Project Manager allows companies to target zero delays with their product planning and development processes to achieve optimal cycle times within scope, capacity and resource constraints. Organizations can concentrate on the most profitable products while standardizing on best-in-class business processes across the extended enterprise.
Description
All companies are faced with ever-shrinking product lifecycles in order to timely satisfy the diverging needs of global markets. This has resulted in an increase number of concurrent product development programs, which necessitates adoption of concurrent engineering methods. However, this also increases complexity due to the parallel activity of various functional teams. Coordinating the various functional teams to prevent overloaded resources and bottlenecks is critical for optimizing cycle time.
If one looks at a classic product profit curve, it is evident why cycle time optimization is so important. All products incur upfront costs before revenue is generated. As a product grows and matures, revenue should make up for the upfront costs and profits should nicely accumulate. Towards the end of the product lifecycle, companies try to exit before revenues decrease below costs and profits erode. If product development management processes are adopted that allow cycle times to shrink then the product launch occurs sooner, which allows revenue to also be obtained sooner. In effect, this profit curve shifts left and can even increase because a company is able to capitalize on market opportunities sooner before competition can react.
Project Manager uniquely accomplishes zero delays by linking product development data to project execution. In effect, project management becomes data-driven by being linked with the product portfolio. When the two processes are disconnected with different technologies, there are multiple projects being defined and tracked, but they are not grounded in the reality of the product data that is being created as part of the project. As a result, it is difficult to understand or contain execution issues related to product planning decisions or portfolio issues related to execution problems.
With Project Manager and the 3DEXPERIENCE® platform it is possible to permanently associate the definition and development of the product portfolio with the tracking of the projects used to govern it. The implications of portfolio decisions can be quickly assessed against the project schedule. As a result, a project manager is taking action to resolve issues with a full understanding of the impact to the product portfolio.