Product knowledge focus grows
Not even a half year after introducing its first "soft" product data management tool, Workgroup Technology Corporation is bringing more tools to the companies looking to leverage knowledge to enhance product development.
WTC has launched its product knowledge management or PKM initiative behind two new solutions: WTC PortfolioCenter and WTC DecisionCenter, which will be available later this summer.
WTC, a stalwart in the traditional PDM space, has seen PDM answer some of its customers' needs but it realizes that there is more to the process of getting products to market efficiently.
It takes knowledge management and knowledge sharing to get products to market quickly and efficiently, and WTC's goal as a PKM provider is to "give an organization the ability to fully leverage all of a corporation's assets and optimize them most effective," according to Sarah Bingman Schott, WTC's VP of marketing.
In the WTC model, those assets are people and not just the product data. The solution is linking those people to the process.
"The process must be one that pulls in all the parties," said Bingman-Schott. There need to be milestones and checkpoints, ways to measure success, to see that things are on-time and be able to make reassessments, she said.
OpCenter, which began shipping earlier this year, serves as a virtual "team workspace" linking different workgroups involved in product development--marketing, engineering, manufacturing and supply chain for example.
PortfolioCenter will link various systems information to decision support tools. It is designed to form project parameters for portfolio ranking such as risk assessment, financial return and external market analysis. PortfolioCenter also will provide a venue for "what if analysis" on that information.
DecisionCenter will serve as a "graphical portal into product development performance," according to Schott.
The premise behind this tool is providing access from enterprise systems including WTC's OpCenter and ProductCenter, as well as ERPs, HR systems and datawarehouses, and tailoring that information to the visual needs of an executive.
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