Editor's note: This is the sixth post in our "Customer Voice" series where we capture and bring to you the direct voice of our customers to demonstrate their areas of PLM ROI. View the other posts below:
Gaining and Maintaining a Competitive Advantage
Launching Trace One Devex PLM in 8 Months
Integrating Trace One Devex PLM into a Single System
Using Trace One Devex PLM for Quality Assurance
How Trace One Devex PLM Improves Innovation
Having implemented Trace One Devex PLM, a global confectionary company realized the benefits of relying on a single system that connects all aspects of a workflow for innovation.
“For once, we had one system and one location for people to go for information,” says a Product Lifecycle Manager with the company. “In the past there was no single source of truth, just a lot of spreadsheets.”
Previously, this lack of standardization and structure led to a lot of confusion, which was amplified by manual processes and silos across the company.
“There was no visibility upstream or downstream,” says the Manager. “There was also an ability to circumvent the process. It gave us flexibility, but it was a risk.”
With Trace One Devex PLM, the company was finally able to eliminate a lot of these risks.
“We didn’t have any check-ins to see how we were doing,” says the Manager. “With Trace One Devex PLM, one of the biggest wins is that it supports stage-gate.”
With the introduction of Trace One Devex PLM, the confectioner finally had visibility into stakeholder involvement.
“Sign off used to be like tossing the project to the next person on the other side of a wall,” notes the Manager. “We can now recognize cross-functional risk with checkpoints across the entire project. This means we can anticipate delays, make sure each step is being taken for deliverables, and ensure we’re not bypassing anything before it gets entered into the system.”
In the past, stakeholders had different processes and stored briefs across a variety of solutions. This led to confusion and broken trust.
Under the new approach, each step needs to be completed in Trace One Devex PLM before the next party is notified to enter information.
“It really drives the notion of cross-functional accountability and responsibility,” says the Manager.“ Then it’s a consistent process and we get the quality we expect.”Reporting in Trace One Devex PLM gave the company the ability to track workflows, financials, and performance.
“Dashboards let us see where we are in the stage-gate process, a full report on the status of all active projects,” says the Manager. “We can identify bottlenecks and adjust timelines, but we can also anticipate upswings.”
Now that the company has cross-functionality, it has been able to improve decision making and automate for better control, more productivity, and higher output.
“Intelligence exists for each item in each project, and we can look at the financials at each stage of development,” says the Manager. “You can get total operating costs, recognize which individual items in a project aren’t profitable, and then make the right decision.”
With clear insight across all stages of development, the company can now utilize best practices to finalize on time and on budget.
“We now execute the right tasks at the right time in the right order,” says the Manager. “Our ability to manage projects is driven by data. We know based on history what to initiate, continue, or terminate.”
Having a centralized system in place reduces the chaos and improves communication. It also ensures that new ideas use resources efficiently in order to deliver product to consumers in an economical way.
“We’re always challenged to come up with new ideas to move business forward,” says the Manager. “It has to be replicable at an economical cost. With Trace One Devex PLM, you bring good ideas to the floor, but get rid of the bad ideas sooner.”