Oracle’s cloud-based PLM brings significant agility and resilience to product operations
A US-based global patient and long-term medical care solutions leader, employs 3400+ associates across more than 100 countries in the world. Before our engagement, the client required significant manual effort to drive engineering, supply chain, and product collaboration processes. This was due to a legacy, on-premise Oracle Agile PLM deployment that was driving these day-to-day operations under the hood. The application was configured with complex customizations and the redundant architecture cost significant man-hours, time, and money to maintain. Moreover, less than 30% of the PLM processes were run within the deployment, which was originally implemented to perform collaborative model change iterations and manage engineering data and other documents. This meant that enterprise product records were scattered across multiple systems.
In search of agility and operational resilience powered by nimble and robust IT solutions, the organization undertook a digital transformation initiative. As a part of this initiative, it engaged Birlasoft to help them achieve their business outcomes by helping them implement and adopt a cloud-based PLM solution. We helped the client implement Oracle’s PLM Cloud solution which is powered by a cutting-edge technology stack and provides a highly secure and FDA-compliant SaaS environment that requires minimal configuration and customization efforts. After the implementation, the client could handle complex processes involving multiple iterations and stakeholders with simple out of the box configurations and rules, whereas integrated Business Intelligence (BI) analytics and dashboard reports keep the teams up to date on productivity levels and state of business operations in real-time.
The Challenge
Rising application complexity due to customizations
Over time, the client’s legacy PLM deployment had acquired an increasing number of customizations, and any updates to the Change Control Framework (CCF) further added to the complexity. As these customizations were supported by multiple vendors, their source code was not available in-house. Moreover, many of these customizations within the platform grew dependencies which made the application intolerant to failures – such failures contributed to prolonged business disruptions. At the same time, reliance on external IT vendors to support the customizations bled revenues.
Infrastructure bottlenecks cause business disruptions
The legacy PLM solution from Oracle leveraged an outdated technology stack, which made the deployment vulnerable to evolving digital security threats. To manage this risk, security patches were applied, or new certificates added, but this required additional tools and utilities that impacted other integrations while also causing data transfer failures. Ultimately, infrastructure bottlenecked business operations and consumed significant resources to maintain. What was needed, instead, was a PLM solution that could simplify and improve core processes.
Legacy PLM necessitates disparate systems for data management
Large-scale medical care products manufacturers transact with significant volumes of data on a day-to-day basis. In the case of our client, the legacy PLM solution could not handle items, bill of materials (BOM) and customer and supplier management data. To this effect, other legacy systems like AMAPS and Info center were used to manage these data entities. As a result, business users had to refer to disparate software systems to execute processes involving enterprise product data; this ultimately impeded the transformation of business use cases and global supply chain processes.
The Solution
Modernizing core business processes using Oracle PLM SaaS Cloud and Oracle Integration Cloud platform
To help the client move beyond these challenges and modernize their business core, we migrated their existing change control framework (CCF) and document management processes to Oracle PLM SaaS Cloud while ensuring zero business disruptions and complete data integrity. The cloud PLM solution enforces a single source of truth within engineering and supply chain processes, thereby simplifying data management, and introducing new efficiencies to global processes.
Moreover, we integrated the cloud PLM with our client’s Identity Provider to ease identity management, whereas integrations with FDA GUDID strengthened the PLM platform while ensuring secure and rapid data transfer. Finally, replacing the complex customizations in the legacy deployment with simple business rules, OOTB configurations, and workflow control actions helped the organization achieve faster supply chain execution by extending cloud PLM capabilities.
Implementing simplified and highly secured PLM SaaS-based platform
Oracle’s SaaS PLM platform ensures that businesses focus on executing business processes with ease and efficiency instead of maintaining the underlying infrastructure. By implementing the PLM cloud solution, we ensured that our client’s business core runs of high-availability instances and a digitally secured infrastructure. Instead of manually updating the platform, our client can now receive automatic updates and security patches from Oracle, thereby requiring minimal IT efforts to maintain the PLM. Near-zero maintenance platform now enables the business to implement product-centric strategic roadmaps.
The Impact
By implementing Oracle PLM Cloud, we enabled our client to onload their business core onto the cloud, thereby helping them realize the agility, scalability and security of an FDA-compliant platform that aligns with the enterprise’ roadmap and their long-term business objectives.
Moreover, our client can now execute core business processes without relying on the support of multiple external IT vendors. Leveraging the OIC platform and implementing a seamless integration with the FDA GUDID database, we ensured that our client’s teams no longer had to transfer product information and metadata to regulation authorities via external applications.
In addition, here are some of the key benefits of our client’s migration to Oracle PLM Cloud:
- Intuitive UI unifies and simplifies processes and enables effective management of Change Control (CCF) data.
- The cloud PLM provides greater flexibility to manage approval controls and workflow-based activity tasks.
- Enable the customer to plug-in Innovation throughout the product and process framework.
- Oracle’s SaaS-based platform brings new industry standards to our client’s deployment on a quarterly basis, thereby keeping technical debt at a minimum.
- OOTB analytics and BI extension capabilities empower quick and enhanced decision-making.
- Simple-to-use interface and closed-loop quality control brings new efficiencies to operations.
Following the migration to the cloud PLM, our client is now equipped with a resilient and agile business core that enables the organization to innovate rapidly, collaborate efficiently, and ensure a single source of truth for product data while mitigating security and compliance risks.
