PM: A step towards innovation

The current global scenario calls for enterprises to be ever dynamic and innovative. In simple terms to win the business race enterprises need to build winning products. A winning product is characterized by customer satisfaction, cost reduction, global competitiveness, time to market, growth and profitability.

Enterprises are striving to achieve this in every possible way, and IT has come handy. Technology has enabled them to manage production process, efficiently, to meet every market requirement. And it has helped them to collaborate product planning and product marketing, two major professional disciplines As a result, big and small businesses are counting rich dividend.

Technology requirements

"Turning market information into products is the key to successful business", says Swamy Narayanaswamy, Founder chairman & Managing Director, CSM software, one of the PLM solutions providers. However he sees a challenge here. As inputs from market are seldom uni- dimensional, they can be extremely complex and demanding. These inputs need to be assessed from various points of view, the most important being costs and manufacturability, he says. He enumerates some useful tools available that help translate market requirements into real products. In R&D these products can be classified as products that help in

• Concept Design (Styling, Aspects of Industrial Design)
•  CAD Tools (Computer Aided Design) for 2D and 3D modeling
•  CAE Tools (Computer Aided Engineering) for simulation and testing

Additionally, in the Manufacturing area, there are

•  CAM tools (Computer Aided Manufacturing) that aid in NC Programming,
•  Tool Path Generation,
•  Robotic Simulation,
•  Factory Layout Simulation,
•  Cycle Time Optimization and so on.

Together, these tools are sometimes referred to as the CAD/CAM/CAE segment of mechanical design.

Role of technology

All these technologies together collaborate on a Product Data Management (PDM) backbone that constantly allows all departments to collaborate in real time to capture changing designs in the development cycle.

The use of these technologies greatly helps in simulating product behavior in real markets and, before the actual manufacturing is undertaken, the product can be virtually tested for compliance to market needs. "Virtual Product Development" therefore is a key technology element in ensuring that market needs are met in a cost effective and an efficient manner.

The benefits of technology to today's product design, planning, manufacture and marketing lie in the successes achieved in Simulation or Virtual Product Development. This provides huge saving to the automotive and aerospace industries and all products in general by the reduction in product development time and cost by the near-total elimination of prototyping. The growth in manufacturing witnessed by Indian companies and India during the past few years, and the expected growth for the next many years, augurs well for the future for technology, engineering services, product planning, product marketing and product management.

In the front-end, the market information for the new product was captured by extensive collection of customer requirements, customer preferences and price-point, among other things, at the back-end it is the role of technology to utilize the information that has gone into product planning in creating the product marketing presentations. In other words, technology can help customers visualize product features that they had originally sought. While the product is being developed, visual 3D representations of products can be showcased to end customers to further refine product planning, greatly enhancing the success of the released product. Technology also plays a vital role in configuring complex product configurations. For example, a customer buying a plane may be able to decide on cabin configurations, seating layout, color schemes etc. by looking at simulations of the product before the product is actually manufactured. Similar uses can be found in various other fields also. Technological collaboration between the various stages of the product's life cycle (from the concept design stage to design, development, manufacture, marketing, servicing and finally retiring of the product in favor of a re-invented and re-designed new product) is critical for the success of the product.

Ramana Venkata, President & CEO, Stratify Software says: " Technology has made a marked shift in the way marketing information is collected. It has moved away from customer sampling based techniques to data mining techniques by increasing the vastness and preciseness of customer data captured. Technology trends like Web 2.0 enable self-adaptable marketing techniques by enhanced feedback mechanisms and focused interactions. And this works both ways as in disbursing product marketing info too."

Challenges

According to Keshav Prakash, Country Manager, Serena Software, Product management as a discipline is about what the product should be. Product managers are advocates for the customer's needs and desires. A large product might have numerous product managers working towards its success at a variety of levels, all the way from the junior product manager writing specifications about single feature sets to a product strategy director who has overall responsibility to executive management for the product direction.

People not familiar with the discipline of product management frequently get a product manager confused with other players. So it very important to have the Product Manager with required skillets and expertise and otherwise it could act as deterrents for this role. So you cannot have a developer, or a software manager, a project manager or a Marketer performing the product management job, he says.

With trends like Lean product development, Digital manufacturing etc, product management has taken giant leap to drive metamorphosis of product manufacturing and marketing.