lToday, discrete manufacturing companies can't operate successfully without managing potential material compliance risk throughout their extended supply chain. Driven by both customers and regulatory demands, compliant bill of material obligations grow in complexity and scope everyday. Manufacturers must ensure the global compliance of components or substances included in products based on where those products are being sold. Failure to do so, places a discrete manufacturer's brand at risk, and results in lost market opportunity. Consumers and businesses alike are demanding responsible innovation.
Innovators and product development teams moving forward, will require enhanced external collaboration and input from numerous stakeholders, including information sources outside their departments and their companies. Innovating successfully in the digital economy requires an “always on,” integrated approach for capturing and leveraging customer and market intelligence, everywhere. Product designers and developers must be able to capture and connect this intelligence from initial product design throughout the product's use and services life-cycle. Collaborating with external stakeholders in “real time” brings on added challenges for protecting a company’s intellectual property and further drives the need to make the exchange of complex information-simple.
As product portfolios, regulations, and supply chains become more complex, discrete manufacturing companies managing their innovation objectives, using independent solutions outside their core business systems, will be increasingly disrupted by competitive innovation while incurring higher operating costs.
Visibility and management over potential bill of material changes needs to extend throughout procurement and supplier management, and if not addressed properly, can impact a product’s “manufacturability” and potential market access. Management systems must reflect and align changes between supplier component material modifications and engineering change orders with required production changes, or companies will experience increased risk for product defects, compliance violations, recalls, and production delays.
Trying to effectively manage these interdependent processes using independent systems increases operating costs and business complexity. Using separate systems with separate databases leads to data redundancy issues and further reduces a company's ability to further optimize operating efficiency while controlling operating risk. Companies can't innovate responsibly at speed, without effectively managing risk while optimizing process inter-dependencies present throughout a products idea creation, production, delivery, use, and recovery life-cycle.
However, in order to move from independent complex systems to one unified and simple integrated innovation platform, companies must leverage common processes supported by a unified data model. I invite you to learn how SAP customers are starting to transform their product life-cycle management systems into highly, integrated innovation and delivery platforms, by accessing IDC’s white paper PLM Selection in SAP Environments.
The IDC Manufacturing Insights white paper looks at product life-cycle management (PLM) application strategies at companies that run SAP as their core ERP system. The paper offers a decision framework for determining the best approach to support an organization's product management needs and includes guidance on steps to take to put the strategy into action.
To learn more about SAP innovations and PLM solutions for discrete manufacturing, please access these complimentary resources.
Regards,
Harry E. Blunt
Director, North America High Tech Industry Marketing
SAP America, Inc.
3999 West Chester Pike
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M: 302-740-8293