Product development is the lifeblood of every manufacturing company’s growth and profitability. Yet in today’s economic climate product development resources are tightly constrained. So it’s critical to ensure that scarce funding is limited to product development programs that align with your company’s strategic goals and have the potential to be technically achievable and commercially successful. These programs need to be consistently evaluated against defined milestones.
Some companies use spreadsheets and other stand-alone tools to track the progress of programs. The problem with this approach is that much of the data contained in standalone tools may be duplicated in other tools and often is outdated or inconsistent. A large amount of manual effort is typically required to perform data rollups.
A much better approach involves the use of program portfolio management (PPM) systems that provide a platform and process for prioritizing and selecting a portfolio of product development projects based on available funding and resources. PPM systems also typically provide resource management tools to help allocate the company’s product development resources to this portfolio of projects.
The problem with existing PPM systems is that they are either independent of or loosely coupled with the product data management (PDM) systems that the vast majority of major companies use to manage the product development process and provide a single source of product development truth. This creates difficulties because many important program metrics such as percentage of parts releases, number of long leads items, etc, are usually tracked in the PDM system. Others, such as percentage complete, schedule variance, and earned value management are usually tracked in the PPM system.
Managers are faced with the tedious task of manually entering the information from the PDM system into the PPM system. Moving product development data out of the PDM system creates duplicate sources for the same data that can easily become inconsistent, resulting in errors that can lead to faulty program management decisions.
Windchill PPMLink provides tight integration with Windchill PDM solutions. Windchill PPMLink takes PPM to the next level by collecting and tracking all of the information required to manage the program portfolio in a single platform. Information from your project management system, spreadsheets, SharePoint lists and PDM system are automatically mapped into actionable metrics that provide a consolidated view of program and portfolio health. The data is not duplicated so there is no danger of it getting out of sync.
Windchill PPMLink easily integrates with and draws information from existing management tools such as financial models and tracking spreadsheets so they can be leveraged without modification to simplify the implementation process. When the underlying data source is updated, the new numbers automatically appear in Windchill PPMLink.
Windchill PPMLink also provides tight integration with Microsoft Project Server. Microsoft Project Server can be used to plan program resources, create schedules and manage new project requests with the resulting metric values fed directly into Windchill PPMLink. Windchill PPMLink’s integration with Windchill PDM solutions can be used to derive metric values and associated deliverables from product data and view product data directly from Windchill PPMLink.
Windchill PPMLink provides the ideal platform for tracking and managing Stage and Gate style processes. Gate style process definitions can be captured as program templates. Users can define standard process gates, deliverables, metrics, milestones and roles. Windchill PPMLink helps manage the preparation of Gate deliverables and scorecards for program reviews and captures executive decisions and program signoffs.
Windchill PPMLink fulfills the true promise of PPM by providing a central access point for all critical project information. Users can easily define dashboards for single page program overviews, program scorecards and resource utilization reporting. Program history can easily be reviewed by capturing baseline snapshots at critical program milestones. Program and portfolio measures, goals and logic can be defined for determining the status of each program. Key portfolio metrics can be rolled up into scorecards. Metric trends can be viewed and analyzed over time. Program portfolios can be organized into product families and product lines.
Windchill PPMLink maximizes the performance of product development programs by automatically aggregating the information from a wide range of product data management, project management and spreadsheet tools into metrics that provide a consolidated view of program and portfolio health. It drastically reduces the amount of data entry required of program managers, product line owners and product development executives, while delivering higher volumes of more timely and accurate program information. Managers have more information and more time to focus on aligning resources with business strategies and effectively prioritizing new product development programs. The net result is more consistent execution of higher quality product development programs.
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