Solution Overview
The Cisco Collaborative PLM Solution with PTC Windchill: Accelerating Engineering Change Approval and Implementation
For today's manufacturers, increasing the rate of innovation has become a top priority. Such initiatives are driven by increasing customer demand for specialized products and new features, high growth in emerging markets that often require localized products, and the need to compete effectively with other global firms. According to a recent study by Forrester, "slow response to changing market conditions in today's hyper-competitive environment places companies at a distinct disadvantage relative to competitors." To accelerate innovation and launch successful new products, therefore, manufacturers are increasingly expanding their global R&D footprint, both internally and via outsourcing. This allows companies to accelerate time-to-market by adding new resources, capture local knowledge and talent, and minimize the costs of development. However, successfully implementing a global product development organization brings with it a number of new challenges that must be addressed to gain the full benefit of a global design chain and achieve innovation objectives. One of the most important of these challenges is ensuring global collaboration. Product development is inherently a team process, in which communications becomes a key part of the development workflow. However, with globally distributed teams working in different locations, in different time zones, with different languages and cultures, effective collaboration can become a significant obstacle. Even though communication devices are proliferating as employees become more mobile, trying to work together based on a series of non-integrated devices can result in costly delays and a potential lack of compliance with the formal change process, due to not being able to locate reviewers and approvers, or not being able to quickly and effectively collaborate to review and discuss changes. In innovation environments, where quick access to people and their knowledge is an imperative, manual interactions and communications may take hours, days, or even weeks to accomplish in today's larger organizations. In fact, a recent study by Forrester indicated that 75% of manufacturing organizations regularly see delays in product development projects due to inability to reach key decision makers to sign off on reviews and milestones. The solution can be found in technologies that support the entire Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) process by fully integrating communications into relevant applications. Offerings such as the Cisco Collaborative PLM Solution with PTC allow manufacturers to optimize communications throughout the workflow to achieve:

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