The rapid pace of change indicates that companies need to modernize their portfolios, systems, and processes frequently to create an efficient and effective business model - changes that benefit the organization to generate higher profits, deliver high quality and stay one step ahead of their competition.

With the cloud being one of the most widespread technologies, businesses are still resisting new technological changes. Companies without Oracle PLM Cloud have all of their data spread across multiple systems, with all kinds of vertical applications running simultaneously, which generally slows down business processes. Additionally, business requirements have changed dramatically as employees are working from anywhere, increasing the demand for cross-team collaboration and so the existing infrastructure is under severe pressure. Hence, Oracle PLM Cloud integration has become essential for keeping up with the pace of industries worldwide.

Key Areas of Modern PLM

Product Lifecycle Management has all the functionalities of developing a product, but it has evolved to cater to all the pre-product development processes as well. These processes enable you to capture ideas, collect requirements, manage all your portfolios and proposals all the way to operation and sales management. It is made out of the box to be used on mobiles, and tablets with a full set of real-time dashboards built-in, assisting the users to stay updated with the most recent information. Additionally, it promotes socialization through instant messaging features on the PLM cloud, tying the chats back to the product for later access.

PLM can be directly integrated into ERP systems for better coordination. It allows collaboration among the internal groups such as R&D, Quality Assurance, Operations and many more. It allows you to work closely with external groups, including the customers and suppliers. This ensures all parties involved can access the same data, hence minimizing the use of incorrect information.

PLM Maturity Curve

Now looking at the PLM maturity curve from the customer perspective. The curve determines where exactly the customers stand in terms of PLM utilization and assists in identifying the next steps of their PLM journey. The curve also helps you understand how integrating PLM Cloud would increase the overall performance of the businesses.

The curve comprises of the following stages:

• Foundational:
  This stage starts with the customers having fragmented product master data where product data is entered manually and is technically dispersed on multiple shared drives.
• Intermediate:
  This stage involves customers performing project-based product management but still the information is being tracked manually.
• Stable:
  In this stage, the processes are beginning to stabilize as you are getting an automated single source of information through a single platform where all the data is ingested and published. Most customers at this stage are using Agile PLM and are working through the inception of the product to the end of the lifecycle.
• Advanced:
  This stage is where you really start to automate the business processes. Companies get into a full enterprise product value chain as part of the supply chain and see the end-to-end product processes. Data governance and change management abilities are greatly increased as businesses have the ability to automate data inputs and ensure only correct data is coming into the system through data validation and verification.
• Transformational:
  In this stage, business processes are aligned throughout the value chains. The processes are much more transparent through real-time analysis and reporting allowing the employees to be more proactive than reactive when making important decisions.

In the past years, Oracle PLM Cloud has proved to be the most beneficial technology adopted by businesses allowing them to increase their business process performance with a high return on investment. Learn more about why Oracle PLM Cloud is the right choice for you in our webinar here.