Agile Software Corp. has bolstered the business intelligence and analytical capabilities of its Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) platform with its latest upgrade that aims to help manufacturers make better strategic and operational decisions about their products.
The new Agile 9.2.2 release, available immediately, includes a number of out-of-the-box, extensible decision support capabilities — from dashboards to Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) — to enable companies to manage product development by exception in an increasingly complex environment. “Not only has the supply chain gone global, but the design chain has as well,” says John Kelley, vice president of product management for Agile, in San Jose, CA. “Product complexity has exploded, there’s more regulation, shorter time-to-market cycles and the product network has exploded as well. When you’ve got that kind of complexity, it’s not enough to manage parts bill of materials any more — you need a tool that helps you understand what you need to be working on.”
While previous versions of Agile had decision support functionality, it required users to perform data mining tasks to get at the data to create reports. With this release, the functionality is embedded out-of-the-box so users can instantly see dashboards and red, yellow, green charts that indicate, for example, what projects are on track, if their electronic change order cycles are up or down or how quality is coming across products, Kelley says.
The addition of business intelligence capabilities to PLM suites is a trend that has been mirrored in other enterprise applications, according to Jim Brown, vice president, Global Product Innovation, at Aberdeen Group, in Stamford, CT. “Aberdeen benchmarks consistently show that Best in Class companies--those that hit the product development targets that drive profitability--measure their product development performance more frequently and on a broader enterprise scale,” Brown says. Business intelligence functions help companies gain control over complex, multi-departmental, cross-company global processes, providing much-needed visibility, he explains.
In addition to the business intelligence enhancements, Agile 9.2.2 also offers expanded relationship capabilities that connect and fully automate end-to-end business processes across functions and enterprises, the goal being to improve companies’ abilities to collaborate with their global network . The software is configured with a number of pre-built best practice capabilities in this area — for instance, an engineering change order to phase gate — and companies can also create their own without any coding or customization.
The upgrade also features a host of usability enhancements, including streamlined navigation, project summary pages, bookmarks and quick-links, allowing users to quickly get frequently-used product information.
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 Personalized, easily configurable dashboards provide both executives and operational personnel with insights and views into the enterprise product record. |
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