Introduce agility into the management and optimization of your products' lifecycle and change processes, and increase process collaboration and visibility while reducing cycle times and time-to-market.
The product lifecycle is complex, particularly given that the process of producing products now rarely involve a single organization. Supply chains are becoming supply networks, complex graphs spanning global relationships that may change on a rapid basis with potentially significant effects. As a result, the common approach of standardizing processes with first-generation static workflow automation tools has reached its limits; directly specifying all possible process configurations and reconfigurations is not only slow and costly, but often impossible. The consequences are ill-fitting processes and soaring process development and improvement costs.
From PLM to ACM
Conventional PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) systems offer very limited agile management of process change. They are too often insensitive to real-time events, unable to deploy changes to production without lengthy and expensive round-trip re-engineering cycles, and are rarely responsive to changes in data state from tertiary systems. Moreover, PLM workflow is often too tightly bound to information flow, with little flexibility to make opportunistic ad-hoc decisions based on exception requirements and real-time resource constraints. These factors will always result in excessively lengthy and expensive process reengineering cycles.
The integration of LSPS, with its ability to represent the goals of any product workflow, removes these limitations and ensures that a PLM installation is designed for change. This solution is called ACM or Agile Change Management.
ACM is defined as the practice of coherently managing change across all aspects of operations. The LSPS ACM solution is characterised by the following features:
Connecting the Enterprise
Enable dynamic collaboration among all parties involved with the product evolution throughout its entire supply network. Use consensus decisions to drive process activities, engage via multiple form of media, and bring transparency to deliberation and decision making.
Agile treatment of change requests
Individual change requests can be treated in a standard manner while allowing for sufficient agility to adapt the process along multiple paths to account for issues such as resource availability, strategic priorities, etc.
Alignment of process performance with business goals
If agility can be present in the execution flow of a product process, it is critical that flow decisions are made in alignment with business performance metrics, i.e., KPIs. As LSPS can ne natively driven by goals, this alignment is assured.
Data-Process coupling
If business data, such as a bill of materials, changes via some system, any affected process will become automatically aware of that change and either adapt its state accordingly, or issue warnings if state cannot be changed due to constraints or conflicts.
Process structure transparency
Since goal-oriented process models are intuitive to read and understand, they build a strong foundation for a real-time Engineering Management Information System (MIS) to check on cycle times or identify areas of quick wins for process improvements, such as bottlenecks.
Real-time process update
Process changes can be made and deployed immediately in-flight when the necessity or opportunity arises thus limiting the need to stop or restart long running and/or critical processes.
Seamless integration of other systems and services
LSPS is designed for ease of integration with, and orchestration of, third party systems. For example, a process activity can directly invoke several third-party systems in parallel and allow those interactions to guide flow decisions within a core change process.