one single system.
B) Give users a way to access the system using simplified role-specific dashboards.
2. Better Data Access
The most important reason your product data shouldn’t (internally anyway) be kept secret is because product data is your company’s most valuable asset.
Not everyone who needs access to specific product information hosted in your PLM system is from your engineering department, so don’t force them to go through the same vigorous Product Lifecycle system training. Don’t make them navigate an engineer’s world one click at a time.
In order to effectively use data, our departments must have ready access to it. We must make rich product information easy to accessible for a broad set of roles.
By creating an organized system that connects all of our product data, your organization will make information easily accessible to users beyond those who have created it.
Just think of the possibilities that come from connecting multiple systems and delivering information to all departments through a single window.
3. Complete Data
Imagine an entire enterprise with access to real data, at the right time, when it’s needed.
By connecting your product lifecycle management systems with your other enterprise systems, every stakeholder within your organization can impact the value flow of product data through your organization. It also equips team members to consistently drive critical decisions with the latest, most accurate information.
4. Better Insights
Better access to data = Better insights.
Your business teams can and should demand a lot of your PLM processes and solution.
This is one of the reasons why your organization should consider integration technologies and custom front-end solutions – Such as PLM applications.
A data-driven enterprise with insights into how current products and processes can be optimized can drastically improve productivity. Doing this requires teams to have access to up-to-date, accurate product data.
5. Better Decisions
Ready access to information is especially important to any company developing products.
Users without access to the system of record resort to error-prone workarounds that can result in inaccuracies, quality problems, and waste.
Decisions made from out- of- date inaccurate data threaten product quality and delay time to market.
Providing everyone in your organization with broad visibility into the system of record will drive better, more accurate decisions. This will ultimately improve quality, reduce waste, scrap, rework, and help you meet your time to market goals.
The analytical possibilities that come with connecting your data will help users across your organization make accurate product decisions throughout the entire development process.
6. Better Products
Who doesn’t want to create better products faster?
Providing your organization with universal data access will allow your company to drastically accelerate product development.
How so?
By connecting disparate systems, you will have access to real-time data allowing you to make better product decisions.
Because your decisions and actions are now driven by up-to-date information, you will achieve a higher product quality.
7. Increased Productivity
Why waste time manually reading, entering and analyzing data? It could be automatically collected, filtered, and combined.
By collecting your product data in one system and providing a simplified role-based interface, any user within your organization can access contextual, up-to-date, real-time product information anytime they need.
I guarantee your productivity will grow when your organization is able to plan earlier with manufacturing, order materials sooner with purchasing all while your engineering team is spending less time pulling reports.
8. Increased collaboration
Using a system that provides role-based data access to stakeholders throughout your organization provides every role with an ability to quickly understand the status of a part number and how the parts fit together in a design.
This will not only help mobilize and inform the work of teams throughout the organization, but it will also help maximize the success of your product development.
Giving your team the ability to extend and connect your PLM data into the rest of your enterprise will rapidly increase the overall effectiveness of your organization.
9. Real Results
The ultimate benefit your organization will achieve by connecting your data systems stems from your ability to acquire real results.
What does that mean?
Positive results have a tendency to snowball into more and more success. Results give your organization the confidence it needs to quickly deliver value. Providing access to the right information empowers a team, department, company to reach their true potential.
We want to help your company thrive. Our EAC Productivity Apps give your organization a way to connect disparate enterprise systems and easily deliver role-based dashboards to increase user confidence and productivity.
Making and extending access to product data (also known as data accessibility) is exactly what can put you ahead, especially if your organization has anything to do with product development.
This article explains how to make product data accessible, as well as why product data access is a trend that many organizations are beginning to pursue.
Product data is vital to organizational success
In business and engineering, product development refers to bringing new and existing products to market. During this process, your product data is everything.
Your organization’s product data likely includes computer-aided design (CAD) data, 3D models, parts information, standardized work instructions, product requirements, notes, documents, and more.
This is why your organization’s product development success starts with… you know it… product data.
The reality is, the product data that may only be visible to engineering or management teams is exactly what your entire organization could leverage to make better-informed decisions.
Product data is vital to organizational success because it helps identify business opportunities, predict future trends, and most importantly it is exactly what allows you to generate more revenue.
Why is data accessibility important?
Data-driven business decisions make or break companies. This is exactly why your product data should be accessible to anyone within your organization who needs it.
People across multiple departments often need to input data into business systems, especially in larger organizations.
If different employees throughout your organization input slightly different information, use non-compatible formats or simply don’t have access to each other’s data – confusion and miscommunication can occur.
These situations lead to mistakes, unnecessary costs, and lost revenue. All of which (I’m going to assume) your business is trying to avoid.
There are many reasons why access to data is important, but let’s address data access methods and tools your organization can use to help extend and make your product data accessible.
The first step to making product data accessible: System integration. System integration is an ever-popular topic among the IT savvy.
Integrated systems streamline processes, increase efficiency and productivity, reduce costs, and reduce manual entry errors. This is why organizations take steps to integrate business and enterprise systems used throughout their operations.
Integrating your business systems helps keep everyone on the same page by ensuring all staff has access to the same data.
This is especially important when tracking product changes, and I’ll explain exactly why.
Let’s assume an engineer needs to make a last-minute one design adjustment to a product. This is a situation when it is crucial to inform affected departments and stakeholders of product changes as soon as possible.
When system integrations and PLM/ERP tools are in place, everyone throughout your organization (who would need access to specific product data) can access up-to-date information!
Not only does this keep people up-to-date and informed, but it also allows people throughout an organization to compare and contrast the evolution of your products.
Why is that so important?
A cross-functional team’s ability to evaluate the history of product changes through the lens of each individual’s respective discipline will provide a better idea of the impact of product and process changes over time.
By encouraging information-sharing and communication between departments, system integration can inspire collaboration between departments and lead to unexpected business improvements.
When one department gains access to information they didn’t have before, it can help them understand the role in the company better as well as the overall operation of the business.
This knowledge can help them improve performance and productivity, as well as, allow them to make better, more informed decisions.
Recognizing & responding to multiple data user’s product information needs
Although product data management tools (such as PTC Windchill) help organization’s collect and manage data, many enterprise solutions (such as product lifecycle management systems) fail to build user interfaces that non-technical staff can actually understand.
PLM systems can quickly become too complex for many roles across an organization. This can make it hard for users to navigate the system, find information, and ensure they’re getting the right information.
Oftentimes the sole users of PLM enterprise systems tend to be engineers and product designers who create the information. This means other roles are requesting information from the authors, whether they are designers or engineers.
When this happens, users lose time waiting for the person who created the information, and they take time from the designers and engineers that should be focused on designing and developing products.
The solution: System integration that is focused on data visibility and data accessibility
By integrating your enterprise systems with a focus on data visibility and data accessibility, your organization ultimately supports communication and collaboration across the entire enterprise and value chain.
For instance, product data management tools (such as PLM applications or plugins) can collect and transform your product data. These same product data access tools can also provide a data output with meaningful content, assisting any role (such as accounting, purchasing marketing, etc.) to make smarter and faster decisions which can directly impact your bottom line.
An easy solution to extend product data access
Our company, EAC Product Development Solutions, designed an easy solution to help organizations (like yours) easily extend access to accurate product data.
Our solution is our EAC Productivity Apps.
Our PLM EAC Productivity Applications deliver role-based data mash-ups, that provide just the type of product information that is needed by a particular role.
Our PLM plugin technology works in the back-end to bring together product information stored in multiple enterprise systems (such as ERP, ALM, PLM, QMS, etc) to deliver product data to users in a way that can be easily consumed.
This enables an entire enterprise to get valuable product data and information in just the way that they want it when they need it.
Our Productivity Applications also eliminate time wasted waiting for authors to collect and redistribute product information.
Our EAC Productivity Applications help deliver on the promise of Product Lifecycle Management.
Want to learn more? Let’s have a conversation.
Here’s why every manufacturing company should be considering product lifecycle management applications.
Expand PLM software usage throughout your enterprise with PLM apps
Let’s face it, no company uses a single product data management system (PDM) or a Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) system for ALL of its organization’s needs.
Your organization likely uses an abundance of different technology software to collect and store data. These technologies can include customer relationship management (CRM) systems, quality management system (QMS) software, enterprise relationship planning (ERP) systems, application lifecycle management (ALM) systems, and so many more.
If your organization currently uses a PLM system, odds are you most likely paid a pretty penny for it. So why not make the most of that product lifecycle system investment and use your system’s complete functionality?!
Product lifecycle applications support, enable, and enhance the value and footprint of PLM software. PLM Apps go a long away to assist and ensure consistent access to up-to-date product data. They can help expand controlled access to valuable content and give functional groups a single simplified view of files, data, and content all within a single browser-accessible screen.
You’re going to want to invest in these kinds of advanced technology solutions that simplify data gathering processes and expand the value of your PLM investment. PLM apps are meant to help you find data easier which reduces user frustration and helps take productivity to new levels within your organization.
PLM applications, also referred to as PLM system plugins, deliver on the dreams of many organizations. They are a simple solution that drastically increases enterprise PLM usage.
PLM apps integrate siloed data from disparate systems
With the use of multiple complex enterprise systems, your organization’s data is most likely held captive in siloed systems. Many PLM applications help connect these disjointed enterprise systems using common application programming interface (API) connection abilities.
PLM apps simply pull data from other enterprise systems into a new user-interface through API integrations. They don’t rely on interface features from other enterprise platforms or systems (besides the data and information they extract), therefore, they are less likely to be affected by a new release of the underlying enterprise systems!
PLM apps simplify searches for the occasional PLM software user
PLM apps change the user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) of your PLM system so that it’s easier to use. This can be useful for occasional or novice users who can feel overwhelmed by the complexity of their PLM system compared to those that use their PLM system on a daily basis.
PLM applications offer user-friendly interfaces that simplify the complexity of PLM systems and make it easier to search, find, locate, and understand product information. In fact, many of these tools even allow organizations to adjust settings for specific users (such as purchasing, marketing, accounting, etc.) so they can access the direct information they need.
PLM apps Many customers we work with use complex product lifecycle management systems such as PTC Windchill or Siemens Teamcenter. Due to the robust capabilities of these enterprise systems (and other PLM systems), many users find product data hard to navigate – especially if they aren’t daily users within these systems.
PLM apps speed up product development processes by providing users with complete access to real-time complex enterprise data.
Product lifecycle applications really do make PLM easier – see it for yourself by watching this short PLM applications video.
Customize PLM apps without disrupting your PLM software
PLM applications and system plugins offer simple and easy ways to customize enterprise product data systems. A PLM Administrator can customize the apps to conform to their company’s goals and prioritization of tasks without disrupting the PLM software itself.
Time after time, we see organizations add PLM customizations to their mainframe PLM software, only to wind up facing dozens of challenges as new system software versions get released. Because PLM apps are an extension of PLM software systems, they are minimally affected by upgraded software versions and updates (if at all).
PLM apps provide organizations with the ability to easily custom tailor simplified product lifecycle management interfaces or mashups. This functionality provides additional value and integration capabilities with other enterprise systems.
PLM Applications offer a brand-new UI for your intricate product data management system; enabling a fresh and simple user experience. They also have started to help organizations solve problems easier and faster with direct, accessible, and instantaneous insights from data.
Your systems are only as good as how you use them. If employees struggle to navigate your product lifecycle system interface, PLM apps are definitely something you should be looking into!
How PLM apps drive flexibility within your organization
PLM applications provide access to PLM information to employees outside of engineering such as marketing, sales, finances, and procurement.
Access to PLM system data provides another way for teams to identify the broad scale of their day to day activities and information. This can help teams understand and prioritize tasks to be more efficient and productive.
This flexibility allows teams to work the way they want. By enhancing a complex system and tailoring each end-user experience, it’s easy to see how these PLM system plug-ins can drastically improve productivity and drive value across an organization.
What is better than providing every department with product information that they want and need to do their job?!
Want to learn more about PLM Applications and how they could pair up with your current enterprise systems? Let’s have the conversation!
You’re likely to have experience with Bill of Materials (BoMs) if the nature of your business has anything to do with product development.
Let’s talk about why bill of materials are so important, how BoMs impact business, and the best BoM management practices. Or check out another helpful article on BoM management, “How BoM Management plays a role in your PLM processes“.
The importance of bill of materials
BoMs define products as they are designed (CAD or engineering bill of materials), as they are ordered (sales bill of materials), as they are built (manufacturing bill of materials), and as they are maintained (service bill of materials).
They incorporate product information from design and engineering, document control, operations, manufacturing, purchasing, contract manufacturers, and more. Bill of materials influence inventory levels, material purchases, shop floor assemblies, and so much more.
In fact, departments often rely on BOM records to get the job done right. Whether you realize it or not, your BoMs drive and affect your businesses’ operational success. This is why it is so important that your organization creates and manages well-organized, correct and up-to-date bill of materials.
BoM information accuracy and why it matters
BoMs require complete and accurate information, in order to successfully benefit design, manufacturing, sales and service building quality products.
The accuracy of BOMs influences an organization’s ability to make well-rounded product development decisions. These decisions fundamentally impact the efforts organizations peruse to generate a product in the most efficient, cost-effective way.
Oftentimes creating BOMs requires input from design, procurement, manufacturing, and sales. Using manual methods to collect and enter items on various BoMs increases the risk of producing inaccurate, out-of-date, or even possibly duplicate BoM versions.
Furthermore, if departments produce products based on incorrect or inaccurate bills of materials, delays to market can occur. This can not only be very costly for an organization, but it oftentimes impacts an entire supply chain.
Inaccurate bills of materials are one of the costliest errors engineering companies can make. In order to avoid the risks of inaccurate BoMs, many organizations have started to reevaluate the way they create, manage, and share product information.
BoM management processes
Bills of materials (such as eBoMs, sBOMs, mBoMs) are most-likely part of your product development process. That being said, what are your current processes for managing those BoMs?
How do you share, collaborate, and ensure the accuracy of your organizations’ bills of materials? Do you find it difficult to manage the differences between them and keep the data consistent across eBOM (engineering bill of materials) and mBoMs (manufacturing bill of materials)?
Odds are if you have yet to implement technology solutions to manage your bills of materials, your methods for BoM management most likely involve spreadsheets, emails, rekeying information, and multiple other systems of communication.
If this is the case, don’t worry – you’re not alone. Studies show nearly 50% of product development companies still use spreadsheets (or sometimes even nothing at all) to manage complex bill of materials!
Despite the big workload that BoM management represents, many organizations are still comparing bills of materials in excel spreadsheets or by opening separate BoMs and manually connecting the dots. This management approach is not only tiring, but it also increases risks of human error and mistakes, especially if the bills of materials are very long.
In fact, is not unusual to find one giant excel spreadsheet on top of information managed by PLM (product lifecycle management), ERP (enterprise resource planning), CRM (customer relationship management) and other databases. Why is that? The information required to assemble bill of material documents tends to reside within separate, disconnected enterprise systems.
It’s time to change that.
Connecting business systems and information
In a world of complex, role and department-specific enterprise systems, productivity can seem quite limited. But the truth is, with the help of technology, businesses no longer need to operate this way. Collaborative solutions exist, and they really are as simple to implement as they, well… should be.
System integration tools (such as applications) change the way organizations create, manage, and share product information- without even having to upgrade or change current enterprise systems.
Using system API connections, applications can pull data from disconnected enterprise systems and consolidate it into centralized dashboard display windows. In fact, many integration applications are even ready to go straight out-of-the-box (yes, this means they require absolutely no special configurations or complicated implementation at all).
For instance, productivity apps offer simple, role-based access to data and other enterprise systems making it easier for stakeholders to view and understand consolidated product information and data. What makes simple applications that integrate enterprise data even better is the fact that most of these system collaboration tools are even affordable.
With a single view to into multiple enterprise systems (such as ALM, MRP, ERP, SLM, CRM, Accounting, and PLM) you can be sure that users have access to the latest and most accurate product information when they need it, and how they need it. There’s really no catch. Productivity apps really are solutions that are; easy, affordable, and that solve the complexity of dealing with multiple disconnected enterprise systems.
Effective BoM management & bill of materials software
Parallel to system integration apps that can pull and consolidate enterprise data, BoM applications can also automatically consolidate real-time data across enterprise systems.
This means organizations can enable real-time BoM collaboration – and that is a game changer.
Real-time BoM collaboration empowers users with capabilities to collaborate and work together creating a bill, sharing BoMs and associated data, and even preview CAD drawings and images. It also opens up the ability to simultaneously edit manufacturing bill of materials, while completely avoiding duplicate and inaccurate documents. This enables users to get a virtual ‘live view’ of data.
Users are able to maintain and manage all associated product documentation such as part datasheets, materials required, CAD drawings and files, as well as anything else that is needed to manufacture a product all in one centralized location. This reassures one sole accurate and revision-controlled bill of material for a product.
This is exactly why it is so important to establish systems and methods that enable all departments within your product development process to be able to share, collaborate, and ensure the accuracy of your bills of materials.
A simple bill of materials software
Our experts at EAC Product Development Solutions recognized the need for better BoM management within many organizations- That’s why we created our bill of materials software application, BoM Reports.
Our BoM Reports PLM application is essentially an out-of-the-box PLM system plugin. It’s easy to use, simple to integrate, and an extremely affordable for any organization.
We designed our Bill of Materials Reports application with the intention of making manufacturing bill of materials and engineering bill of materials management ‘easy’ for organizations of all sizes. Meaning- our bill of materials software can even work for small businesses!
Our BoM Reports app delivers access to your accurate bill of materials database while it provides visual representations, cost rollup for materials, and detailed informational listings of items within bill of materials.
We guarantee our BoM Reports application will enhance your bill of materials management. In fact, it has changed the way many of our customers do business.
Our EAC Productivity app enables purchasers to see product cost roll-ups during design, so they can hit cost targets. It allows project managers to see the highest level status and availability of constituent parts so they can keep projects on time and budget. It helps fabricators see what version of parts go into the build so they can prevent scrap and rework- and SO much more!
We’re excited about how our organization is enhancing product development and we would love to share more information with you about how our EAC productivity apps really work.
If you would like more information about apps that could work for your business insert your information below. We promise not to fill up your inbox with overloads of information, we simply want to share tips, tricks, and tools that will help your organization succeed.
Data Visualization and system integration tools are shaping the future of business and I am going to explain exactly why.
First, it is essential that you understand the impacts of technology and data today.
The impacts of big data
Humans collectively produce approximately 2.5 quintillion bytes of data each day and this number is only increasing with the acceleration of the Internet of Things (IoT). These already astonishing statistics are growing at an ever-increasing rate as our world becomes even more digitized and data-centric.
Due to this overwhelming growth, businesses have begun facing challenges with data capture, analysis, distribution, storage, and visualization. In fact, big data has started to become so large and so complex that businesses are even finding traditional data processing techniques to be inadequate. This is exactly why system integration and business intelligence software have become essential components for successful business data management strategies.
System integration and system integration tools
Enterprise application integration software combine components of sub-systems together into one centralized system. Essentially, system integration applications ensure all business systems function together as one.
For instance, integration applications (such as EAC Productivity Apps) connect existing systems and enable seamless data to flow from various systems into role-based dashboards or “mashups.”
By using applications that integrate all of your business systems, your organization opens up a clear, efficient path, for information to travel from one application or system to another. The process of linking together different computing systems and software applications opens up an organization’s ability to easily collect, aggregate, and share data.
Business intelligence
The trend towards business intelligence (BI) has driven many companies to evaluate technology-driven processes for analyzing data and presenting actionable information.
Common functions of business intelligence technologies include reporting, analytics, data mining, process mining, business performance management, benchmarking, predictive analytics and prescriptive analytics.
BI technologies can handle large amounts of structured and sometimes unstructured data to help
System integration, Bi, and data visualization
Tools and applications that integrate business systems incorporate oftentimes incorporate data visualizations, also known as data dashboards.
Data visualizations deliver graphical representations of data or information, often in the form of a chart, diagram, picture, or any other visual illustration. Visual representations of data and information help humans understand the significance of data by transforming it into information placing it in a visual context.
Human visual processing is efficient in detecting changes and making comparisons between quantities, sizes, shapes, and variations in lightness. When properties of symbolic data are mapped to visual properties, humans can browse through large amounts of data efficiently.
If considering the way the human brain processes information, using charts or graphs to visualize large amounts of complex data is much easier than attempting to analyze multiple different spreadsheets or reports. By using visual elements like charts, graphs, and maps, data visualization tools provide an accessible way to see and understand trends, outliers, and patterns in data.
The impacts of data visualization
Data visualization enables executives, managers, and other corporate end users, to easily digest huge amounts of data by displaying visuals.
These data visuals encourage decision makers to compare sizeable amounts of information while data is being revealed beneath several levels of detail. This encourages the natural eye to compare and contrast different pieces of data, that may have otherwise been lost within reports.
System integration tools that collect data from internal and external systems and aggregate it into data dashboards, enable organizations to reason quantitative information. This helps executives, managers, and other corporate end users to better understand trends, patterns, and possible correlations. Data visualizations can also allow decision makers to make better business decisions.
Visual data representations of information assist decision makers in the absorption of information in new and more constructive ways. They encourage a user to think about the substance of the data rather than the methodology.
With the ability to manipulate and interact directly with data, organizations visualize relationships and pattern between operational and business activities. This allows them to identify and act on emerging trends faster, as well as, identify areas that need attention or improvement.
By using system integration business intelligence tools and applications, organizations can collect data from internal and external systems, prepare it for analysis, develop and run queries against that data, and create reports, dashboards and data visualizations to make the analytical results available to corporate decision-makers, as well as operational workers.
Think data visualization and system integration could be what your organization needs?
We offer EAC Productivity Apps as
