PLANO, USA: Siemens PLM Software, a business unit of the Siemens Industry Automation Division and a leading global provider of product lifecycle management (PLM) software and services, today announced a new global initiative and online resource center to show small manufacturing businesses how implementing a PLM strategy can help them better respond to the needs of their customers.

“Since we introduced the Velocity Series portfolio, one of the top requests from small to medium size businesses (SMBs) is to provide tools that help them respond more quickly to customer demands,” said Bruce Boes, vice president, Global Velocity Series Marketing. “Small businesses have special needs and limited resources, yet they need the ability to provide innovative products rapidly. This initiative focuses on enabling our customers to respond better to their customers so they can turn more ideas into successful products.”

A new Aberdeen report indicates that top SMB companies use PLM to respond effectively and efficiently to customer needs.

“Our research shows that a variety of pressures driving product development improvements ultimately tie back to customer responsiveness,” said Chad Jackson, Vice President of the Product Innovation practice at Aberdeen. “Unfortunately, these SMB organizations are highly constrained in terms of budgets, timelines and skilled workforce. Our recent studies show that top performing organizations leverage a comprehensive toolset including CAD, CAE, CAM as well as PLM to enable an approach to product development that allows them to respond effectively and quickly to changing customer needs, without sacrificing high performance expectations of their engineering organizations.”

In this new initiative, Siemens PLM Software shows customers how to reduce customer delivery by 50 percent, reduce engineering change orders by 40 percent, and save 30 percent in physical prototyping costs.

Siemens PLM Software’s top performing SMB customers use PLM to achieve these kinds of savings so they can respond quickly to customer needs.

Vikram Sirur, managing director at Miven Machine Tools Ltd., said that Siemens PLM Software “is helping us meet customers’ requirements in terms of quality, delivery and product performance.”
 
Luisito Chong, manager of production engineering at Angelus Sanitary Can, said that, “We wanted the productivity gains and the superior visualization that 3D offers so we could continue to meet our customers’ requests.”
 
Offered in the online resource center are a variety of tools for assessing one’s customer responsiveness, case studies on how other customers have improved responsiveness, as well as multiple videos and industry analyst white papers. Also available are details on capabilities for product development, manufacturing and project management roles play into responding better to customers.