How do you accelerate the co-development of hardware and software for your products?
Today’s products increasingly rely on software for innovation. Yet, development teams follow different processes and use separate tools to support the engineering and development of hardware and software. This creates silos within the development team that causes breakdowns in communication and hurts efficiency. Then, the inevitable errors and bottlenecks drive up costs.
By integrating Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) for hardware and Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) for software, engineering teams can overcome development silos. This will enable more efficient processes that accelerate the development of higher-quality products. This buyer’s guide reveals buying criteria to select the right solutions for integrating PLM and ALM.
Please enjoy the summary* below. For the full research, please visit our sponsor PTC (registration required).
Table of Contents
- Executive Summary
- Why Integrate?
- The Value of a Digital Thread
- How Will Integrating ALM and PLM Help?
- 1. Requirements Management
- 2. Change Management
- 3. Configuration / Variant Management
- 4. Test Management
- 5. Regulatory Compliance
- Adoption and Implementation
- Vendor Considerations
- Specific Company Needs
- Conclusions and Next Steps
- Acknowledgments
Executive Summary
ALM and PLM
As fierce market competition drives companies to get to market faster with innovative products, companies need to empower their development teams to be as efficient as possible. Products continue to become increasingly complex, and software plays an ever-growing role in innovation. Silos between development teams increase the risks of problems which drive up costs and cause delays. One way to overcome these silos is to integrate ALM and PLM.
Introducing This Guide
By integrating ALM and PLM, companies will enable improved collaboration, better traceability with a digital thread, and earlier visibility into potential problems. This will result in a more efficient development process while reducing the risk of finding errors late in the process, helping to avoid delays and increased costs. This buyer’s guide will help manufacturers select the right software for an integrated ALM and PLM solution.
How to Use This Guide
This guide comprises four major sections covering software tool functionality, service requirements, vendor attributes, and special company considerations. Each section includes a checklist of key requirements to support your selection process.
This guide does not focus on buyer criteria for PLM or ALM solutions, but rather criteria to support key processes that should span both systems as an integrated solution. It is not an all-encompassing requirements list, but provides a high-level overview of criteria considerations.
Why Integrate
Growing Importance of Software
Software is increasingly becoming a major source of innovation, increasing its importance in product development. Yet, despite its criticality, many companies develop it separately from the hardware. As a result, companies experience many challenges that make the jobs of engineers much harder.
Business Cost
While engineers have done their best to develop processes to deal with the challenges associated with siloed development teams, the increasing complexity and growing requirements make it easy to overlook errors. These errors come at a business cost. Companies can avoid this cost by adapting their development processes to support a more integrated multi-disciplinary approach.
The Value of a Digital Thread
Overcome Silos
Hardware and software follow different development methods. The rigor of hardware development has led many companies to adopt PLM to help them manage it. Meanwhile, software is developed at a much faster pace, often following the Agile Methodology. ALM solutions have been tailored to support the rapid software development process.
With so much innovation coming from software, software needs to iterate quickly and should not be slowed down by hardware’s slower pace. However, keeping the systems separate prevents processes from being managed across disciplines, resulting in companies missing out on opportunities to improve efficiency.
Disconnected systems make it hard for engineers to find what they need. They are also unsure if they can trust data as they don’t have visibility into changes that impact them. Inefficiency results in engineers wasting 33% of their time on non-value-added work. This non-value-added work includes things like searching for information and recreating work. They often don’t even know if they are working with the latest information.
Integrate ALM and PLM
One way to overcome this is to integrate ALM and PLM. This integration will create a digital thread across the development process, resulting in multiple business benefits (see graphic).
Conclusions and Next Steps
Accelerate Development
With fierce global competition, companies must accelerate their development processes without adding cost or hurting quality. Engineering teams need to be as efficient as possible, yet wasted effort often hinders the development of today’s complex products. Inherent silos across engineering disciplines are often a major contributor to this wasted effort. As software continues to be a significant innovation driver, companies that empower their development teams by overcoming these silos will enjoy a competitive advantage. Integrating ALM and PLM can be a way to achieve this. By bringing these solutions together, you will create a digital thread across the hardware and software, enabling efficiencies that make it harder for competitors to compete against.
Select the Right Solutions for Your Company
Integrating ALM and PLM allows you to create a digital thread across hardware and software development. With traceability to support the management of requirements, changes, configurations, testing, and regulatory compliance, engineers will have greater confidence in their data, resulting in fewer errors, lower costs, and less wasted time. To select the right solutions to integrate ALM and PLM, consider not just software capabilities, but also factors like implementation, adoption, vendor considerations, and your specific company needs.
*This summary is an abbreviated version of the ebook and does not contain the full content. For the full report, please visit our sponsor PTC.
If you have difficulty obtaining a copy of the research, please contact us.