How Imperial Brands Adapts to the Changing Compliance Landscape with Aras Innovator

Imperial Brands, an international tobacco company, has faced several roadblocks with product lifecycle management (PLM). The company needed to operate across dispersed business systems and manufacturing sites worldwide to manage a complex product portfolio while keeping up with a highly regulated industry with constantly changing compliance requirements.

Many global, asset-driven organizations face the same situation as Imperial Brands; they need to quickly update many product specifications with country-specific requirements but struggle to do so in a siloed engineering environment.

The challenges of a fluctuating compliance landscape

Imperial Brands is the fourth-largest tobacco company in the world and has recently begun offering an extensive portfolio of next-generation, smoke-free products. As a large global enterprise, they operate in over 100 markets and must work to meet the unique demands and requirements associated with each one. Many companies experience similar challenges when operating across several countries, each with its own legal specifications and changing regulatory requirements. It can be exceptionally difficult to track frequent changes to each market’s regulations and integrate these new requirements into products efficiently.

Imperial Brands’ past approach to product lifecycle management involved several disjointed systems. However, these siloed tools couldn’t keep up with the massive number of changes made to product specifications as Imperial grew: an average of 30,000 changes yearly. The team also had difficulty maintaining consistency, managing data across the organization, and enabling cross-team collaboration. As a result, Imperial Brands experienced operational bottlenecks and missed opportunities for product improvements. These challenges worsened as Imperial Brands expanded its product portfolio and underwent several acquisitions.

3 ways Imperial Brands leverages Aras Innovator

Imperial Brands knew it was time to adopt a more cohesive approach to PLM and improve their product traceability. The organization chose Aras because of its customized workflow offerings and ability to easily track and report compliance requirements. After developing a few custom applications for its instance of Aras Innovator®, the team rolled it out to twenty manufacturing sites simultaneously. This implementation strategy ensured that the connectivity between Bill of Materials (BOM) data, compliance processes, and production locations across the globe would face minimal disruption.

Here are a few fundamental ways the team leveraged Aras Innovator to meet country-specific regulations and pivot seamlessly:

Connected workflows

First, the team needed to link fragmented systems and employ a connected, end-to-end approach across departments. To facilitate this level of connectivity, the team prioritized effective data transfer, establishing ways to easily share information and going beyond manual efforts such as downloading and sending information through static documents.

Customization for business-specific needs

Rather than deploying a one-size-fits-all approach, Imperial Brands leveraged Aras Innovator to tailor PLM workflows to match existing processes rather than forcing teams to adapt to a rigid PLM structure. With Aras Innovator’s built-in software development tools, Imperial Brands could create applications that worked seamlessly within its existing environments.

Robust compliance features

The team customized its Aras Innovator instance to keep up with a high volume of product specifications and regulatory changes. The final product offers real-time version control, traceability, and data integrity features. With these features, the team can keep up with country-specific regulatory changes and quickly adapt production to align with them.

Imperial Brands: Set up for current and future success

Today, Imperial Brands leverages its unique instance of Aras Innovator to meet current challenges and prepare for future success. The organization enjoys better data quality and higher operational efficiency, giving it a clear path forward for other initiatives. For example, Imperial Brands plans to integrate Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) data management functionality into its existing PLM platform.

According to David Everson, senior manager of PLM Processes and Systems for Imperial Brands, “The Aras platform has been instrumental in our PLM transformation, enabling us to streamline processes, enhance collaboration, and lay the foundation for future digitalization efforts. Its flexibility and customization capabilities have truly revolutionized our ways of working.”

Read the complete case study to learn more about Imperial Brands’ PLM transformation.