Consulting Product & System Lifecycle Management

As digitalization progresses, products and services become more comparable, markets more dynamic and product life cycles shorter and shorter.

ROI-EFESO's consulting approach in this context consists of four design dimensions along the complete product life cycle, which are specifically coordinated for your company: 

• Product
• Process
• Product data model and 
• Organizational structure.

In the development of products, it has long since ceased to be sufficient to take up the customer's requirements from the sales department, develop a prototype and then throw it "over the wall" into production to ensure the company's success. The responsibility has also long since ceased to end at these interfaces.

In order to be competitive, products and their development must be considered and coordinated "end-to-end", i.e. from their birth as an idea in the market to their end of life in the market. The overarching goal is to increase the profitability of your company by focusing on the needs and conditions of the market.

In Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), the areas involved are coordinated with each other in such a way that an overall corporate optimum of sales, costs and time-to-market is achieved. Central aspects here are:

• Coordination of responsibilities and work results to ensure efficient working methods,
• Inclusion of relevant areas along the entire product life cycle, e.g. through simultaneous engineering and advanced quality planning,
• Coordination and consistency of product-relevant information flows and data, e.g. via PDM or PLM systems,
• Transparency and targeting with regard to costs and quality features, e.g. failure figures in production due to unsuitable design, and
  efficient adaptation or further development of products in line with market conditions in order to maximize revenues.

The leading role in the management of these aspects falls to product management, which must ensure efficient communication with the market and customers on the one hand and the involved implementing departments and internal company processes on the other.

ROI-EFESO offers you comprehensive experience in building and optimizing cross-functionally coordinated, end-to-end development processes and organizations to ensure sustainable corporate growth.

Development model for networked systems

Products that have software components in addition to hardware (smart products) require specially adapted process models. These are designed to combine the different development cycles and methods (e.g. waterfall for hardware and agile methods for software) in an optimized and coordinated way.

In addition to hardware and software, there is often a networking (connectivity) of products. Therefore, these hybrid process models alone are not sufficient to depict the increase in complexity in the coordination and optimization of networked systems. To master development projects in this context, a new systematic approach is required.

A central feature of this approach is the intelligent linking of the relevant organizational structures in the sense of a cross-functional, coordinated development organization, for example, of product development, product management and production.

Analogous to organizational networking, development information (data) must also be intelligently linked with and coordinated with each other, i.e., consistently - e.g., product structures (e.g., color, material), product data (e.g., specifications, individual features and feature cross-dependencies), customer data (e.g., prices, volumes, country specifics), marketing information (e.g., tutorials for specific application areas), development data (e.g., eBOM and drawings) or production data (e.g., mBOM and routings).

In addition, life-cycle engineering must be integrated as a technical discipline. Based on company-wide standardised LCAs (life cycle assessments), which are used to determine TCO assessments and the carbon footprint of certain products and services, among other things, hotspots in the life cycle are to be identified in order to derive constructive solutions with the greatest possible effect from them as early as possible. This applies in particular to the environmental compatibility and sustainability of products, which must be considered over the entire life cycle.

One of the main challenges of this development process is not to create separate, optimized information architectures and tools for each organizational and information unit, because once they have been introduced they can hardly be coordinated with each other and thus make efficient development more difficult (keyword: media breaks).

Only a well thought-out, intelligent and expandable product data model allows reliable evaluations. An inconsistent product data model ties up many unnecessary capacities, e.g. due to inconsistencies or lack of consistency. In the simplest case this is a wrong translation in certain countries, which impairs the corporate image. In the worst case, there are difficulties with regard to product approval and a product recall is imminent.

SysLM as an integrative approach

Against this background, SysLM (System Lifecycle Management) offers an integrative approach in which all components and information are coordinated with each other from the beginning and until the end of the life cycle of a product system.

This ensures maximum quality and cost efficiency (especially in terms of Total Cost of Ownership TCOQ). It also enables the generation of additional revenue opportunities at later points in the product (system) life cycle. Digital Twin applications or service-oriented business approaches, which would be inconceivable without coordinated system networking and data evaluation, can also be implemented with this approach.

ROI-EFESO supports companies in designing and implementing holistic SysLM solutions.

Our service portfolio includes the following topics in particular:

• SysLM strategy development, architecture design, PLM system selection and system integration,
• Selection of platforms for the integration of ALM, PLM and ERP systems,
• Introduction of MBSE tools and methods and continuous integration into PLM processes and systems,
• Optimization of product architectures and development of a domain-spanning variant system,
• Design of collaboration processes and selection of solutions for integration and data exchange,
• Analysis and conception of the necessary organizational and procedural changes,
• Implementation of agile methods.