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PLM Advisors & Specialists -
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Strategic Consulting
Advisors & Specialists -
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INDUSTRIES
Aerospace, Defense & Ship Building
Product and program development in the aerospace industry requires collaboration among partners, suppliers, customers and multi-disciplined teams around the world. The products and programs themselves are often very complex and there are challenging dynamics related to multi-year development cycles.
Key Challenges
- Long, inefficient product and program development cycles
- Product Development complexity
- Increased financial scrutiny
- Lack in full lifecycle support
- Increased environmental focus
- Emerging international competition
- Rapidly deploy and integrate new technologies into platforms, products and programs that involve multiple suppliers, partners and customers throughout the process
- Security challenges when sharing data across the globe with hosted functional suppliers, contractors, partners and customers
- Compliance with strict government and industry requirements, and regulatory mandate
Ways to Overcome Challenges
- Create a centralized product data model that tracks and integrates software, hardware, electronics and mechanical parts, improving visibility across long planning cycles while eliminating waste and rework.
- Establish traceability between programs and product documentation, from the original concept to services and repairs, reducing lifecycle management costs.
- Build a secure infrastructure plan which accounts for ITAR, EAR and other important government regulations.
- Integrate customers, suppliers and partners early in your product and program development process to improve collaboration and minimize errors.
- Integrate customers into your Program and Contract Management processes.
How We Can Help
- Establish common frameworks and efficient methods that can improve the predictability and effectiveness of aircraft design and manufacturing.
- Define process controls and implement program management frameworks to ensure that you meet cost, time and quality targets.
- Develop knowledge management databases to improve the visibility and traceability of product plans, from the proposal phase through customer service and repair.
- Implement program management and product development processes that seamlessly integrate customers and suppliers into your PLM systems and processes.
- Create security identification, verification and validation processes to meet ITAR and EAR restrictions when sharing information with your supply chain.
Automotive
To grow market share in today’s competitive automotive industry, companies need to bring innovative new products to market while reducing product development cycles and costs. Market leaders are focusing on ways to further differentiate their brands, exceed quality requirements and drive process efficiencies that will improve profit margins.
Key Challenges
- Pressure to stay ahead of innovative new designs being introduced by competitors while maintaining superior quality
- Shifting design responsibility to suppliers increases the level of complexity in the exchange of product design information, creating more room for error
- Reducing product development lead times increases pressure on design, materials, procurement, and manufacturing to quickly incorporate complex customer changes
- Emerging Market OEMs demand state of the art PLM solution
- Sophisticated customers expect innovative, intelligent and connected vehicles
- Government regulations are increasing by country and compliance categories
- Industry is at an inflection point to accelerate consolidation of PLM Systems
Ways to Overcome Challenges
- Identify opportunities to reduce design errors, integration, and testing times for vehicles by incorporating simulation design practices
- Capture and reuse components, processes and past knowledge to accelerate time to market
- Increase the importance of Systems Engineering by developing capabilities for a multidisciplinary and collaborative approach to designing and maintaining complex systems
- Deploy advanced product configuration and modular architecture design and development capabilities to deliver more features and variants to customers
- Proliferate Mechatronics & Embedded systems across multiple engineering disciplines
- Enable design-in-context within a heterogeneous environment to design complex products that span multiple design tools
- Optimize resources for global product development that spans continents, regions and organizations
- Initiate green product development and balance product performance to comply with environmental regulations and market demands
- Address the challenge of increasing cost and harmonization pressures through IT consolidation and design to cost
- Extend PLM system access to design partners, suppliers, dealers, and service providers around the globe
- Improve product quality by applying consistent design and manufacturing processes
- Manage historical supplier cost and performance data to make cost-effective sourcing decisions while reducing risk.
- Optimize global manufacturing operations and capacity
How We Can Help
- Implement concurrent engineering processes to accelerate design cycles
- Synchronize product planning and communication across all design and manufacturing partners by creating a single product record
- Implement advanced quality management programs such as APQP and PPAP using PLM technologies to ensure consistency of design and manufacturing processes
- Bridge gaps in the design processes and product manufacturability by integrating PLM system data and processes with other enterprise systems
- Establishing “design-in-context” processes to integrate CAD data from disparate CAD applications, facilitating better design integrations and collaboration within the extended value chain.
Consumer Goods
Consumer Goods manufacturers continue to grapple with fierce competition, complex supply chains and long product life cycles. They also must rise to the challenge of bringing new innovations to market while optimizing their product portfolios, managing outsourced manufacturing and ensuring regulatory compliance.
Key Challenges
- Accelerating time-to-market while meeting quality and compliance standards
- Shrinking profit margins, greater customer choice and eroding brand loyalty
- Managing the intricacies of global suppliers and partners who play critical roles in the design and manufacturing process
- Large, complex product portfolios, making it more difficult to prioritize new products and react to changing market information
- Leveraging global product development and production footprints
- Cost pressures to maintain existing demand while developing new brands in low cost markets, and preserving existing premium brands
- Regulations – Increasing complexity country and across compliance categories
- Variable market structures, renewable energies and supply chain risks
- Operational efficiency, infrastructure reliability, and long lifecycle support
Ways to Overcome Challenges
- Improve portfolio management and product management processes to yield greater profit margins
- Implement effective sourcing and supplier management processes to improve collaboration and achieve cost reductions
- Introduce initiatives that integrate engineering and manufacturing systems and data, enabling you to “design anywhere and build anywhere”
- Reduce direct material and operational costs
- Ensure compliance and regulatory requirements with access to better data throughout the product development process
- Increase collaboration with customers, suppliers and partners through “open innovation”
- Establish traceability from the Voice of the customer to product performance
- Initiate green product development to comply with environmental regulations
- Optimize resources for global product development across continents, teams and organizations
- Manage product configuration complexity to deliver more features and variants with existing resources
- Address cost pressure through IT consolidation and design to cost
- Improve quality and speed in service information delivery, reduce repair time, and increase profitability
How We Can Help
- Implement Program and Portfolio Management solutions to help you better manage the NPD process
- Configure PLM solutions that will allow you to collaborate with your suppliers, in a secure and timely manner
- Implement processes and solutions that enable improved compliance and regulatory requirements, allowing you to be more proactive and less reactive
- Assist with creating solutions that more effectively integrate Product Manuals, Labeling, Packaging and Artwork Management into the product development lifecycle.
Electronics and High-Tech
In today’s fast-paced high tech industry, successful companies must help to shape customer demand, continually evolve their offerings and optimize their product portfolio. In addition, because high-tech products often involve complex components, technologies and platforms as part of the product development cycle, there is little room for error in quickly bringing quality new products to market.
Key Challenges
- Reduce the launch to volume or the time to market for quality products
- Manage increasingly complex products with shorter life spans
- Maintain brand image with fast changing customer needs
- Link supply chain partners with your strategy roadmap
- Improve the success rates for new product introductions
Ways to Overcome Challenges
- Optimize product development cycle times
- Integrate global supply chain and globally dispersed OEMs
- Implement processes to better integrate and manage your product and technology portfolios, enabling you to maximize your return
- Increase profitability through the optimization of manufacturing resources and capital investments
- Improve management of complex product configurations
- Improve electromechanical product development
- Increase Part and Design Re-use
- Satisfy Environmental and Regulatory Compliance
- Enhance Product Development Collaboration
- Improve Portfolio and Program Management
How We Can Help
- Implement New Product Development and Introduction Systems using PLM solutions
- Optimize product development processes, from creating the initial requirements through design, sourcing and production
- Enable better collaboration and communication of up-to-date product planning information across the enterprise and your supply network
- Implement data management techniques and solutions that centralize product portfolio data into a single system, enabling you to optimize assets and make better planning decisions
Energy
Increase in the global demand for energy is driving exploration for new energy sources and the commercialization of clean technologies and applications. Companies will need to optimize their existing products and processes while bringing innovative products and services to market that minimize costs and the environmental impact.
Key Challenges
- Leveraging plant and asset capacity while responding to shifting market changes
- Integrating product development processes across the enterprise and throughout the supply chain
- Optimizing system efficiency and asset availability while reducing lifecycle costs
- Implementing technology infrastructure that minimizes risks and vulnerability
Ways to Overcome Challenges
- Develop innovative products and solutions that utilize new sources of energy such as solar, wind, hydroelectric, next-generation nuclear reactors, and other sources
- Implement systems that are open and scalable across suppliers and customers
- Invest in building new assets and processes that will improve customer loyalty
- Establish an IT infrastructure that minimizes risks and meets regulatory compliance mandates for maintaining, storing, and accessing information
How We Can Help
- Replicate design, construction and operations best practices across your company
- Reduce lifecycle costs and knowledge assets by implementing asset tracking solutions
- Improve the design and layout of facilities to maximize productivity and efficiency
- Improve plant utilization and asset availability to minimize costs
Industrial Manufacturing
Industrial Manufacturers are looking to get more out of R&D and focusing on better ways to innovate and drive growth to the bottom line. To avoid competing on price, Industrial Manufacturers will need to focus on improving engineering, quality and services.
Key Challenges
- Maintaining long-term customer relationships
- Lack of product differentiation, leading to potential price wars
- Increasing time to market by leveraging company knowledge and expertise
- Regulations – Increasing complexity country and across compliance categories
- Longer lifecycles of industrial equipment requires extended maintenance support and service parts
- Aging assets, increasing mergers and acquisitions and serve emerging market needs
- Variable market structures, renewable energies and supply chain risks
- Operational efficiency, infrastructure reliability, and long lifecycle support
Ways to Overcome Challenges
- Integrate your customer value chain with your supply chain
- Identify opportunities to re-use existing components, technologies and designs
- Leverage intellectual property, outsourcing, and collaborative design opportunities by centralizing important product planning data
- Create a centralized way to share data such as 3-D design methods, parts re-use information and product reviews, enabling development teams to be more agile
- Establish traceability from the Voice of the customer to product performance
- Initiate green product development to comply with environmental regulations
- Optimize resources for global product development across continents, teams and organizations
- Manage product configuration complexity to deliver more features and variants with existing resources
- Address cost pressure through IT consolidation and design to cost
- Improve quality and speed in service information delivery, reduce repair time, and increase profitability
How We Can Help
- Implement customer-centric program management processes, establishing the right foundation for customer satisfaction
- Optimize design and manufacturing processes to maximize component re-use and leverage common architecture across engineering domains
- Accelerate the introduction of innovative new products and services with easy-to-use templates
- Improve delivery processes by creating process governance methods and integrating customer needs into plant, and supply chain operations
Life Sciences
Today’s Life Sciences companies must bring new innovations to market while managing a pipeline of potential new products and improving the productivity of Research & Development. Keeping up with changing regulatory burdens, counterfeit products, and patent expirations is also a daunting task. To remain profitable and to sustain long-term growth, companies must optimize cost to profit equations by reducing dependence on blockbuster drugs and transitioning their growth strategy to include other targeted treatments.
Key Challenges
- Changing regulatory requirements
- Preventing counterfeit products for blockbuster drugs while maintaining safety
- Reducing timelines from discovery through trials and regulatory approvals
- Lack of alignment between R & D initiatives and business priorities
- Managing information across the total Product Life cycle
- Increased regulatory scrutiny
- Consolidate Information Technology infrastructure and optimize investments across a smaller footprint
- Create Product and Service offerings that meet Global demand
Ways to Overcome Challenges
- Implement a centralized system to monitor, track and report on regulatory compliance
- Introduce processes and technologies that facilitate secured access to key intellectual property across the enterprise
- Re-use technology across different products, yielding faster time to market while decreasing total costs
- Create processes that allow for better alignment between R & D activities and strategic business objectives
- Implement Electronic Documentation Controls
- Improve Supplier Documentation Control
- Implement Closed Loop Quality Management Solutions
- Design for Environmental compliance
- Improve Labeling & Approval submission process
- Implement effective risk management solutions
How We Can Help
- Create processes that allow for better alignment between R & D activities and strategic business objectives
- Implement knowledge management systems to capture historical clinical trials and drug studies and link them to publicly available information and patents
- Create regulatory compliance reporting models to speed drug approvals and reduce time to market for new drug introductions
Process Manufacturing
Today’s process manufacturers need to shorten cycle times, reduce scrap materials, lower costs and reduce the risks associated with new innovations. Too often, companies use disconnected systems and inefficient processes, leading to poor cross-functional coordination and rendering the product development process ineffective. Process manufacturers will need to begin addressing challenges by standardizing planning and innovation across business divisions, product lines and distributed teams.
Key Challenges
- Managing a volatile mix of opportunities and challenges requires extreme agility, accurate forecasting and hedging strategies
- Implementing ways to react quickly to increasing and changing customer demands
- Maximizing value from global and complex network of plants and distribution centers throughout the world
- Optimizing purchasing and production plans and enabling fast-paced decision making processes that involve cross functional teams
Ways to Overcome Challenges
- Create an integrated information backbone to plan, procure, manufacture, distribute and market products
- Centralize knowledge assets and systems to capture production process knowledge that will improve production methods
- Optimize production capacity by rapidly adapting manufacturing systems to adjust for shifting industry demands
How We Can Help
- Implement a centralized data architecture that supports an integrated system which tracks the flow of information, from the customer order to delivery
- Improve quality with real-time visibility into quality at every phase of production, including raw materials, intermediates and final products
- Implement business practices such as collaborative forecasting and vendor- managed inventory tracking
- Integrate formula, material and recipe management processes and track total production cost by batch, customer, business, or region
Retail Footwear and Apparel
Retail Footwear and Apparel businesses rely on their ability to provide consumers with the latest fashion trends. To remain competitive, hit launch dates and optimize profit margins, companies need to bring merchandisers, designers, production planners and suppliers into their market launch plans early on.
Key Challenges
- Reducing sourcing costs for raw materials and components
- Eroding margins and customer loyalty due to increased competition
- Being able to communicate product changes quickly across a global supply chain
- Managing complex product development schedules while reducing the risk of rework and missed launch dates
- Consolidate Information Technology infrastructure and optimize investments across a smaller footprint
- Create Product and Service offerings that meet Global demand
Ways to Overcome Challenges
- Establish global supply chains to reduce costs, minimize supplier risks and improve product quality
- Increase innovation by encouraging early supplier involvement in the design phase, identifying opportunities to cut product costs while maintaining product quality
- Create a single product record accessible to global suppliers, agents, and factories to improve opportunities for collaboration while reducing costs, rework and errors
- Drive early sourcing processes into product development
How We Can Help
- Integrate disparate planning information across the entire lifecycle by establishing a centralized solution for tracking, sharing and exchanging information related to product design concepts, color, palettes, fabrics, trims and other raw materials
- Implement streamlined seasonal line planning and process management to improve the exchange of product information across multiple merchandisers, designers, production planners, and suppliers, reducing errors and launch delays
- Achieve greater visibility and component re-use when planning new products and product lines, enabling you to quickly leverage existing materials, knowledge, processes and technologies from one product or brand initiative to another.
Turning Innovation Into ResultsInfinite possibilities. Endless opportunities.
ABOUT US
Founded in 2007, Datafrond offers industry proven best practice processes and technology solutions for small to mid-size businesses looking to improve their product development processes. We provide solutions for CAD, Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), Quality Management (QLM/QMS) and Industrial Internet of Things. Most notably, Datafrond’s proprietary PLM-IN-A-BOX and Quality Management solutions are recognized for their proven methods and successfully adopted by many industrial product manufacturers. We have helped some of the world’s most recognized companies to become more innovative and competitive by helping create efficiency in product development processes. Our approach focuses on building the right PLM foundation that integrates the process, systems, data and people.
In addition, Datafrond is proud to be a Silver member of the PTC Channel Advantage Program and a Value Added Re-seller of PTC products and services.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
We offer on premise and a range of cloud based offering through our partner network; PLM support services, strategic advisory consulting, training, implementation and data migration.
We provide technology solutions to for 3D CAD, Product Lifecycle Management, Quality Management Solutions, Application Lifecycle Management, Service Lifecycle Management and Connected Product Strategies, PLM-IN-A-BOX and QLM-IN-A-BOX.
CREO, PTC Windchill, PTC Quality, PTC Integrity, Thingworx, Vuforia.
Datafrond has been a blessing for our company. We have been searching for a PLM consulting firm that truly understood our needs, and finally we found one. Datafrond’s understanding of PLM and Windchill functionally has been excellent; more importantly they have helped us improve and develop our business processes. You would be hard pressed to find a consulting firm that has the breadth and depth in knowledge, and responds as quickly or efficiently as Datafrond.
David Richardson
Vice President, Richardson Cooling Packages
Datafrond is a highly competent boutique firm focused on solving customer’s PLM needs, seamlessly integrating it into our business. They have been able to architect and deploy solutions in a fraction of the time and cost of larger consulting firms.
Jeffrey L Burk
Director, Global Product Organization, Whirlpool Corporation
We have worked with Datafrond over three years on different aspects of a Windchill PLM implementation including Business and Use Case Analysis, System Assessment and Configuration, and System Customization . They have always been professional, well organized, and qualified to do whatever was asked. They have rolled up their sleeves and worked elbow to elbow with us in delivering customer requirements and adding business value to our PLM implementation.
Jeff Lewis
Manager, E&T IT, Residential Solutions, a business of Ingersoll Rand
Datafrond has provided insight across multiple industry segments and a PLM solution that promises to shorten initial implementation schedules. Datafrond PLM solution also provides a scalable approach to adding functionality over time that will be seamlessly integrated with previous modules.
Kevin Stahl
Director of Information Technologies, ASC Industries Inc.
Collaboration with Datafrond has been instrumental in establishing a realistic project timeline with a phased-in approach that reduces risk during the transition from current to future state.
Betsy Lawrence
Manager, Documentation Services, Starkey Hearing Technologies
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