In this competitive world, the early launch of a new product or quickly change in the product design or functionality to meet market requirements has become very crucial. To achieve these companies need to streamline their product development process and business operation.
Here comes product lifecycle management software to rescue. With the help of the right PLM system companies can gain a competitive edge in the market. Various PLM tools are available in the market to support multiple business process requirements. Selecting the right PLM application is one of the most challenging tasks that organizations face. Here we will see 10 key factors that every organization should consider while selecting a PLM software for their business vertical to avoid later regret.
List of 10 Key Factors:
Technical requirement
Select a system which fullfills the technical requirment. Technical requirement includes infrastructure requirement, business workflow process requirement, product information management, flow and conversion of information across enterprise. Software application must provide all the technical functionalities as per business process requirement.
Ability to integrate with existing legacy software’s
PLM system must provide flexibility to smoothly integrate with existing legacy fowtwares such as CAD, CAM, CAE, ERP and simulation application.
Organizations don’t want to get rid of some of very important legacy applications that they are trusting from very beginning. So in that case PLM sustem must integrate with such applications to exachange information.
Service vendor
Selecting a right service vendor is also a very critical task because service vendor is the one who is going to implement PLM system. Always select a experienced service vendor who has a good track record of implementing PLM system in various industries. You can also get in touch with the organisations where vendor has implemented the system and get feedback from them. Selecting a wrong vendor may lead to failure of a PLM system.
Connect with existing customers
Find and connect with the organizations that are already using the PLM software. Understand their success stories and the mistakes they made. Get feedback on the PLM software. This will give you a real insight into the PLM software and will help you to make a decision to go with the software or not.
System usability
The user interface of the software application should be neat and clean. UI must display required information in an uncluttered format. All UI features must be easily accessible and user-friendly. End users should feel that they are doing something creative.
Cost of ownership
Of course cost of ownership of the software is the first consideration when selecting a PLM system. What’s the point in buying a high costly software to fulfill the requirements which can be achieved with other low-cost applications. Cost of ownership includes licensing cost, implementation cost, and service cost.
To evaluate the exact user licensing cost, you must consult with all functional departments and try to achieve the requirement with a minimal user license. And also make sure software does not require frequent maintenance and upgrades otherwise you will end up paying a huge amount of service cost.
Functional process requirement
Check if the software is capable of mapping complex functional processes with minimal changes. Some software does not support specific business cases. Make sure to check that the software fulfills all the functional process requirements.
Compatibility with the legacy data
The new software applications must be compatible with the data generated by the legacy applications and they must preserve legacy data in the required form and fit.
Performance and security
Performance and security of data are the most important and primary requirements for any organization before selecting the software application. Users should be able to access and upload required information very quickly. Product design files are generally huge in size. Software should handle Uploading and downloading of such huge files without impacting the performance.
All information and files should not be accessible to all users. Software must be able to provide access to information based on various conditions such as users, groups, roles, and projects.
End to End solution
Select software which provides a complete end-to-end solution as per business process requirements. So that all the business units and processes can be handled through only one software.
We recommend you to read the following topics related to PLM
Different Stages of PLM Implementation Project
10 Challenges in PLM Implementation
Summary
In this article, we studied 10 important factors that organizations must consider while selecting a PLM system. There are also other important factors available apart from these that organizations must consider. But here we have mentioned only these 10 as these are generic to most of the organizations. Based on the organization and business process requirements these factors or criteria can change.
We hope this article was informative. Please share your experience of implementing a PLM system. Please do mention it in the comments section or you can reach out to us using the contact form.
Thanks and keep learning.
