The Oracle E-Business Suite Product Lifecycle Management

As promised, I will blog today about the Oracle E-Business Suite Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) which is actually a set of applications which work in collaboration to help business organizations effectively manage all activities related to products innovation and development. These product related activities include from product conceptualization to retirement.

Because product development and management is a fairly complex area, there needs to be a unified data model which will guide the company in having a single and accurate view of the product. This will ensure that that company can accelerate introduction of new products while maximizing its value throughout the entire life cycle as well as future investments.

Business organizations have different product requirements depending on the industry they are operating. Oracle's E-Business Suite has tailored its PLM to suit the needs.

For instance, Oracle has these keen observations as the basis for tailoring their PLM to specific industries:

• In life sciences, the rate of growth in the investment required to bring a drug to market is outpacing growth in the return on marketed drugs.
• In consumer electronics, it is not uncommon for lifecycles to be as short as a few months, with extremely narrow product introduction windows–a delay in product introduction could have significant impact on company performance.
• In complex manufacturing industries, as the outsourcing trend accelerates, ensuring consistency and secure collaboration across company and geographic boundaries becomes a pre-requisite to on-time, on-cost product delivery.

Oracle PLM has a feature to integrate and support both manufacturing and service industries. This will make a company have the correct information and analysis tool needed to find the right bets and maximize captured value from services and products.

Oracle PLM's Analytics can help companies strategically allocate resources and make smart decisions. The Analytics tool is so advance that it can work in collaboration with other modules across the enterprise to reduce cost throughout the value chain.

One can configure the company products to meet the demands of the customers using Oracle PLM. The information about product attributes can be taken from the costing analytics. PLM's configuration feature can provide customer and designers with a catalog of profitable options.

Although investing in Oracle E-Business Suite Product Lifecycle Management means spending money on buying the software, it could also actually mean a reduction in the company's IT cost because of the Oracle architecture advantage.

Oracle, world leader in database software and enterprise resource management (ERP), can make possible a superior integration of both Oracle and non-Oracle systems. This way a company can have a single definition of suppliers, customers, partners, services and products. With one source of information, decision making can be made faster.
E-Business Suite Product Lifecycle Management also protects a company's intellectual property by using role based views so only certain employees can view certain information.

In tomorrow's blog, I will try to write other innovation software applications within the E-Business Suite. For now, I hope you well in all your business and personal endeavors.