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Single Source of Truth for All Product-Related Information

Product innovation brings new challenges daily - environmental concerns, shorter product life spans, globally distributed sites and project teams. Today manufacturers must deliver high-quality products quickly and cost-effectively - while retaining and building a customer base, reducing service costs, and complying with international regulations.

After using sophisticated systems for design, enterprise resource planning, and customer relationship management, you may still need to get new products to market faster. Critical departments and functions may still operate separately. Suppliers and partners may have challenges getting through your firewalls.

You need an integrated product life-cycle management (PLM) software solution for collaborative engineering, product development, and management of projects, product structures, documents, and quality. That PLM software should provide an information backbone to help you access relevant information anywhere, anytime. You need the mySAP Product Lifecycle Management (mySAP PLM) application.

How can mySAP PLM help?

The mySAP PLM application provides integrated product life-cycle management software - a single source of all product-related information needed for collaborating with business partners and supporting processes including product innovation, design and engineering, quality and maintenance management, and control of environmental issues.

The mySAP PLM application can help your organization:

• Support strategic sourcing by interfacing with supplier relationship management software
• Provide role-specific, context-driven access for internal and external users to relevant information, tools, and services
• Improve decision-making through insight into projects; flexible reporting; and analytics for portfolio management, occupational health, product safety, and product quality
• Increase strategic and operative control by monitoring product and production changes affecting timelines, costs, and resources
• Provide an open-technology framework that delivers up-to-date data required by enterprise processes for demand planning, manufacturing, purchasing, and sales

Features and Functions

The mySAP Product Lifecycle Management (mySAP PLM) application offers all the functionality you need for integrated product and asset management. Features and functions include:

• Life-cycle data management - Provides an environment for managing specifications, bills of materials, routing and resource data, project structures, and related technical documentation throughout the product life cycle
• Program and project management - Provides advanced capabilities to plan, manage, and control the complete product development process
• Life-cycle collaboration - Supports collaborative engineering and project management, employing XML-based Web standards to communicate information such as project plans, documents, and product structures across virtual development teams
• Quality management - Provides integrated quality management for all industries throughout the entire product life cycle
• Enterprise asset management - Enables project managers, maintenance engineers, and others to manage physical assets and equipment, from first investment idea to retirement of the asset
• Environment, health, and safety - Provides a solution for environment, health, and safety issues by enhancing business processes to comply with government regulations

mySAP PLM is built on an open technology framework that takes advantage of industry standards such as HTML, XML, and Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) to ensure flexibility and interoperability. Its unified architecture can be tailored to the unique requirements of specific industries and companies. And communication via mobile and handheld devices means you get access to product information anytime, anywhere.

Business Benefits

The mySAP Product Lifecycle Management (mySAP PLM) application can help you quickly develop and deliver the products that drive your business. With mySAP PLM, you gain the following benefits:

• Reduced costs - mySAP PLM allows you to outsource tasks and focus on your company's core competencies while controlling the cost of relationship management. The solution also allows you to manage the cost of changes and evaluate the progress of projects across product lines.
• Better business results - With mySAP PLM, you can develop innovative products, explore new market opportunities, gain a higher market share, and increase customer satisfaction.
• Higher product quality - mySAP PLM helps you manage product quality and reduce waste throughout every phase of the product life cycle.
• Faster development - The solution reduces time to market and time to volume by integrating supply chain management and procurement closely.
• Improved manufacturing operations - mySAP PLM enables you to plan, measure, and track equipment availability, operation, safety, and maintenance.
• Higher productivity - mySAP PLM increases productivity through an easy-to-use, role-based enterprise portal that delivers all of the necessary content to workers.
• Better business decisions - mySAP PLM supports decision-making at all levels with powerful analytics covering areas such as portfolio management, occupational health, product safety, product quality, and maintenance management.
• Lower cost of ownership - mySAP PLM can be integrated with operational systems, such as computer-aided design, ERP, CRM, SRM, and SCM systems. Using a modular approach, you can implement gradually to meet evolving needs.