Industry Background
Over the past 25 years, three trends have significantly increased the challenges that US OEMs face in bringing products to market:
- Business Competition
Business competition has increased as markets have evolved from local to regional to global, while product release cycles have shortened from years to months. Reductions in staffing levels and recent regulations such as ISO, Sarbanes-Oxley, and the European Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) directive make product data management a necessity in today’s market .
- Technological Complexity
Technological complexity has grown as breakthroughs have led to assemblies that are both smaller and more intricate. To support these advances, both engineering and manufacturing companies have increased their investments in infrastructure. Increased costs, combined with new RoHS regulations, are driving companies to integrate Engineering, Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems.
- Software Proliferation without Integration
Software applications have developed over time to support specific hardware and software platforms. As a result, many organizations need to manage islands of data, which must be exported from one system (i.e. a design system), moved to an intermediate system (i.e. a spreadsheet), and then imported into a third system (i.e. an ERP system). This data isolation creates a need for companies to update their software to applications that are capable of integration.
Impact to Businesses
These trends have hit small- to medium-sized companies particularly hard due to their capital and personnel resource limitations. As a result, these companies have been forced to launch products using incomplete, obsolete, and often inaccurate data — all of which increase product costs, expose excess materials, and delay product releases. Many companies have been forced out of business.
New Opportunities
With the advancements in open architecture software, the maturation of the internet, and the development of business-ready applications, companies now have the opportunity to select powerful individual products as well as our Integrated Solutions in order to effectively handle the challenges of doing business in today’s climate.
