Opinion
and OEMs. This results in bringing together the right people at the right time, even when they are in different locations to deliver higher productivity, operation optimisation and often more creativity in product designs and innovation. According to ARC Advisory Group, collaboration is a key factor that is driving better business performance because it enables teams to tackle business challenges more effectively, speeding up decision-making and transforming key activities like new product development.
The social computing era
The emergence of Web 2.0 capabilities has taken centre stage in positioning wider spread adoption of social computing-- where individuals, at home or at work, can easily and simply engage with peers and colleagues. Sharing information and opinions have become easier and more collaborative than ever before. According to ARC Advisory Group, what we are witnessing is the convergence of social real-time collaboration and PLM across product development organizations in connecting the people and the products they develop to create communities that solve real problems and develop breakthrough product ideas. There are PLM vendors on opposite ends of the
spectrum with the likes of Dassault Systems promoting its ‘Social 3DExperience platform’ to PTC and Autodesk with ‘Social PLM’ to Omnify Software’s more down to earth approach in providing a ‘Social Collaboration Portal’. Omnify Software serves primarily small to mid-market companies that need secure, safe environments for their PLM initiatives. Their key differentiators fall within their scalable and flexible technology platform offering on-premises and cloud deployment options as well as open integration to engineering and business systems. Whereas the large enterprises or Fortune 500 companies have the bigger budgets to invest in all the bells and whistles that ‘Social PLM’ promises to deliver with more of a 3D experience. Josh Bernoff, senior vice president, Idea
Development at Forrester Research put it bluntly: “We’re several years into the social marketing boom, but still many executives are going about social strategy backward: picking technologies like Facebook or Twitter first instead of focusing on what they want to accomplish.” Omnify Software advocates conducting perception
studies with customers in order to prioritize how its social dashboard could provide the most value. They went about identifying how users would want to communicate PLM data with suppliers, customers, manufacturing partners, and other external resources and uncovered that customers want a web-based social platform that can allow for communicating product
information in a secure environment that eliminates the need for partners to directly access their Omnify Empower system. Omnify partnered with Sabisu, a social business
platform provider that makes complex operational environments manageable. Their partnership and work together has yielded a social business portal that is promoting faster, better product design and manufacturing management collaboration. This type of social portal eliminates the use of emails and spreadsheets to share information with external resources and instead provides the ability for these channels to access real-time information from anywhere in the world, shorten the communication cycle and make better decisions.
Transforming global outsourcing
ISG, the sourcing advisory firm, reports that social media collaboration, mobility, cloud computing and big data are the key factors that have impacted global outsourcing during 2012 and will reshape outsourcing in the long term. Companies will use collaboration tools to accelerate growth by utilising the skills and knowledge of suppliers, partners and customers in an ‘extended enterprise’. Author Patricia Seybold coined the process term for
this as ‘Outside Innovation’. PLM customers often will outsource functions, whether engineering, manufacturing or logistics, to quickly gain greater scale or reduce costs.” Enterprise software deployments are complex, customised to each customer and incredibly time consuming. Seybold continues: “The future of global
outsourcing is going to have to move to more social, collaborative environments where customers, partners and employees are able to communicate more readily amongst themselves.” For engineering and design departments, it seems
that it is the IT group that is brought in to set up ad hoc internal social networking tools and facilitate the free flow of information between teams. Once this is done, it becomes apparent that product management is impacted with engineering interfaces extended to product service and support functions. Real-time feedback on product performance improves the accuracy of demand and manufacturing planning. Workflow-based systems minimise design iterations, while enabling streamlined engineering and ensuring regulatory compliance. Mevion Medical Systems Inc, a radiation therapy company has just that – a workforce distributed across the globe and a business solutions requirement to be available 24/7 on all company-supported platforms (PC, Mac, Linux, Android and IOS). Making Omnify Empower PLM software an integral part of the
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