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by Lauren Gibbons Paul, Contributing Editor Posted on Friday, November 03, 2006 3:10:08 PM   | Abstract: | Hitachi GST ditches its legacy PDM system and moves to a new PLM platform, cutting cycle time. |
When Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (San Jose, CA) opened for business in 2003, it was a startup unlike any other. For one thing, with over 20,000 employees, it was a huge operation formed when Hitachi Ltd. (Tokyo) purchased IBM Corp.'s hard drive business. For another thing, unlike most startups (which have a clean slate in terms of technology infrastructure), Hitachi GST was struggling to cope with five years of product data from a variety of inherited IBM legacy systems. Prior to the spin-off from IBM, the hard drive product data had been housed in IBM product data management (PDM) systems. Hitachi GST management wanted to move from PDM to product lifecycle management (PLM) -- installing a single source of product data -- to reduce the amount of time it took to release a product change into production and improve overall speed and quality. But that move would mean not only migrating the more than 150,000 historical CAD designs on three different platforms, but also straightening out the disparate business processes that had developed at the company's five major sites in the United States and Japan. PLM MIGRATION
"We had lots of disparate data types, including three or four different CAD systems," says Jon Burton, global Agile PLM manager for Hitachi GST. "We knew in order to be a strategic organization, we would have to have more robust product lifecycle capabilities. That's when we knew we had to move away from PDM." Hitachi GST implemented PLM software from Agile Software Corp. (San Jose, CA) beginning in March 2003 to create an enterprise-wide product data system of record. Manufacturers of all types and sizes have found PLM helps them increase product profitability and reduce time-to-market. PLM systems provide a single, enterprise-wide view of the product record, from concept to design to production to service/support to warranty to phase-out, enabling changes to be managed more easily. Potential payoffs of having an enterprise product record include accelerated time-to-market, reduced materials costs and enhanced regulatory compliance. Speed is PLM's ultimate promise. According to a recent report from Deloitte & Touche, titled "Product Lifecycle Management in Increasingly Dynamic and Complex Supply Chains," product lifecycles are shrinking as global competition accelerates the race to get new products to market. There are shorter windows of opportunity to command premium pricing and profits, and PLM software, judiciously applied, can speed time-to-market 20 to 60%, according to the report. "Companies do not have as many opportunities to fail with a new product as they used to have. They used to have a lot more at-bats," says Sarvesh Jagannivas, director of electronics and high-tech marketing for Agile, whose company has 10,000 customers worldwide thanks to its recent acquisition of Cimmetry. "With constrained cost structures, people have to come up with very innovative new products and get them to market quickly." TWO-STEP APPROACH
Even prior to the Cimmetry acquisition -- which boosted Agile's customer base exponentially from its previous 1,200 -- Agile was strong in high tech, Hitachi GST's sector, says Jagannivas. "We help high-tech manufacturers take a portfolio approach of managing the profitability of their products. These companies have to make sure they are designing for manufacturability, sourceability, regulatory compliance and, above all, time-to-market." Being the first to market a product in high tech carries a profit and revenue premium of between 25 to 50%. Page : 1 2 3 ... NEXT |