There are several challenges in successfully implementing Product Lifecycle Management system for Process industries like CPG, Chemical, Pharma etc, some of the key ones are -
Project Initiation
The responsibility for PLM projects is often unclear due to their enterprise-wide scope, making it difficult to start.
Unlike HRMS, CRM and Marketing platforms which are owned by corresponding functional departments, PLM systems cuts across the departments right from executives, marketing, sales, R&D, manufacturing, distribution etc.
This needs an interdisciplinary ownership to initiate a successful implementation in large organisations.
Interconnectedness
PLM is cross-functional platform and requires improvements in interconnected systems and collaboration among people and business units.
Using standard API based integration capabilities to seamlessly connect with other enterprise systems (ERP, SCM, CRM) ensures continuity of information flow.
With the advent of collaboration features to share, co-author, comment, annotate, track, version control, sharing documents etc enables people and departments to work effectively and regardless of their physical location.
Product Data
Diverse product data is often fragmented and siloed, requiring complex integration, consolidation, transformation, and even translation efforts.
For many businesses having a Product data universe with all the latest and greatest information in single source is always a distant pipe dream. This often boils down to lack of central PLM platform, uniform business process and its data is simply stored and duplicated across marketing, crm and erp systems.
People centric business workflow, real time API’s, data import and export features enables the platform to work as an integrated universal product data set.
Process and Methods
Product lifecycle processes may lack clear definition and alignment.
Taking a product through its creative journey from idea to product launch requires an iterative process with agility. Any process too rigid stifles the innovation and too liberal will burn the timelines and budgets without outcomes.
The product leaders should define an enclosing framework with its process, methods and means of execution throughout the product lifecycle, the chosen platform should be configurable and adaptable to accommodate the defined process and methods.
People and Teams
Geographically distributed teams, external partners, including suppliers can pose coordination challenges.
To put a finished product on a customers domain it can take a team of scientists, skilful technicians, packaging experts, artwork designers and quality experts. All these expertise has to come from both internal and external to organisation.
Teams are sparsely distributed, more so if you have many contract researchers and suppliers to work with.
Knowledge
Fragmented and incomplete product knowledge, especially with contracted research, supplier materials, production equipment, can hinder progress.
For any product right from conceptualisation to its commercialisation there are endless chain of communications between both internal and external teams. Knowledge is shared both in structured and unstructured form but not curated in a central platform. In some cases though it's partly curated there is no uniform way to access, search and extract the knowledge out of it.
Having a collaborative product development platform which supports structured transactional data like - specifications, formulations, labelling etc. semi-structured machine data like - tests, test results etc. and unstructured data like - documents, images, packaging etc. with powerful sophisticated search will enhance your knowledge discovery by multi-fold.
Corporate Events
Uncertainty stemming from changing product roadmaps, business models, company structures, and mergers/acquisitions can disrupt PLM projects.
In a competitive and volatile market - product strategies change, new business models evolve, products get acquired or divested, all these impact the organisation ability to respond rapidly to these events.
When a PLM platform implemented with agile process will allow the organisation to respond in timely and structured manner. A platform that is scalable on cloud can scale up or down according to the organisational changes, such as during mergers, acquisitions to accommodate the changing size and complexity of projects.
In nutshell business need to adopt a centralised cloud managed adaptable PLM platform with collaborative and integration capabilities to overcome the key challenges.