How to Translate PLM Functionality into Business Value

For many engineering teams, internal buy-in is often the toughest hurdle in initiating a digital transformation project. Launching a complex technical endeavor necessitates translating technical details into strategic benefits for the C-suite, shifting focus from “how” to “why.” It’s crucial to clarify the advantages of the chosen technology for both the organization and its customers, demonstrating its potential to enhance the company’s profitability.

Many teams struggle to translate functionality into business value when moving to new PLM (product lifecycle management) technologies and processes. Often, a team starts searching for new PLM solutions because the staff members interacting directly with the existing tools face technical challenges and time-consuming frustrations.

However, simply describing process issues and how you can solve them isn’t directly applicable to common business objectives such as increased profitability or customer satisfaction. Instead of presenting a PLM project in IT terminology, engineering teams must identify ways to articulate how it aligns with strategic business objectives.

Moving from IT-centric to business-centric language

Translating your PLM functionality into business value starts with a language shift. Your team must understand what executive leadership values most and tie your project details back to these key goals without leaning on IT jargon. To get you started, we’ll cover a few ways that you can directly tie your PLM project to three common business objectives:

Customer satisfaction

Engineering teams often look to initiate a PLM project because they notice quality discrepancies throughout the product lifecycle. Legacy PLM tools create these quality issues because they often lack interoperability with each other. These disjointed systems end up displaying inconsistent product data throughout the lifecycle. In addition, a siloed approach to PLM makes it very challenging to manage vital changes across the entire lifecycle, such as technological advancements, adaptations for meeting compliance, and improvements based on customer feedback.

These examples show how an outdated PLM tech stack could lead to lower-quality products and, ultimately, less satisfied customers. With this idea in mind, it’s clear that a successful PLM project that improves connectivity and data-sharing will directly relate to one of the C-suite’s most significant goals: making customers happy with quality products.

Business Value Translation: “This PLM project will improve the quality of our products and enable us to incorporate customer feedback far more effectively.”

Lower operating costs

Many engineering teams also start considering a PLM project because they’re frustrated by the time and cost waste associated with their existing PLM systems. Legacy PLM tools lack connectivity, which leads to incomplete information about inventory and other costs. Without a big-picture view of the entire product lifecycle, businesses cannot know where they are wasting materials, continuing to produce EOL products that should be decommissioned or replaced, or duplicating efforts when they could be reusing modules instead.

Disjointed PLM systems also cause many workforce inefficiencies, as team members must manually search through documents stored across multiple systems for information about the product. Updating these overly complex systems can also be very expensive and time-consuming.

A strategic PLM project that improves traceability – digital threads and workforce efficiency can yield a significant return on investment. The time and cost savings of implementing an interconnected PLM system far outweigh the upfront costs.

Business Value Translation: This PLM project will enable us to save costs and time across the product lifecycle by saving man hours and giving us a bird’s-eye view of where we can improve process efficiencies and eliminate unnecessary costs.

Product innovations

Enabling a comprehensive view of a product’s lifecycle, real-time tracking of product data and processes, and faster communication across teams and departments will shift resources from spending hours of extra time to find the product data they need to a future where engineering teams can put their time, effort, and brainpower into making products more competitive, differentiated, safer, and, in many cases, more sustainable than ever.

Improved products lead to higher customer satisfaction and better sales while lowering costs—all business priorities that the C-suite values.

Business Value Translation: “This PLM project will automate many of the tasks that take up our team’s time. With all these rote tasks taken care of, our team will have far more time to develop an innovative product.”

How Aras Innovator contributes to business value

Finding the right technology partner is another key to the success of the PLM project and clear business value. At Aras, we offer PLM and digital thread solutions that scale with your business, including enterprise-level customization capabilities and SaaS on your terms. Here are a few ways that Aras Innovator® can contribute to your business’s bottom line:

• Open Integration to connect your PLM with broader engineering and enterprise ecosystems
• Upgradeable by design
• Managed system upgrades at no additional cost for better scalability over time.
• Aras deployed as SaaS or customer deployed with no compromise on functionality

Visit our customer stories library to learn how Aras Innovator helped enterprises improve engineering productivity and meet pressing business needs.