The Complete Agile Lifecycle Management Guide

Make your business rise above any challenging market conditions by implementing agile lifecycle management systems that are tailor made to achieve long lasting results. The management systems will help you structure your business so that you can accelerate revenue, reduce your general business costs and improve the quality of your product. Once these important elements of your business have been streamlined, you’ll be able to achieve a lot of success when growing your business on a global scale. Anyone doing business today will agree that the current business environment is quite challenging to maneuver. It is therefore important that you structure your business using strategic management systems that will give you an edge over your competitors.

The Complete Agile Lifecycle Management Guide

The business market consists of aggressive global competition, product life cycles that are shrinking, customer demands that are always increasing and a supply chain system that is getting more complex. As a result, bringing winning products to the market has become quite challenging. It’s now very essential to achieve operational excellence and this is only possible through the use of proper life cycle management systems. Among other things, the systems enable businesses to:

  • Achieve target margins
  • Ensure regulatory compliance
  •  Shorten cycle times while at the same time maximizing product pipeline throughput

All these aspects are essential if the business is to remain competitive. The ability to integrate manufacturing resources, supply chain and outsourced design with the internal processes of the business can be the difference between winning and losing. A proper agile lifecycle management system will maximize your product profitability and accelerate your product innovation by managing your business decisions, business processes and general information on your business. The system tends to be more effective if it’s built upon a scalable, secure and standards based open architecture platform. This ensures quick and cost effective implementations that will help the business to thrive.

Managing the Enterprise Product Record

Any business expert will agree that products define the profitability, competitive advantage as well as the long term growth of major businesses. An enterprise product record is the important intellectual asset that has the information that defines a product at each and every stage in its entire lifecycle. All the information required to design, build, source, conceptualize, sell, dispose and even service products is contained in the product record. An agile lifecycle management system should be able to accurately highlight:

  • Customer relationship management systems. These are used to manage the records of all customers.
  •  Supply management systems. These are used to manage the records of the suppliers.
  •  Enterprise resource planning. These are used to manage all financial records.
  • Human capital management. These are used to manage all employee records.

Some of the key industries that the lifecycle management system can be able to spearhead include:

  •  High technology
  • Life sciences
  • Automotive industry
  •  Defense and aerospace
  • Industrial manufacturing
  • Consumer goods

Optimizing the Global Product Network

Some of the priorities of a good product lifecycle management system include the management of product information as well as creating a single enterprise product. It is however important to go further and look for a broader solution that enables your business to improve the management of cross functional product lifecycle processes in the business. This should happen across all product networks worldwide. There’s no doubt that complex enterprises could definitely benefit from this system as it has been built very uniquely from the ground up.

Accelerating Time to Market

This is a very delicate part of any business and you wouldn’t want to have any setbacks here. The ideal product lifecycle management system should enable your teams to efficiently collaborate across the extended supply chain. They should be able to coordinate on matters regarding design, sourcing and building of products that are right for the market. Once this has been streamlined, you won’t experience any information latency, there will be minimal errors, your intellectual property will be sufficiently protected and ultimately, your time to market and time to volume will be accelerated.

Minimizing Cost

It’s always important to minimize costs whenever a product network extends all around the world. The product lifecycle management system makes this possible by streamlining and formalizing all the cost management processes. The system gives managers enough analytical power as well as the tools and information they need to apply their good business insight. Their skills are essential to cost management and this can only be improved if they work with a system that improves their ability to do so.

Improving Product Quality

Managing the manufacturing and design aspects of a growing company is not easy. However, with the product lifecycle management system, it becomes easier to put the necessary product improvements that are required to improve customer satisfaction as well as the quality of the products dispatched.

Ensuring Regulatory Compliance

The system makes it a lot easier to manage compliance processes and documentation across your entire product network, across all the countries that you’re in business. You can easily be able to manage efficiency, compliance and lifecycle processes of your auditable products. This ensures that you reduce the risks in your business while at the same time ensuring that you adhere to all the requirements of the regulators.

Driving Innovation

The engine of growth in any business is innovation. It’s therefore important to ensure that the innovation in your business is accelerated. This should be done without compromising on the flexibility of your supply chain or your engineering creativity. The lifecycle management system enables all your teams across the globe to be able to collaborate in real time thus improving the innovation in your business.

Driving Strategic and Operational Decisions

If your business is to become successful, you need to be able to leverage analytical capabilities and decision support systems. A well designed product lifecycle management system will provide your business with out of the box support systems for all decisions. These will include comprehensive analytics, capabilities for advanced custom reporting as well as standard quality reports. All these help to simplify the decision making process while ensuring that the decisions made are good and will therefore improve the quality of all products and leave customers satisfied.

Once you’re able to accelerate innovation in your business, enable globalization, improve the quality of your products, sort out regulation and compliance matters; the ultimate result is a significant growth in your profits. The best way your business can succeed is by applying enterprise class solutions whose implications are focused on time to value. This is the only way you can get the most out of your business regardless of the region in the world your business is operating. Go ahead and join the global market leaders who are using agile lifecycle management systems to further the growth of their businesses.

mm
Mark is the Lead Author & Editor of Spectechular Blog. Mark established the Spectechular blog to create a source for news and discussion about some of the issues, challenges, news, and ideas relating to Product Management.