A true understanding of a product development requires an appreciation of how a product is described (documents, BOMs, etc.) and the process of developing it (tasks, time, resources etc.). Whenever an organisation considers development of a new product, there is strong motivation to capitalise on past experience and reuse knowledge.

Traditionally, project and product knowledge are managed by two different systems - Project Management systems (such as Microsoft® Project) and PLM systems (such as SMARTEAM) respectively. This segregated approach has the following shortcomings:

SMARTEAM Programme Management Module

• A PLM system allows easy retrieval of product-related knowledge (drawrings, BOM’s etc.) making it easy to answer questions such as “What was in the previous product?” and “What parts do I need to purchase?” but is almost impossible to answer questions such as “How much will it cost?”, “How long will it take?”
  
• A project management system makes it easy to reuse past project timelines but difficult to retrieve documents and other deliverables associated with the project.

SMARTEAM - Program Management (PGM) provides a collaborative & integrated environment where both project & product knowledge can be managed in a controlled manner across a team.

Business Benefit
Domain	Business Issue	PGM Solution
Decision support	Decisions are not based on up-to-date, reliable and clear information.	Guarantee that problems and deviations from the global plan are identified before they happen. Identify and treat bottlenecks.
Project Lifecycle Management	Hard to determine the current status of projects, impossible to assure the integrity of the project.	Business rules govern what can be done in each state and what the conditions are before a state can be promoted to the next state.
Reuse	Company's practices and processes are not repeatable, project knowledge is not systematically stored for reuse.	Reuse of project know-how and standard practices. Use of project templates, predict and prevent risks based on previous project experience.
Productivity	Hard to know what to do and when to do it, hard to locate task assets and task dependencies.	Increase in overall productivity. Be aware of your tasks and their dependencies. Associate tasks with any other type of information.
Resource Management	Information on resources not shared between projects, difficult to assign a resource based on its capabilities or properties (Security, maintenance)	All resources are stored and managed, and can be used across multiple projects and tasks Keep rich information for each resource. Project-based authorisations.
Collaboration	Project information not accessible to everybody, hard to work in large distributed teams, miscommunication	Project information in one place, accessible to all. Supports collaboration and management of large product development teams.

The area in which SMARTEAM excels is collaboration and product lifecycle management, while project planning is the core competency of systems such as Microsoft Project and Primavera. PGM delivers useful Program Management capabilities that complement the project planning tools, rather than competing with them. PGM provides the means to store and manage a project plan (created in Microsoft Project, for example) and to allow people from across the enterprise to access and make collaborative use of this knowledge.

For more details please contact Intrinsys
|Tel: 01908 278606 | email: info@intrinsys.co.uk