Solution Brief / SpirePLMTM

OverviewCustomer demands and intense competition constantly push organizations to bring high quality products to market as fast as possible. To face these challenges, SpirePLM provides data models and processes to support products from ideation to end-of-life, integrates product data across your organization and includes tools to provide full traceability to maintain regulatory compliance.

Business Drivers• Pressures to quickly design,

manufacture and launch new products

• Large number of SKUs• High demands for quality products• Need to maintain regulatory

compliance• Rapidly changing customer needs

Key Features• Flexible processes to manage

requirements, pricing and branding data

• Comprehensive New Product Development (NPD) and release management

• Accurate problem and change reporting

• Complete view of structures such as Bill of Materials (BOM)

• Efficient tools to integrate information from multiple systems

Key Benefits• Accelerate time-to-market• Improve process efficiency• Reduce development costs• Deliver visibility and tracking across

lifecycle process• Boost compliance with full traceability • Avoid errors and eliminate delays

About SpirePLM and STEPSpirePLM is a comprehensive PLM solution powered by STEP. STEP is a Multidomain Master Data Management platform that integrates multiple disparate systems in your company by streamlining the process of aggregating and consolidating information around your products, customers, suppliers, employees, assets, location and reference data from multiple sources and formats. STEP connects that information to derive actionable insights, and publishes it to backend systems as well as online and offline channels.

About Stibo SystemsStibo Systems is the global leader in multidomain master data management solutions. Established in 1976, privately held and AAA rated, with 18 offices worldwide and global headquarters in Aarhus, Denmark. Over 300 customers globally rely on Stibo Systems’ master data management platform, STEP, to manage their operational information across their enterprise. For more information, visit www.stibosystems.com.

Solution At-A-Glance

SpirePLMTM

Manage Your Products Throughout Their Lifetime

Today, organizations are constantly pressured to reduce time-to-market due to customer demands and to remain competitive. Efficiently managing product information from ideation to end-of-life is key in order to launch products faster without losing quality. Unfortunately, product data is often stored and managed from different and disconnected systems – even spreadsheets. This quickly introduces errors resulting in poor designs, little visibility and no guidance for standards, which directly affects how quickly your new products can launch, reduces customer loyalty and ultimately increases costs.

Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) applications optimize product development by enhancing how you manage your product information. PLM solutions produce results by centralizing product data and establishing processes to handle the complexities inherent in new product development, release and maintenance. A comprehensive PLM solution also allows you to:

OPTIMIZE collaboration with other

departments

MAINTAIN visibility

throughout a product’s lifetime

MEASURE KPIs and other

metrics

ENHANCE collaboration with suppliers and partners

ENSURE full traceability

to maintain compliance

While standalone PLM applications have many benefits, there are some drawbacks. Adequately implementing a PLM system can be very complex and many applications don’t provide the necessary flexibility to properly mold themselves to the specific needs of your business. This creates implementations that, in the end, can’t deliver on the optimized product development cycle that most businesses are looking for. Furthermore, a PLM system that stands on its own and does not integrate with the rest of your organization’s data creates another silo for product information.

PRODUCT LIFECYCLE

MANAGEMENT

Solution Brief / SpirePLMTM

PLM needs Master Data Management (MDM)

While most PLM applications provide data warehouses to store all of your product information in one place, all of your other systems and data remain independent. This causes disparities during product development since the information stored and used by other departments is not integrated or linked with your product data. These issues become increasingly visible as your products move towards production where sales, marketing and other teams require clean and precise product data in order to accurately and consistently launch your products.

MDM solutions gather, integrate and clean data from different systems and stores it in a central repository. By creating a central hub for all your data and ensuring data quality through deduplication tools and comprehensive data governance, MDM allows for available, secure, accurate and consistent product information ready to be distributed across your enterprise. In turn, this enhances collaboration throughout different departments and optimizes your product’s development, launch and eventual retirement. MDM solutions also provide the visibility required to monitor data quality at any point of the manufacturing process and ensures your products are compliant with industry standards.

ENABLES THREE FUNCTIONAL AREAS

Line and Portfolio Planning

Change Management

New Product Development

Data Model, including objects,

references and attributes

Business Rules Templates

and API

Work�ow and Web UI Templates

• Line and Portfolio Planning: Manage requirements, pricing and branding data while making sure that your products align with your roadmap and organization’s needs. Use efficient portfolio risk management and insightful portfolio, market and impact analyses.

• New Product Development (NPD): Make sure that your design and manufacturing information is accurate and efficiently managed, take advantage of comprehensive NPD functionality and ensure regulatory compliance throughout the development process.

• Change Management: Adapt quickly to changes during the development of complex products and use accurate and timely problem reporting at any stage of development.

What is SpirePLM?

SpirePLM is a comprehensive PLM solution that provides flexible data models and processes to efficiently manage your products from ideation to end-of-life. SpirePLM manages your product information across three distinct areas:

As part of STEP, Stibo Systems’ MDM platform, SpirePLM takes advantage of all the benefits of a world leading MDM solution to seamlessly integrate product data across your organization with your master data and digital assets. SpirePLM uses STEP to ensure you work with clean and accurate data, deliver needed visibility and traceability through audit trails and reports to guarantee compliance. This ensures that you work with a single version of the truth throughout your product development cycle.

Solution Brief / SpirePLMTM

To deliver the benefits of a comprehensive PLM solution, SpirePLM provides you with the following tools:

Data Model

Quickly configure and use a flexible PLM data model template that adapts to your specific needs and use cases. The data model includes eight out-of-box (OOB) hierarchies that handle the necessary objects, references and attributes needed based on your product requirements.

Workflows

Easily set up workflows to manage tasks, requirements and change requests as well as creating processes for every step of your product development cycle.

Business Rules and API

Set up business rules to ensure the integrity of your product data and to manage revisions. Use our flexible API for a customized solution based on your specific product development needs.

Centralized Repository

Take advantage of a true multidomain platform, STEP, to efficiently integrate your product, supplier, asset and other operational information – all in one platform. Quickly upload data from multiple sources with extract, transform, and load (ETL) tools. Ensure that your products take advantage of clean, complete, available and consistent data throughout their development with data governance. Maintain high quality data by identifying duplicate records via automated matching and linking functionality.

Digital Asset Management (DAM)

A built-in DAM manages and links related digital assets to your products to deliver rich, content to vendors and across your internal teams. Use STEP’s localization functionality to supply region-specific information to geographically dispersed teams and channels.

Web UI and Reports

Enjoy a clean and simple workspace thorough the Web UI and use customizable dashboards to maintain visibility throughout a product’s development and reduce operational inefficiencies. SpirePLM takes advantage of STEP’s Web UI to provide reference visualizer functionality that clearly and accurately displays structures such as Bill of Materials (BOM). Comprehensive audit trails and reports provide the necessary traceability to maintain regulatory compliance.

Easily view complex structures like Bill of Materials (BOM)

Powered by STEP

SpirePLM for Retail

Retailers are continuously challenged to adapt to rapidly shifting customer demands and to handle increasing number of SKUs all while still providing the experience their customers expect. To deal with these pressures, many retailers aim to optimize their supply chain and introduce their own private-label products to gain market share. Without a system to manage product information, product development can be clumsy and costly. Using PLM to face these challenges has been a growing trend among retailers to establish solid processes that aim to shorten time-to-market, manage with a global suppliers and respond to ever-changing consumer needs.

SpirePLM includes highly customizable data models that use advanced workflows to optimize the way retailers design, develop and launch their private-label offerings. To deal with products that may need to change during their development, SpirePLM includes processes to efficiently manage change requests and problem reports. As part of Stibo Systems’ MDM platform, STEP, SpirePLM also ensures all product data is properly integrated with other systems across your organization, improves the quality of your product data through data governance and guarantees your products maintain compliance through comprehensive audit trails and reports. Using STEP’s integrated Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution, SpirePLM efficiently links digital assets to your products and ensures consistency across all channels.

Solution Brief / SpirePLMTM

SpirePLM for Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG)

Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) manufacturers face increased scrutiny to maintain compliance and to provide the highest levels of quality while at the same time developing and launching products at an increasing pace. Furthermore, CPG companies deal with very precise information such as complex recipe requirements, ingredient management, nutritional data and specific packaging, to name a few. Some organizations rely on outdated methods to manage this information during product development, such as spreadsheets, which reduce efficiency and easily introduce errors. Others have opted for heavy PLM solutions that can improve their processes and reduce their time-to-market, but also prove to be highly complex and costly.

SpirePLM provides the traceability necessary to maintain all regulatory and market compliance for your products. The solution’s data models are highly configurable to easily adapt to your needs while also ensuring that you can efficiently manage the complex materials and requirements to develop, launch and maintain your products. As a seamless extension of our STEP platform, SpirePLM also guarantees that your sensitive product data is not only clean and accurate but also secure. SpirePLM easily integrates product information from suppliers and uses our integrated Digital Asset Management (DAM) to make sure that your products portray a consistent brand image across all your different channels and regions.

solution brief_SpirePLM_EN_NA_F8Solution Brief / SpirePLMTM