The Service Lifecycle Management (SLM) Approach: Strong Customer Relationships Result In Profit In The Service Industry overviews an approach to improve the profitability of services businesses by concurrently increasing service and lowering costs. Please enjoy the free Executive Summary below, or click the report title above to download the full PDF (free of charge, no…
- Executive Overview
- Improving Profitability in the Product Aftermarket
- Never Ignore a Call for Help
- Reduce Waste in the Call Center
- Avoid the Service Call (or at least Reduce the Urgency)
- Make the Right Calls First
- Close the Call the First Time
- Keep Technicians Productive, not Just Busy
- Turn the Service Call into an Opportunity
- Turn Service into Cash – Rapidly
- Stop Revenue Leaks
- Enhance the Customer Relationship
- Grow Revenue by Restarting the Service Lifecycle
- Turn to Proactive Management
- Driving SLM Changes into the Business
- Services Can’t Remain a Stepchild
- Make the Move to SLM – Change the Business Processes
- Enable the Change with Technology
- Get the Right Software
- Get the Right Partner
- Summary and Additional Information
- Summary
- About the Author
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[post_content] => Services for Manufacturing and Industry 
Tech-Clarity shares our research, experience and insights with manufacturers and other industry clients to educate them on the business value available from the intelligent use of enterprise software. Clients benefit by focusing on the value of solutions as opposed to the technology itself.
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Jim Brown is the President of Digital Transformation Research for independent research firm Tech-Clarity. He covers digital transformation across the product digital thread for manufacturing and industrial companies including PLM, PDM, product development, portfolio management, digital manufacturing, IoT, EAM, SLM, and other solutions.
Jim founded Tech-Clarity in 2002 and has over 30 years of industry experience in the manufacturing and software industries. He began his career in manufacturing engineering and software systems at GE before pursuing management consulting at Andersen Consulting (Accenture). He subsequently served as a strategy, marketing, and product development executive for software companies specializing in ERP, PLM, Supply Chain, and related manufacturing solutions. He has a BS in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Maryland, College Park.
Jim is actively researching the impact of digital transformation and technology convergence in manufacturing. His research analyzes the business value available from new initiatives and technologies including cloud computing, advanced analytics, AI, product innovation platforms, service transformation, augmented reality, the digital twin, and the digital thread.
Mr. Brown is an experienced author and speaker and enjoys engaging with people with a passion to improve business performance through digital enterprise strategies and supporting software technology. When he’s not focused on technology, he is a scuba instructor and plays in an old guy ice hockey league.
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Tech-Clarity is an independent research firm dedicated to making the business value of technology clear. We analyze how companies improve innovation, product development, design, engineering, manufacturing, and service performance through the use of digital transformation, best practices, software technology, industrial automation, and IT services.
Our mission is to help manufacturers learn how to improve business results through the use of PLM, portfolio management, CAD, simulation, MES / MOM, IoT, quality, service, analytics, and other solutions.
Meet Our Analysts
Disclosure
The views and opinions on this site are those of Tech-Clarity. The content is independent and objective, however, Tech-Clarity frequently receives compensation for reports and presentations in addition to consulting services. This compensation may influence the topics chosen for coverage but does not influence the views or opinions expressed. In addition, industry analysts including Tech-Clarity are frequently invited to attend conferences and briefings for which travel and reasonable living expenses are paid or reimbursed, in part or in full. Tech-Clarity does not accept compensation for posts or accept advertising on this site.
2011 Spike Summit. Amy Kenly of Kalypso presented his company with the Spike Award for Manufacturing for theirs Sparks Innovation Center. I think you will enjoy hearing about the opportunity that they saw and how they took advantage of it to develop some great new products.
Note: You can also listen to my interview with Spike Award winner for CPG Justin Winter and my interview with Spike Award Winner for Technology CDC Software.
The Sparks Innovation Center was created to gather product ideas from the large network of electrical contractors that Madison counts as customers. They realized that there were lots of potential product ideas in their customer community, and developed a crowdsourcing site to tap into that knowledge. I was impressed that Rob is as excited about helping the budding innovators in his customer base as he is developing new, successful products for his company (which they have done). This one is definitely worth a listen.
Rob's presentation (along with mine and a number of others) is still available for replay by registering and attending the virtual event via the Spike Summit Expo. The entire virtual event was a great experience, and between the speakers and the award winners we all heard some great examples of social computing can help improve product innovation and product development.
Let us know what you think of their innovation center and crowdsourcing initiative. Do you like it? Have a similar example to share? Please feel free to check out the blog for more on social computing and product development or read a report on social computing and innovation.
[post_title] => Podcast: Interview with 2011 Spike Award for Manufacturing Winner Madison Electric Products
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[post_content] => I had the chance to talk with ... Robert Roy of CDC Software following the 2011 Spike Summit. Amy Kenly of Kalypso presented 
CDC Software with the Spike Award for Technology based on their use of social strategies, processes and supporting technologies to improve innovation, product management, and product development. Rob provided some great insight on the processes that CDC Software uses to get product feature ideas from their customer base for release planning as well as how they use social computing tools to collaborate during their agile development process.
Note: You can also listen to my interview with Spike Award winner for CPG Justin Winter and my interview with Manufacturing Spike Award Winner Madison Electric Products.
The CDC presentation (along with mine and a number of others) is still available for replay by registering and attending the virtual event via the Spike Summit Expo. The entire virtual event was a great experience, and between the speakers and the award winners we all heard some great examples of social computing can help improve product innovation and product development.
Let us know what you think of their program. Do you like it? Have a similar example to share? Please feel free to check out the blog for more on social computing and product development or read a report on social computing and innovation.
[post_title] => Podcast: Interviewing 2011 Spike Award for Technology Winner CDC Software
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[post_content] => I had the chance to talk with ... Justin Winter of Diamond Candles following the 2011 Spike Summit. Amy Kenly of Kalypso 
presented Diamond Candles with the Spike Award for CPG (consumer packaged goods) based on their use of social strategies, processes and supporting technologies to improve innovation and product development. Justin provided some great insight on the program they used to get new product ideas from their customers.
Update: You can also listen to my interview with CDC Software for winning the Spike Award for Technology and my interview with Manufacturing Spike Award Winner Madison Electric Products.
I enjoyed hearing Justin's presentation at the Spike awards. His presentation (along with mine and a number of others) is still available for replay by registering and attending the virtual event via the Spike Summit Expo. It's a pretty cool experience. I was impressed with the way that Diamond Candles was able to share information with their customers, receive new product ideas from them, and then introduce the new products back to the customers. It was an interesting way to combine outbound marketing with crowdsourcing and gathering voice of the customer (VOC).
After talking to him, I even bought a candle. Wish me luck, I hope I get one of the $5,000 rings in mine! 
If you don't know what I am talking about, take a look at the Diamond Candles web site, their goal is to "make buying candles fun again."
Let us know what you think of their program. Do you like it? Have a similar example to share? Feel free to look around the blog, you will see a lot of information on the use of social computing to improve product innovation, product development, and engineering.
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[post_content] => Hear Jim Brown share his views on … efficiently and effectively meeting product environmental compliance demands using PLM software. This episode shares some interesting findings from Tech-Clarity's Understanding Product Development Tradeoffs: Designing Products for Sustainability, Cost, and Compliance.
This is the latest edition of Tech-Clarity TV, let us know what you think.
The topics included in this episode include:
- Continued regulatory pressure from multiple sources
- Top 10 environmental regulations faced by global manufacturer
- Common negative business impacts from difficulty designing products for compliance, cost, and sustainability (including time to market and missed shipments)
- Increasing frequency (trend data) of these damaging business impacts
- Framework for environmental product compliance that shows the steps and capabilities required to design for compliance
- Discussion of how PLM meets the Tech-Clarity Compliance Framework
Please vote, register for the Spike Summit. Also, please feel free to review more free research and white papers about PLM and other enterprise software for manufacturers from Tech-Clarity.
[post_title] => Tech-Clarity TV: Speak your Mind on Social Product Innovation - 2011 Spike People's Choice Award
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Tech-Clarity Issue in Focus: Optimizing Product Portfolios with Advanced PPM: Applying Value Optimization to Portfolio Decision Making explains how companies can gain greater levels of product portfolio profitability by using value optimization techniques to make portfolio decisions. Describes how the basic best practices of PPM can be extended by Advanced PPM concepts.
Please enjoy the summary below, or click the report or title above to download the full PDF (free of charge, no registration required).
Table of Contents
- Introducing the Issue
- The Basics of Product Portfolio Management
- The Next Level of Portfolio Decision Making
- Realizing Optimal Portfolio Value
- Conclusion
- Recommendations
- About the Author
Introducing the Issue
Companies are gaining significant business value by implementing Product Portfolio Management (PPM) best practices. According to Tech-Clarity’s Issue in Focus: The ROI of Product Portfolio Management, effective portfolio management can improve both top-line performance and bottom-line profitability. PPM does this by helping companies align their product portfolios with business objectives, effectively allocate resources to their projects, and better execute product development projects. Despite the value achieved from these standard PPM best practices, most companies fail to reach the highest possible levels of profitability because they lack a clear understanding of the potential financial value of the products in their portfolio. Part of the problem is that current best practices and technology lack an effective way to assess risk and uncertainty and can’t predict their impact on product value. These impacts can be in the range of millions of dollars. Decision-makers can’t afford to ignore this uncertainty, and can’t make optimal portfolio decisions without a realistic picture of the likely range of values returned from candidate projects in the portfolio. To get the most out of limited product development resources, companies need to be able to optimize the value of their product portfolios in addition to managing them through a product development processes with standard PPM best practices. Advanced PPM processes and technology enable this by providing a systematic approach to determine financial value. As Tech-Clarity’s Maximizing Product Development Value report concludes, “Creating high value portfolios is much simpler when the factors that create and destroy value for a project are clearly identified, quantified, and managed over the life of the project.” The result is extending “on-time” and “on-budget” to “on-profit.” With this understanding, companies can develop portfolios that provide an optimal financial return based on sound business analysis. [post_title] => Advanced PPM [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => open [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => advanced-ppm-wp [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2022-11-14 22:27:30 [post_modified_gmt] => 2022-11-15 03:27:30 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => http://tech-clarity.com/?p=2730 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) [15] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 2677 [post_author] => 2 [post_date] => 2011-09-19 14:30:06 [post_date_gmt] => 2011-09-19 18:30:06 [post_content] =>
Issue in Focus: Systems and Software Driven Innovation - Complexity and Opportunity in the Mechatronic Era describes the fundamental shift to increased software and electronics in traditionally mechanical products, sometimes known as "mechatronics." The report explains the need to manage the resulting design complexity and how to take advantage of the opportunities offered by systems and software based products.
Please enjoy the summary below, or click the report or title to download a PDF overview of the report (free of charge, no registration required). Please visit the PTC website to download the full report (free of charge, no registration required).
Table of Contents
- Introducing the Issue
- The Mechatronics Imperative
- The Complexity of Mechatronic Products
- Managing Change in Mechatronic Products
- Working Together – The Systems View
- The Opportunity to Innovate with Systems and Software
- Competing through Software Driven Innovation
- Enabling Software Driven Innovation
- PLM and Software Driven Innovation
- The Current Reality of PLM for Systems
- Conclusion
- Recommendations
- About the Author
Introducing the Issue
Modern products increasingly incorporate a combination of mechanical, electrical, and software components that allow innovative designers to take advantage of sensors and logic to solve problems and provide capabilities in new ways. This impacts the way companies innovate. As manufacturers develop their next generation of products, they are more likely to turn to electronics and software to make a “smarter” mousetrap as opposed to innovating solely in their mechanical design. Over the last decade, there has been a steady, fundamental shift towards increased software and electronics in traditionally mechanical products. Engineers have added more monitoring and more sophisticated controls, and have increased the amount of product functionality and value delivered through software as compared to mechanics. Examples of this shift range from automobiles, to mobile devices, to “simple” household appliances. This changing paradigm requires multiple design disciplines to work together to develop a working system. Systems that rely more heavily on the combination of mechanics, electronics, and software demand more integrated engineering and validation processes. The shift has driven higher levels of product development and engineering complexity starting in the early requirements phase of a product, continuing through design, making a significant impact on product testing and validation, and continuing as a configuration management issue throughout the product lifecycle. [post_title] => Systems and Software Driven Innovation [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => open [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => systems-sw-innovation [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2022-11-14 22:27:29 [post_modified_gmt] => 2022-11-15 03:27:29 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => http://tech-clarity.com/?p=2677 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) [16] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 2659 [post_author] => 2 [post_date] => 2011-09-17 12:54:47 [post_date_gmt] => 2011-09-17 16:54:47 [post_content] =>
Issue in Focus: Enabling Mobile PLM - IT Considerations for Leveraging Mobility to Extend PLM Value points out some very practical considerations that IT leaders must take into account when taking PLM mobile. The rise of tablets like the iPad offers an opportunity to further PLM value by reducing barriers to innovation, decision-making, program management, and contribution to product development by extending applications to employees while they are away from the office. It also offers the potential to share critical manufacturing or service data to those in challenging locations such as the plant or in the field. See what the CIO should know about implementing and supporting mobile applications for PLM.
Please enjoy the Executive Summary below, or click the report title above to download a PDF that overviews the report (free of charge, no registration required). For the full report, visit the Siemens PLM website (free of charge, registration required).
Table of Contents
- Introducing the Issue
- Leveraging Existing PLM Infrastructure
- Device Considerations
- Business Process Considerations
- Application Considerations
- People Considerations
- Management Considerations
- Conclusion
- Recommendations
- About the Author
- Analyzing and executing engineering changes
- Providing interactive, 3D manufacturing and service instructions
- Managing program status, issues, resources, and tasks
- Approving deliverables and signing off on stage-gate reviews
- Leveraging existing PLM infrastructure
- Device considerations
- Application considerations
- Process considerations
- People considerations
- Management considerations
Issue in Focus: Product and Program Management Goes Mobile - Compressing Project Cycle Time and Time to Market with Mobile PLM describes how mobile workers can decide, approve, and contribute to their projects and programs in real-time using PLM in a mobile scenario. PLM applications provide significant value to product and program managers, including control of NPD processes and projects, better access to information, and improved decision making. But there are significant barriers that keep mobile employees from contributing to projects with PLM when they travel. Learn how mobile PLM applications can help.
Please enjoy the Executive Summary below, or click the report title above to download a PDF that overviews the report (free of charge, no registration required). For the full report, visit the Siemens PLM website (free of charge, registration required).
Table of Contents
- Introducing the Issue
- The Value of Mobility to Product and Program Management
- Compressing Project Cycle Time with Mobile PLM
- A Mobile Product and Program Management Scenario
- Conclusion
- Recommendations
- About the Author
Introducing the Issue
Manufacturers use Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) solutions to effectively control product, project, and programs across their enterprises and supply chains. These applications provide significant value to product and program managers, including control of NPD processes and projects, better access to information, and improved decision making. PLM helps companies manage the complexity of today’s projects and programs, including coordinating cross-functional teams that may be dispersed across different sites, time zones, and even company boundaries. This results in better planning and execution of projects, faster time to market, and reduced project risk. Unfortunately, there are significant barriers that keep mobile employees from contributing to projects with PLM when they travel. The challenges include inability to easily access information and being disconnected from processes. These barriers result in lag times in project execution and decision making that slow down project and program delivery. They may also contribute to people moving forward based on assumptions that will result in project rework or quality problems. The issue is that traditional devices that run PLM are simply not designed for mobility. Employees on the road or away from their desk may use smartphones to keep in touch via e-mail, but these devices lack the size and screen to be useful for most PLM applications. Laptops are helpful, but require users to be settled with a flat surface and their hands free. They are really designed for portability as opposed to mobility. Beyond devices, feature-rich project and program management software built for a desktop is not designed with mobile users in mind. Simply making desktop or web applications available on a mobile web browser can prove to be frustrating and cumbersome, resulting in people waiting for a more convenient time to contribute or handling issues outside of the system. Product and program managers can’t afford delays. They need mobile workers to decide, approve, and contribute to their projects and programs in real-time. Manufacturers can leverage the rise of tablets like the iPad to allow project leaders and team members alike to make decisions and keep their projects moving forward, regardless of their physical location and access to a PC. [post_title] => Product and Program Management Goes Mobile [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => open [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => pd-mobile [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2022-11-14 22:27:27 [post_modified_gmt] => 2022-11-15 03:27:27 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => http://tech-clarity.com/?p=2649 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) [18] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 2640 [post_author] => 2 [post_date] => 2011-09-17 12:19:37 [post_date_gmt] => 2011-09-17 16:19:37 [post_content] =>
Issue in Focus: PLM Goes Mobile - Reducing Barriers to Engineering Decision-Making and Innovation explains how mobile devices like the iPad have set the stage to extend the ways engineers and others in the product lifecycle contribute, decide, act, and innovate with PLM. There are significant barriers to taking the value of PLM into the plant or into the service center – namely the available devices that run PLM. This means that much of the value of PLM gets left behind when an engineer leaves their workstation to get a firsthand view of production or see their products in the field. Find out how mobile applications and device in PLM can help.
Please enjoy the Executive Summary below, or click the report title above to download a PDF that overviews the report (free of charge, no registration required). For the full report, visit the Siemens PLM website (free of charge, registration required).
Table of Contents
- Introducing the Issue
- The Value of Mobility to Engineering
- Business Value of Mobile PLM Decision Making
- A Mobile Engineering Scenario
- Conclusion
- Recommendations
- About the Author
Introducing the Issue
Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) provides significant value to engineers and product developers, including control of product data, process management, and better access to information. PLM helps companies manage the increased complexity of today’s products and product development environments. As Tech-Clarity Insight: The Five Dimensions of Product Complexity states, “PLM solutions help manage the five dimensions of product complexity on an enterprise scale, resulting in greater efficiency and better products.” The result is increased innovation, higher revenue, decreased cost, and faster time to market. Today, however, there are significant barriers to taking the value of PLM into the plant or into the service center – namely the available devices that run PLM. This means that much of the value of PLM gets left behind when an engineer leaves their workstation to get a firsthand view of production or see their products in the field. This is also the case when a worker in the plant needs information and doesn’t have easy access to a terminal. There are further barriers for employees when they travel, according to Tech Clarity Issue in Focus: Product and Program Management Goes Mobile, resulting in lag times in decision making and project execution. The issue is the devices typically required to access PLM information and processes. Traditional choices for PLM have been laptops or workstations with bulky form factors, short battery life, and long boot times. Other choices include smartphones or netbooks, each with their own challenges. Beyond devices, software applications built for a personal computer or engineering workstation are simply not suited for the realities of mobile environments. Some things just don’t work on a smaller device but aren’t worth the overhead of booting up a laptop or struggling with a smartphone in a mobile environment. As a consequence, a lot of decision-making and innovation goes uncaptured or gets put on hold when an engineer is mobile. Manufacturers need to reduce the threshold to use PLM to extend the benefits beyond the desk. Otherwise, they might lose a brainstorm, or a technician might pass on an impulse to verify a detail that could have a large impact on product performance and profitability. Mobile devices like the iPad have set the stage to extend the opportunity for engineers and others in the product lifecycle to contribute, decide, act, and innovate with PLM. [post_title] => PLM Goes Mobile [post_excerpt] => [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => open [ping_status] => open [post_password] => [post_name] => plm-goes-mobile [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2022-11-14 22:27:27 [post_modified_gmt] => 2022-11-15 03:27:27 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => http://tech-clarity.com/?p=2640 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) [19] => WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 2595 [post_author] => 2 [post_date] => 2011-09-13 10:15:04 [post_date_gmt] => 2011-09-13 14:15:04 [post_content] =>
Tech-Clarity Perspective: Understanding Product Development Trade-offs - Designing Products for Compliance, Cost, and Sustainability presents results from a survey on how companies design their products to meet environmental regulatory compliance, product sustainability, and product cost targets. Shares survey data and perspectives from two leading manufacturers on how they collect data and manage the trade-offs between these important design criteria.
Please enjoy the Executive Summary below, or click the report title above to download the full PDF (free of charge, no registration required).
Feel free to watch the Related Webcast sponsored by PTC (free of charge, registration required).
Table of Contents
- Executive Overview
- The Product Development Balancing Act
- Barriers and Challenges
- Design for Environmental Compliance
- Design for Sustainability
- Design for Cost
- Enabling Optimal Design Decisions
- Enabling Efficient and Effective Data Collection
- Conclusion
- Recommendations
- About the Research
- About the Author
Executive Overview
Over the last five to ten years, product environmental compliance has become increasingly critical to protecting top line revenue. Now, manufacturers also face emerging sustainability requirements stemming from corporate “green” initiatives, market pressure, scrutiny from NGOs like Greenpeace, emerging customer mandates, and even financial pressure from investors and sources like the Dow Jones Sustainability Index. To remain profitable, companies have to address compliance and sustainability while minimizing the impact on product cost. “We can’t sell a product if it’s not compliant so cost doesn’t enter into the equation for regulatory compliance. Since we are in a business that needs to remain viable, we must thoroughly investigate and assess our voluntary green initiatives with regards to impact to cost in other areas,” explains Kim Braun, an Environmental Compliance Engineer for Microsoft. Engineers and product developers have to address all of these criteria – compliance, cost, and sustainability – early in the product lifecycle when changes can still be made. Unfortunately, these are not independent criteria. Changes to one aspect can have a dramatic impact on the others. Similar to a juggler spinning plates, product developers have to focus on all aspects at once or they may all come crashing down. To address this, leading companies are building compliance, cost, and sustainability analysis into their design processes. “We try hard to embed it in design excellence and not make it a separate process,” explains the leader of corporate environmental compliance for a leading consumer products company. To understand the challenges manufacturers face in designing products for environmental compliance, sustainability, and cost, Tech-Clarity surveyed over one hundred companies and interviewed two leading, global manufacturers. The research identified two major themes that hinder companies from optimizing designs:- Collecting the right data to make informed decisions
- Making the information readily available to product developers in time to make decisions
The Service Lifecycle Management (SLM) Approach: Strong Customer Relationships Result In Profit In The Service Industry overviews an approach to improve the profitability of services businesses by concurrently increasing service and lowering costs. Please enjoy the free Executive Summary below, or click the report title above to download the full PDF (free of charge, no registration required).
Table of Contents
- Executive Overview
- Improving Profitability in the Product Aftermarket
- Never Ignore a Call for Help
- Reduce Waste in the Call Center
- Avoid the Service Call (or at least Reduce the Urgency)
- Make the Right Calls First
- Close the Call the First Time
- Keep Technicians Productive, not Just Busy
- Turn the Service Call into an Opportunity
- Turn Service into Cash – Rapidly
- Stop Revenue Leaks
- Enhance the Customer Relationship
- Grow Revenue by Restarting the Service Lifecycle
- Turn to Proactive Management
- Driving SLM Changes into the Business
- Services Can’t Remain a Stepchild
- Make the Move to SLM – Change the Business Processes
- Enable the Change with Technology
- Get the Right Software
- Get the Right Partner
- Summary and Additional Information
- Summary
- About the Author
All Results for "All"
Webcasts: Learn what Social Business Collaboration and Advanced Product Portfolio Management Have in Common
A quick peek into some research on Social Business Collaboration and Advanced PPM. What do these two very interesting topics have in common? Live webcasts featuring Jim Brown of Tech-Clarity next week, Thursday and Friday February 16-17. OK, I admit it was a cheap trick, but I hope it convinces you to learn about one…
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Jim Brown
Jim Brown is the President of Digital Transformation Research for independent research firm Tech-Clarity. He covers digital transformation across the product digital thread for manufacturing and industrial companies including PLM, PDM, product development, portfolio management, digital manufacturing, IoT, EAM, SLM, and other solutions. Jim founded Tech-Clarity in 2002 and has over 30 years of industry…
About
Tech-Clarity is an independent research firm dedicated to making the business value of technology clear. We analyze how companies improve innovation, product development, design, engineering, manufacturing, and service performance through the use of digital transformation, best practices, software technology, industrial automation, and IT services. Our mission is to help manufacturers learn how to improve business…
Podcast: Interview with 2011 Spike Award for Manufacturing Winner Madison Electric Products
I had the chance to talk with … Rob Fisher of Madison Electric Products following the 2011 Spike Summit. Amy Kenly of Kalypso presented his company with the Spike Award for Manufacturing for theirs Sparks Innovation Center. I think you will enjoy hearing about the opportunity that they saw and how they took advantage of…
Podcast: Interviewing 2011 Spike Award for Technology Winner CDC Software
I had the chance to talk with … Robert Roy of CDC Software following the 2011 Spike Summit. Amy Kenly of Kalypso presented CDC Software with the Spike Award for Technology based on their use of social strategies, processes and supporting technologies to improve innovation, product management, and product development. Rob provided some great insight…
Podcast: Interview with 2011 Spike Award Winner Diamond Candles
I had the chance to talk with … Justin Winter of Diamond Candles following the 2011 Spike Summit. Amy Kenly of Kalypso presented Diamond Candles with the Spike Award for CPG (consumer packaged goods) based on their use of social strategies, processes and supporting technologies to improve innovation and product development. Justin provided some great…
Tech-Clarity TV: Environmental Compliance and the Product Lifecycle
Hear Jim Brown share his views on … efficiently and effectively meeting product environmental compliance demands using PLM software. This episode shares some interesting findings from Tech-Clarity’s Understanding Product Development Tradeoffs: Designing Products for Sustainability, Cost, and Compliance. This is the latest edition of Tech-Clarity TV, let us know what you think. The topics included…
Tech-Clarity TV: Speak your Mind on Social Product Innovation – 2011 Spike People’s Choice Award
Hear Jim Brown invite manufacturers to vote in the 2011 Spike Awards. The Spike Awards, run by leading innovation consulting firm Kalypso, rewards companies for using social computing processes and technology to improve product innovation, product development, and product management. Jim Brown is acting as a judge for the awards for the second year in…
Advanced PPM
Tech-Clarity Issue in Focus: Optimizing Product Portfolios with Advanced PPM: Applying Value Optimization to Portfolio Decision Making explains how companies can gain greater levels of product portfolio profitability by using value optimization techniques to make portfolio decisions. Describes how the basic best practices of PPM can be extended by Advanced PPM concepts. Please enjoy the…
Systems and Software Driven Innovation
Issue in Focus: Systems and Software Driven Innovation – Complexity and Opportunity in the Mechatronic Era describes the fundamental shift to increased software and electronics in traditionally mechanical products, sometimes known as “mechatronics.” The report explains the need to manage the resulting design complexity and how to take advantage of the opportunities offered by systems…
Enabling Mobile PLM
Issue in Focus: Enabling Mobile PLM – IT Considerations for Leveraging Mobility to Extend PLM Value points out some very practical considerations that IT leaders must take into account when taking PLM mobile. The rise of tablets like the iPad offers an opportunity to further PLM value by reducing barriers to innovation, decision-making, program management,…
Product and Program Management Goes Mobile
Issue in Focus: Product and Program Management Goes Mobile – Compressing Project Cycle Time and Time to Market with Mobile PLM describes how mobile workers can decide, approve, and contribute to their projects and programs in real-time using PLM in a mobile scenario. PLM applications provide significant value to product and program managers, including control…
PLM Goes Mobile
Issue in Focus: PLM Goes Mobile – Reducing Barriers to Engineering Decision-Making and Innovation explains how mobile devices like the iPad have set the stage to extend the ways engineers and others in the product lifecycle contribute, decide, act, and innovate with PLM. There are significant barriers to taking the value of PLM into the…
Making Product Development Tradeoffs
Tech-Clarity Perspective: Understanding Product Development Trade-offs – Designing Products for Compliance, Cost, and Sustainability presents results from a survey on how companies design their products to meet environmental regulatory compliance, product sustainability, and product cost targets. Shares survey data and perspectives from two leading manufacturers on how they collect data and manage the trade-offs between…
