CIMdata review on SAP's PLM cPDm program (PDF) - Large ...

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Figure 4-mySAP Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) Positioning
process within a company's e-business platform can
allow an organization to leverage their investment in
the mySAP.com solution. In addition, this approach
supports many corporate information technology (IT)
desires to manage all their business and engineering
operations with a single, comprehensive solution for
planning, developing, controlling, monitoring, and
delivering products.
Since its launch in 1996, SAP has constantly improved
its cPDm solution by addressing a number of initial
product weaknesses. By incorporating role-based
enterprise portals to provide people with easy-to-use,
centralized access to all relevant content to get the job
done via the Internet or mobile devices, adding a
breath of cPDm enabling functionality, addressing the
need for distributed data management and bringing
some innovative ideas that address the globalization
aspects of data management, SAP has crafted the
mySAP PLM solution into a comprehensive and very
effective solution in the cPDm market.
In addition to the core cPDm functionality as defined
by <strong>CIMdata</strong>, SAP has also included functions to support
quality management, asset lifecycle management, and
environment health and services in their mySAP PLM
portfolio. For manufacturing companies, it becomes
increasingly essential to also provide maintenance services
around their products. Quality management,
including the feedback loop from manufacturing into
development, is important for companies to get products
right the first time. For process industries, especially in
chemicals or pharmaceuticals, the compliance to
governmental regulations and product safety issues
becomes increasingly important. These capabilities are
described within the section entitled "Applications."
SAP’s mySAP PLM
A dynamic data model is still an area
where development work is required.
However, SAP has not been standing
still in this area. Over the last few
years, SAP has introduced new data
modeling capabilities in its newer
solutions, such as those that support
product variant configuration via
iPPE. mySAP PLM and other solutions
have adopted the underlying
dynamic data model. It is our understanding
that SAP plans to continue
its introduction of a more flexible
data model into other mySAP.com
solutions. As experience is gained
from their users, we expect to see
refinements to their new Web-based enterprise portal
work environment and a trend toward removing some
of the complexities that exist in the use of the product.
A good example is the fully Web-centric cFolders
application that supports design collaboration processes
across heterogeneous environments.
mySAP PLM is positioned at the same level as the
mySAP.com solutions that support CRM and SCM.
mySAP PLM is comprised of a number of cPDm enabling
capabilities found in most enterprise proven
cPDm solutions. These applications currently include:
• Document Management
• Product Structure Management
• Variant Configuration
• Integrated Product and Process Engineering
• Order Change Management
• Change Management
• Workflow
• Project Management
• Classification System
• Engineering Workbench
• Distribution
• CAD Integration
• Asset Lifecycle Management
• Quality Management
• Environment Health & Safety
SAP has recently added a series of new features and
functional support that are detailed in this paper.
Among them, and of special interest, are:
• Collaboration Folders (cFolders)
• Product Designer for requirements management
• Recipe management
• Lifecycle analytics
• Enterprise portals for PLM
<strong>CIMdata</strong> Program Assessment