SaaS PLM can revolutionize the customer experience by reducing upfront investments, improving scalability and more.
ITC Infotech has sponsored this post. Written by Akhil Jain, Vice President, Product Lifecycle Management, and Vishal Agarwal, Principal, Product Lifecycle Management, ITC Infotech.
The digital thread places engineering systems, particularly product lifecycle management (PLM), at its core. Within the digital thread, PLM plays a pivotal role as it maintains the single source of truth for all product data.
However, engineering teams often adopt a “wait and watch” approach when it comes to adopting new technologies, especially when it comes to the cloud, primarily due to concerns about security (IP protection), performance and scalability.
As cloud technology becomes robust and mature, Software as a Service (SaaS) PLM may offer a solution to these concerns. SaaS is the future of PLM, a viewpoint shared by CEOs of leading PLM vendors. PTC’s recent acquisitions of Onshape and ArenaPLM mark a step towards “PLM SaaS-ification,” yet this only scratches the surface of its wider adoption.
Manufacturers should consider adopting SaaS PLM platforms in a manner akin to the “Agile” methodology. SaaS PLM enables manufacturers to leverage PLM for its intended purpose: bringing high-quality and innovative products to market faster, as opposed to grappling with issues related to PLM system security, performance and other challenges.
Gartner’s analysis indicates that even with significant growth in cloud infrastructure and platform services, SaaS remains the dominant segment in cloud market spending, projected to grow to $197 billion in 2023. Furthermore, they forecast that 75% of organizations will have integrated a digital transformation strategy centred around Cloud computing as the essential platform by 2026.
How SaaS PLM Can Revolutionize the Customer Experience
There are many potential advantages to SaaS PLM:
- Reduced Upfront Investments: Historically, PLM systems required significant capital investment, making their adoption a daunting prospect for many organizations, especially those in the small to mid-size category. However, SaaS PLM solutions are designed to empower companies of all sizes to embrace PLM without extensive upfront investments. This democratization of access ensures that even startups and SMEs can harness the full power of PLM systems without denting their finances.
- Scalability (Growing with the Business): SaaS solutions inherently offer scalable infrastructure. As a company grows, its PLM system can be scaled up to accommodate more users, products or features.
- Flexible Plans: Many SaaS PLM vendors offer different tiers, allowing businesses to select what they need and upgrade when necessary.
- Silent Upgrades, Updates and Patch Deployments: Version upgrades (or even minor updates and patch deployments) are rolled out silently by the vendor in the background. This ensures every onboarded customer benefits instantly from these updates.
- No Hardware Worries: Since there’s no need to invest in physical infrastructure, scaling up doesn’t require investing in new servers or storage solutions.
Transitioning to SaaS PLM
Our experience with transitioning clients to SaaS PLM, whether as new implementations or migrating from traditional PLM systems (on-premise or cloud), highlights its nature as a transformative journey. This shift requires a fundamental change in perspective and alignment from both the business and IT units.
Here are some of the common pitfalls clients should avoid while moving towards SaaS PLM Transformation:
- Considering SaaS PLM as “Lift and Shift”: SaaS projects should be more than just replication; they should be transformational. They give businesses a chance to reevaluate processes and align with product guardrails. This requires a team effort to understand current business processes and how they fit with SaaS PLM. For instance, one customer compared out-of-the-box features against their customizations. Most customizations were replaced with standard functionality, but some were rewritten according to SaaS PLM guardrails where necessary.
- Reluctance to Embrace Change: Traditional upgrades might occur every 3-5 years, however, in a SaaS PLM environment, upgrades are fluid and hinge on product launches and will happen much faster. Along with upgrades, new functionalities (and technologies, such as easier ways of integrating with ERP or other systems) will also be available faster. Clients should be open to embracing these changes and new functionalities. For example, existing SAP integration (say with S4-Hana) may have been implemented using Webservices but both SaaS PLM and S4 Hana support oData based REST services. Such change should be considered as this will also reduce technology burden in future.
- Ignoring Organizational Change Management (OCM): Every transformative initiative necessitates a robust OCM team. For SaaS PLM implementations, this team plays a crucial role in managing transitions, facilitating the adoption of new features, and ensuring agility and adaptability.
Conclusion
All major PLM vendors are working towards creating the next generation SaaS PLM platform that provides seamless experience to customers by having integrated CAD, PLM, ALM and SLM solution available in one platform, allowing customers to focus more on core business and less on IT system management.
As seasoned system integrators with more than two decades of experience in implementing PLM solutions and with rich history of implementing genuine SaaS PLM solutions for diverse clients, we recognize the challenges associated with SaaS PLM implementations and adoption and have developed best practices (along with framework, methodology and solution accelerators) to execute such transformation projects successfully.
To learn more, visit ITC Infotech.
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