With signs of a slowing economy, information technology (IT) spending will drop. Manufacturers will focus on IT applications that can be quickly deployed for maximum benefit. Two challenges emerge as consumer product goods (CPG) and life sciences manufacturers consolidate and explore new opportunities while increasing profitability. These challenges, namely integration and product life-cycle management (PLM), will contribute to cost-reduction efforts and top-line growth, but also lay an important foundation for e-Business.

Manufacturing IT is fragmented. Multiple versions of the truth exist across plants because of business process disconnects and islands of information. This includes status of the order in the plant or available capacity.

For e-Business collaboration to be successful, these paradigms must change. Manufacturing operations must move beyond data integration and enable process-focused operations. Plants must integrate with the supply chain and become reliable, agile, and responsive components of customer-facing processes. Take, for example, the synchronization needed between customer-facing order management, supply chain planning, plant scheduling, and manufacturing order execution to ensure that the customer order is met on-time, as promised.

Process-based integration, versus moving data between repositories, will enable cross-functional collaboration across a broader base of business processes and functions. But integration has risks, too! An integration project can become a technology monster if it is not led and prioritized.

Why PLM?

PLM is the set of integrated workflows and supporting applications that allow the product being produced for a customer to be synchronously managed across its full life cycle. This includes coordinating the processes involved in planning, making, and delivering a product-from the supplier's supplier, to the customer's customer.

A responsive business requires product management at the intersection of four core strategic processes. In CPG, these four processes are:

* real-time measurement and aggregation of market demand,

* producing to demand without excess production and inventory,

* just-in-time responsiveness of suppliers to extended supply chain plans, and

* real-time demand-pull optimization of the extended supply chain.

Consolidated view lost

The intersection of these four processes is not integrated. Structural information and process gaps constrain the performance of strategic business initiatives such as new product introductions. The problem is that a consolidated view of the customer product is lost among IT systems and manual processes across the extended supply chain. Manufacturers must build a PLM thread within each of the four components and across the intersection so that the business can optimize management of products destined for customers.

Integration and PLM initiatives are likely to get out of hand if appropriate analyses and prioritization are not led by the business around the business opportunities with the highest value. Manufacturers are doing too many disconnected initiatives as it is! Priorities for PLM and integration will be different across companies depending on the product portfolio, the maturity of products, the position in the supply chain, and the state of existing IT infrastructure. No one vendor delivers a complete PLM solution or provides everything required for integration.

An incremental deployment strategy dictates choosing modular software products that can be implemented in phases. Leading manufacturers have already started PLM initiatives that are harmonizing product specifications across the business to make supply chain collaboration more effective. Value is coming from reduced waste, costs, and better coordination.