HP PLM Solutions: Helping you launch products
faster, smarter, and more cost-effectively
An experienced partner, innovative platforms and effective applications can
enhance profitability and help you gain a competitive edge.
The need for PLM
Change is never easy—especially when that change involves restructuring current business processes and technology investments. Yet change is what you may need to stay competitive in today’s business environment. A company that embraces change by implementing a more effective way of doing business is a company that will not only survive, but thrive.
Product Lifecycle Management or PLM is an area of change that successful companies are pursuing to launch innovative products faster with reduced cost. PLM is a process of managing the entire lifecycle of a product—from concept, through design and manufacture, to service, and including final disposal. PLM integrates every aspect of the product: all processes, systems, data, and people. PLM empowers you to make informed, unified, data-driven decisions at every stage in the product lifecycle.
Successful companies are implementing PLM strategies because they work. PLM removes the typical business
challenges associated with disjointed data:
• Data ownership with no clearly defined responsibilities. Telling a user that they “own” some corporate product management data is is tempting, but can be dangerous. Without clearly defined responsibilities, users can have power over who sees or can change data, or they might replicate it for themselves and destroy its integrity.
• Complexity due to multiple business processes across different divisions. Manufacturers work with multiple product lines, perhaps developed in geographically dispersed operating units. Each group probably has different processes and different systems to manage product information. How do you ensure that all business processes and all systems use the same product information?
• Silos of technology that are unable to be integrated, impeding collaborative efforts. Have you ever pulled a component from your company library and integrated it into your design—only to find out later that the component description was obsolete? The engineer who designed it says they keep the new parts on a different server now, but no one told you. How do you prevent these situations?
These typical data challenges are expensive and time consuming, devastating a company’s bottom line profits. A successful PLM implementation removes these hurdles, allowing you to improve both your company’s top- and bottom-line indicators.
One route to a relatively pain free PLM implementation is choosing an experienced partner, innovative platforms, and an effective application landscape.
HP Services—an experienced partner
The transition to PLM can be difficult if it isn’t implemented correctly. The key is planning and patience. Many companies fail because they expect too much too early in the process. They also don’t thoroughly look at the process side of the implementation, and tend to take on more than they can handle. PLM is a progressive effort, requiring well- stated goals and a detailed roadmap.
HP is an experienced PLM partner that can help you develop a comprehensive roadmap, detailing needed changes in process, organization, performance measurement, and knowledge management. HP will work with you to effectively deploy PLM solutions that are flexible, adaptable and easy-to-use, while offering increased visibility into the total cost of ownership. The consulting services within HP have experience with nearly all major PLM software providers and can tailor a solution to fit your unique needs.
The first step toward successful PLM is to thoroughly understand the challenges you face. After identifying these challenges, you can then define a strategic roadmap. The roadmap, which is typically a two- to three-year framework, outlines current business processes and highlights which ones may require reengineering. Once you have the roadmap, the second stage is a deeper self-assessment of your current challenges. You can’t fix a problem until you understand all of the issues surrounding it. After that, we work together to implement a strategy uniquely suited to your business needs.
Throughout the entire process, HP works with you as a partner, architecting a PLM strategy that will deliver a completely integrated solution. HP’s PLM program includes portfolio management, product design, product configuration and development, production process planning and failure tracking. HP PLM strategies also include a comprehensive portfolio of services for startup, expansion, and management.
One of the best examples of implementing a successful PLM strategy, and one that HP services cut its teeth on, is that of the merger of HP and Compaq in the early 2000’s. Beginning with the vision of real-time collaboration across the entire HP virtual enterprise, HP developed and implemented an end-to-end strategy that includes complete Product Data Management (PDM) of over 200,000 products, managing over 100,000 suppliers, and comprehending widely varying product lifecycles. The result: engineers and management can retrieve product information quickly and easily, business “best practices” can be globally implemented throughout a product’s lifecycle, and time-to-market has been reduced in nearly every product engineering organization.
HP reduces time-to-value for PLM implementations, largely because of its strategic relationship with its application vendors. HP works closely with the major software companies to optimize, improve, and validate applications on HP platforms.
The relationship between HP and its PLM application partners is highlighted by support for Application Competency Centers—organizations developed to validate end-to-end solutions optimized for HP equipment. The focus on partnerships and collaborative deployment provides customers with reliable, easy-to-own solutions based on innovation and solutions excellence.
HP and its partners also build on strong, strategic relationships with customers—leveraging combined PLM experiences to deploy and support production ready product lifecycle solutions. Together, HP and its application partners deliver a streamlined, high- value offering to every customer. You can read more about HP’s migration assistance and proof-of-concept services at www.hp.com/go/PDMmodernization.
Innovative Platforms
A vital component of any successful PLM implementation is your IT infrastructure. Your first step in the PLM roadmap is to take an inventory of your current platforms and evaluate whether the hardware you’re using will help you achieve your future goals.
Technology improves at a rapid pace, and keeping your hardware modern will give you an exponential improvement in performance and in total cost of ownership. For example, HP helps users migrate from HP’s legacy PA-RISC architecture to today’s Intel® Itanium® and Intel® Xeon® processors. Not only does such a migration provide vastly increased performance, but both acquisition and facilities costs are dramatically reduced. In addition, if you’re still using legacy systems to run today’s PLM applications, you may not be taking full advantage of r
ecent innovations in applications such as multi-tiered architectures and web-based interfaces.
When considering a hardware platform there is a dizzying choice of packaging, performance, and operating environments. While we’ll discuss different hardware and operating system options more depth in a later article, one bright star that shines today is the use of blade systems as a core hardware component.
Blades have the same features as standard rack- mounted “pizza box” servers and run the same applications. The key difference is that blades share a common infrastructure (enclosure). In a nutshell, a blade enclosure is an all-in-one system in a box. Everything (cabl
es, network switches, etc.) is pooled and shared, making it easier to build, adapt, and maintain the common elements of your infrastructure. A blade system saves money and time by reducing maintenance events, cables, and switch connections. It also provides shared power and cooling that saves up-front costs and helps reduce monthly energy and air conditioning bills. Finally, the enclosure can add redundancy to each server to prevent unplanned
downtime.
Building a PLM solution with the modular HP BladeSystem delivers advantages not possible from standalone systems. You save time by utilizing HP Insight Control management software because it allows you to deploy, maintain, and enhance your entire server infrastructure. You save energy by employing HP Thermal Logic technology. And you increase simplicity with the HP Virtual Connect because it allows you to wire once and then add,
replace and recover server and storage blades on the fly. That means you can implement the applications you need now, and then easily add more as your requirements change.
Another advantage of the HP BladeSystem is virtualization—a technology that leads to the consolidation of server resources and improved TCO. Virtualization creates the illusion of many independent systems, each containing its own dedicated hardware and software—even though they may physically be sharing the resources of a single server. The virtual systems can be allocated and scheduled on the fly, which greatly increases hardware efficiency. Another benefit of virtualization is increased reliability—if a virtual system fails, the application can be restarted on another virtualsystem. Learn more about HP BladeSystems at www.hp.com/go/blades.
Effective Application Management
A PLM deployment can require hundreds or even thousands of application components—often scattered across an enterprise, hidden away on remote servers or distributed on departments’ desktops. Managing different revision levels, locations, and options of these applications can be a nightmare. In addition, engineers and designers often end up managing their own software, leading to reduced productivity—or worse, incorrect/out-of-date design data.
Effectively managing the critical applications of a PLM infrastructure can:
• Reduce time and money spent by engineers managing their own software
• More effectively utilize application licenses
• Lower expenditures on maintenance by reducing the number of licenses
• Deploy maintenance and improvement releases more quickly and widely
HP offers several core product suites that can help you implement a successful application lifecycle model, including:
HP Quality Center software provides automated software testing and quality assurance across a wide range of IT and application environments. It includes an integrated suite of role-based applications, a business dashboard, and an open, scalable, and extensible foundation. The Quality Center software helps optimize and automate key quality activities, including test management, functional testing and regression testing, and business process design validation.
HP Performance Center software provides application performance optimization, helping applications scale to support the right number of users, transaction volumes, and performance levels. HP Performance Center includes integrated applications and a business dashboard for key performance optimization activities, including load-testing, and J2EE diagnostics across heterogeneous computing environments.
HP Application Security Center software solutions enable your developers, QA teams, and security experts to successfully conduct Web application security testing and remediation. HP’s web application security solutions help find and fix security vulnerabilities throughout the application software development lifecycle.
Conclusion
To stay competitive, manufacturers are using HP PLM solutions to share intellectual assets in a collaborative and secure environment throughout an entire product lifecycle. HP PLM solutions help manufacturers integrate and collaborate with partners, suppliers and customers, resulting in faster delivery of quality products with innovative features and affordable prices.
