Opinion
4 Marlee Rosen examines how ubiquitous social networking tools have become and how the global supply chain/ manufacturing/development marketplace can use this to their best advantage.
4 Marlee Rosen examine l’omniprésence actuelle des réseaux sociaux et comment la chaîne d’approvisionnement/ l’industrie/le marché du développement mondial peuvent les utiliser pour servir leur intérêt.
4 Marlee Rosen untersucht, wie allgegenwärtig Tools für soziale Netzwerke geworden sind und wie diese in Bezug auf Lieferung / Herstellung / Entwicklung am besten genutzt werden können.
The social PLM model gets a reality check
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roduct Lifecycle Management (PLM), the series of strategies, business practices, and technology design for acquiring and maintaining product
information across the entire lifecycle of the product, can provide the ability to boost development speed, enhance customer satisfaction, optimise operations, and create new revenue generation opportunities. Product designers and engineers managing
their company’s PLM are becoming more and more mobile or distributed. When you couple that with an aging engineering workforce, there has become an even more critical need to capture the implicit knowledge that these team members possess and pass it on to younger generations of engineers. In addition, the role of the IT team
is expanding due to social IT networking and collaboration tools being deployed in other departments. Industry analysts report seeing an incremental rise in IT department
members being asked to contribute their technical expertise and Microsoft skill sets to support the infrastructure once solely involving engineering and design teams. PLM software companies have come to understand that within the product design environment; there are many new challenges to collaborate across far extending teams and geographies. When you add to the mix the sophistication of product development processes, it is easy to see how both managers and their teams can feel overwhelmed by the many options to address these challenges especially in light of the importance of dealing with security and being in compliance. In what has become a global economy in
the last decade, manufacturers today have to make the most productive use of the skills and knowledge of their own people regardless of where they – as well as their business partners – reside and adopt a more collaborative approach to do so. The innovation of collaboration tools,
which historically began with email, teleconferencing, videoconferencing, instant messaging, LinkedIn, wikis, and other social forums are further progressing into next generation collaboration dashboards (such as Sharepoint, Sabisu and internet-based communications platforms). The idea is to provide companies with real-time visibility to product data and share information across planning, design, costing, sourcing, manufacturing, and logistics. There is no doubt that collaboration tools
are quickly evolving and helping growing companies to create even better and more effective ‘virtual teams’. The extended reach of these virtual teams have advanced as well to include internal employees, a company’s supply chain partners – such as vendors, outsourced services, distribution houses, consultants, integrators, distributors, etc. – and even customers, private labelled partners
Fig 1. Social media and collaboration tools are changing how product development was once regarded. Gone are the days of the closed-door, experts-only approach to designing and engineering products.
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