The manufacturing of products relies on numerous activities supported by disconnected processes and applications that produce a steady flow of product-related content. But most of this information is housed in siloed applications, making content difficult for stakeholders to access.
Product lifecycle management (PLM) applications can help manufacturers develop new products and bring them to market faster by making it easier to track and share data along the product value chain. From product design to post-design, PLM applications can enable stakeholders across the organization to access and view product-related content.
PLM applications maintain critical content that supports functions such as product design, product simulations, manufacturing simulations, production tooling and field maintenance. But limited content access can lead to a reduction in collaboration, error-prone information requests and slow and disconnected change processes between product development and the rest of the business. This undermines the continuous improvement loop of product innovation. Organizations need a way to break down these barriers and unify data access.
Bringing ECM and PLM together
Much of the product data that is produced by manufacturers includes models, documents, drawings, artifacts and other files plus the meta data that defines these items. Previously, manufacturers have pursued several initiatives to unify access to and utilization of this data, including point-to-point integration, establishing data lakes and building data-processing hubs. However, these initiatives are not designed to meet the needs of consumers of content from across the enterprise.
Enterprise content management (ECM) platforms integrate content services with lead applications to bridge content silos, expedite information flows and expand governance. ECM platforms are ideally positioned to serve as a single, unifying repository for released product data and provide access to consumers of content across the enterprise.
With ECM for PLM, manufacturers can share released product information across the organization by synchronizing and serving data between ECM and PLM applications to downstream applications. ECM for PLM solutions ensure the most relevant source of truth and lay the foundation for further connectivity to enterprise systems like ERP, MES and MRO applications and more.
The benefits of ECM for PLM
The advantages of ECM for PLM solutions for manufacturers are clear: According to Propel, companies that use PLM software achieve 75% faster go-to-market speeds.
ECM for PLM solutions provide several important benefits to manufacturers, including:
- Control access to the most relevant released product information and eliminate manual error-prone information collection and distribution where mistakes can be costlier the longer they go undetected.
- Synchronize post-design change requests and problem reports back to the PLM from other systems.
- Accelerate deployments with preconfigured connectivity with enterprise applications, such as ERP, MES and MRO.
- Easily connect enterprise applications to the enterprise ecosystem with plug-and-play connectors and preconfigured transaction templates.
- Facilitate collaboration between multiple PLM systems and other enterprises across subsidiaries and their supply chains.
- Reduce cost of ownership with application programming interface capabilities for consistent collaboration.
Introducing OpenText Extended ECM for PLM
With ECM for PLM solutions, manufacturers can enable unified access to released product data, documents and drawings to be utilized across the product lifecycle and in the context needed by downstream applications. Proven ECM capabilities create a data highway and digital backbone that shares information siloed in enterprise applications. ECM provides data governance best practices and the orchestration of change processes and synchronization across multiple applications, enterprises and people. Information consumers can readily find, access and collaborate with product data and related content.
OpenText™ Extended ECM for PLM facilitates an end-to-end collaboration platform for manufacturers, providing the information highway to manage, share and present information to the right people at the right time.
Learn more about OpenText Extended ECM for PLM.
