It is not a question of whether your company can use PLM 360, but rather “how can your company use PLM 360?”.
In our estimation, every company can put it to use somewhere in their organization, even if they have no need for PLM functionality at all. Autodesk PLM 360 is a totally flexible product that can be used for any type of data management and workflow and is not just limited to PLM (product lifecycle management) usage.
Here at Hagerman & Company, we have already put PLM 360 to use for managing our Autodesk Vault, BlueCielo and Synergis Adept data management implementations. In an hour or two, we were able to configure a custom workspace in PLM 360 to track our customer data management projects and include important information such as:
- Customer Name, Location and Key Contacts
- Project Description, Type (New, Upgrade, Training and/or Customization) and Project Notes
- Customer Payment Status, Desired Dates, Schedule Status and Dates
- Proposal Number, Software Required and Software Delivery Status
- FTP Folder Location (for receiving existing customer data), Status of Customer Data Validation
- Project Planning Status, Project Plan Development and Customer Approval Status
- Hagerman Personnel Assigned and Project Next Steps
PLM 360’s interface allows everyone to see an overview of the above information for all open projects on a single screen or drill down for detailed information on an individual project in a single click. PLM 360 also allows us to attach important files such as our original customer proposal, the customer PO, the detailed project plan and other important files directly to the project record. We can also directly link a URL for the location for customer data on our FTP site to the PLM 360 record as well. This allows us to have all of our important project information available in one place. Another nice feature of PLM 360 is its Change Log which allows us to see what changes were made to any of the above fields, who made the changes and when they made them. We also know exactly who uploaded each file to PLM 360 and when they did it.
Our Hagerman personnel needs to collaborate while spread out over multiple offices across the country. With the cloud-based PLM 360 this project information is available in any of our offices or by any of our personnel when they are at home or on the road. They can even access it from an iPad or other mobile device.
While extremely valuable, we have put together a very simple PLM 360 application. In the future, we may look at expanding this project workspace to include things like key milestones, Gantt charts and workflow automation with e-mail notification. In addition, we are considering expanding our use of PLM 360 to include workspaces for sharing product technical documents and product demonstration requests for our salespeople.
We urge all of our customers to consider where they might use PLM 360 within their company to better integrate and share information between all departments. PLM 360 is useful for engineering, sales, manufacturing, quality, human resources, marketing, purchasing, service and support to name a few. PLM 360 is also ideal for collaborating and sharing information with suppliers and customers.
If you have any questions or want further information on Autodesk PLM 360, don’t hesitate to contact your local Hagerman & Company representative.
Comments