Issue in Focus: Product Portfolio Management in a PLM Strategy – Closing the Loop on Product Planning explores how engineering-centric businesses can take a more closed-loop approach between Product Portfolio Management (PPM) and Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) to extend the value of PPM. Discusses the benefits of closing the loop between theoretical plans and actual progress and results.
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Table of Contents
- Introducing the Issue
- First Things First – Get the Portfolio Right
- Make it Feasible – Resource Planning
- Make it Happen – Project Execution
- Make it worth the Investment – Assess and Monitor Value
- Close the Loop between Planning and Reality
- Conclusion
- Recommendations
- About the Author
Introducing the Issue
As reported in 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. For this reason, manufacturers are increasingly adopting Product Portfolio Management (PPM) solutions to help improve portfolio management and new product development (NPD) execution. A well developed PPM program consists of four primary processes:
- Select and Maximize Product Portfolio
- Resource and Enable Pipeline
- Execute and Manage Project
- Determine and Monitor Product Value
PPM offers value to any business that needs to align portfolios with business strategy and maximize the investment of limited resources to accomplish their goals. For a manufacturing business, that means developing profitable products. But there are differences even within the manufacturing industries. Most of what has been written is about PPM for consumer goods, but PPM takes on different meaning for other industries. For example, Sandia National Labs is a multi-program engineering and science laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a Lockheed Martin Company. “For Sandia Labs, we need an integrated planning process,” explains Sharon Trauth, a Principal Member of Technical Staff for Sandia National Labs. “We need the ability to see what needs to be done, understand how that is funded, and then we need to take action.”
In some industries, such as consumer packaged goods, the connection between the commercial and technical aspects of product development project can be very separate. For other manufacturing industries and companies like Sandia, the tie between the project and the underlying engineering efforts are tightly linked. This paper explores how engineering-centric businesses can take a more closed-loop approach between Product Portfolio Management (PPM) and Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) to extend their benefits by closing the loop between theoretical plans and actual progress and results.