Background
Agile Software and its partners have made it perfectly clear that innovation is the primary theme driving product lifecycle management (PLM). The Agility 2006 Conference audience, drawn from the automotive, electronics and high tech, industrial products, life sciences, and semiconductor industries, got their fill of conceptual and visionary thoughts on innovation, with such keynote speakers as TCG Advisors' Geoffrey Moore, author of Crossing the Chasm; and IDEO's Tom Kelley, author of The Art of Innovation and The Ten Faces of Innovation.
For today's progressive enterprises, who are doing business in a highly competitive environment, innovation is a priority all on its own, and the sheer pace of innovation is as important as the art of innovation. Enterprises need to examine opportunities surrounding product innovation, as well as business process or business model innovation. Agile Software's tag line, "how products happen," is exemplified by the current product development forces of innovation, globalization, and compliance. These forces are coupled with outsourcing and collaboration imperatives that necessitate a high reliance on supply chain flexibility and agility. Enterprise attempts at simultaneous global product launches, aimed at improving time to market, have shown the need for a mastery of the supply chain for successful new product development and introduction (NPDI) execution. How well Agile Software provides tools and processes to meet the challenges of the PLM market and the expanding audience of companies looking for PLM solutions, is largely based on its ability to find synergy between its technology solutions and the market forces.
The companies mentioned above learned an important lesson: enterprises need to instill a PLM culture in their organizations. Solutions such as Agile PLM provide a structure for enabling the introduction of more products, with a faster pace to market. These companies also delineated the major challenges facing enterprises beginning a PLM initiative:
Global competition is clearly elevating both the nature and the pace of innovation as a corporate priority. Companies need to consider both product and business process innovation, as methods to differentiate themselves and to grow profitably. Dell has led the way with business process innovation, while several companies, such as IBM and Samsung, have been able to establish and maintain a rapid pace for product design innovation. Agile Software recognizes PLM as an emerging business imperative. It has a unique opportunity to leverage its position as the sole remaining PLM vendor of significance to have a pure PLM pedigree. This differentiation can be attractive to prospects looking for a PLM solution set that is not biased by enterprise resource planning (ERP) or computer-aided design (CAD) legacies. While the PLM vendor landscape has several strong and viable vendor alternatives, prospects with diverse vendor software portfolios should view Agile Software with anticipation.