The client, a leading Life Science brand leader in its domain and having a global presence, has a turnover of approximately USD 40 billion. It was looking for ways to curb its purported launch times for new products that would enable them to achieve a competitive advantage and widen its base. But they had an Agile PLM solution that was not as easily scalable as they would have liked, and they were facing severe difficulties in managing efficiency and timelines. The inculcation of the Oracle PLM and PDH cloud solution helped them achieve the timeline targets.
The Challenge
Delay in the onboarding of new products
The client had planned to launch approximately 50,000 SKUs within a few weeks. It was crucial to their success as their success depends heavily on how they develop and market new products. But given their legacy PLM system, the approximate time needed for the same would stretch to months instead of weeks. As a result, it would lend their competition an unwanted advantage, and the brand would unwantedly lose market share.
Missing enterprise-wide data model and platform to harness data
The adoption of Industry 4.0 saw most industries looking to utilize PLM data with greater efficiency and for a myriad of purposes. As with this client of ours, it has acquired several companies since 2011, and there was a need for robust cloud-based software that could increase the number of users part of the system. In addition, there was a push to improve the way data was generated throughout their supply chain, and the data model was managed. But they did not have an enterprise-wide solution that could encompass all the data available and provide them with the requisite output.
Inability to curb the rising cost of data management
Data sharing among PLM entities is a great way to streamline and improve product lifecycle management, but there is always a risk of increased cost if the data is incorrectly captured, analyzed, or disseminated. For example, the client operated through multiple divisions and was trying to improve operational productivity, customer experience and ultimately drive growth/revenue. For this, they would require expedited commercial enablement only possible if their PLM processes across divisions and business units were in alignment. Unfortunately, they experienced a spike in costs when they tried doing it, and several management issues plagued the process.
Inefficiency in end-to-end data workflow management
Given the plethora of processes across the PLM chain and the presence of several divisions and business units, The Life Science leader struggled to improve their workflows, data models, and product class structure. In addition, they had a hard time finalizing the approval metrics for tracking the same.
The Solution
Aligning PLM processes with operations through our in-house Birlasoft Oracle PLM and PDH cloud solution.
Since the onset, we have developed the Birlasoft Oracle PLM and PDH cloud solution with an intention to provide better transparency and control throughout the lifecycle of the product. As a result, it helped streamline, modernize, expand, and scale its plethora of product launches and their maintenance by better managing the multitude of data, thereby driving revenue growth and reduction in operating costs. We also helped establish a streamlined product governance outlook encompassing over 200 business rules stretching across the seven departments to facilitate improved product introduction and change management.
Here are the objectives that we wanted to excel at via this venture –
- Improved product launch time while reducing rejections and stuck orders throughout the value chain
- Expanding global launch capacity and allowing the client to widen its base across regions and products offered in existing markets
- Optimize user experience by introducing automation
- Attain a higher performance level throughout by removing bottlenecks and organizational silos
- Build a genuinely scalable global product platform with Oracle PLM and PDH cloud
- Optimizing Q2C projects by efficient M&A integrations, improved planning and customer notification process, and curbing change orders
- Streamline business processes by using industry-standard best practices throughout the organization
The Impact
Developing a dynamic solution could be a solution for all their operational silos. The integration of the Oracle PLM and PDH cloud solution had the following impacts:
Faster product development
Removing departmental silos could bring about real-time collaboration on product development and data and commercialization processes. In addition, we also established a central Oracle PLM and PDH cloud repository that could manage and help track items and associated attributes.
A truly global, secure solution
The solution we offered was truly global and covered over 100 countries. In addition, we successfully migrated over 7.4 million items from the plethora of sites of their existing legacy system to the PLM cloud. All of it was secured via role-based data security that has over 300 user groups for improved and controlled accessibility.
Improved reporting
Our Oracle PLM and PDH cloud solution can generate over 40 reports that are directly accessible via the product dashboard. It helped pinpoint and eliminate bottlenecks impacting each process with ease.
Improved launch time
The association’s ultimate goal was to bring down the launch time of 50,000 SKUs from a few months to a few weeks. Our solution enabled over 800 users to go live simultaneously, and we plan to extend the limit to over 5,000 users. It allowed the brand to achieve a launching publication performance of over 2 million records in less than a day. It brought down the tentative launch timeline from several months to several weeks.
