How a Product Lifecycle Management System Powers Innovation in Your NPD Process

As you know, to stay relevant, your brand must continuously innovate its products to cater to the unique needs of your consumers and differentiate your offerings from the competition. But, fostering a culture of innovation while managing the complexities of new product development (NPD) and a busy manufacturing operation can be a significant challenge. This is where product lifecycle management (PLM) software comes into play.

A PLM system manages the entire product lifecycle for you—from initial concept through design, manufacturing and eventual disposal—streamlining processes and enhancing collaboration. By implementing the right PLM system, your brand can promote creativity, boost innovation and accelerate the product creation process. So you can launch ground-breaking products that meet market demands more quickly than ever.

This blog explores how PLM systems drive innovation by freeing up your team from less productive tasks, increasing visibility and collaboration, reducing costs, and efficiently managing your product portfolios. Read on to discover how embracing a product lifecycle management system can embolden your product development process, ensuring your brand remains competitive and successful.

Common Challenges That Limit Product Innovation

No matter what product you’re developing, most brands face similar challenges in product innovation. These hurdles can hinder your ability to create and launch new lines and items effectively, inflate your costs, and frustrate your staff.

• Time Constraints: Do you struggle to allocate sufficient time for research and development (R&D) while juggling multiple projects with tight deadlines? You’re not alone. The pressure to frequently deliver new products to satisfy evolving customer demands can lead to rushed processes and less time for out-of-the-box thinking. Unfortunately, this sometimes means products don't fully meet market demands or quality standards, increasing the pressure to deliver quickly and hit the mark on the next product. And so, the cycle of tight deadlines continues.

• Lack of Collaboration: Sometimes the best ideas come from collective efforts—with multiple people sharing different viewpoints and important requirements. This means that if you have insufficient collaboration or poor communication across your departments you may be inadvertently stifling idea sharing, fragmenting efforts and missing opportunities. Effective collaboration is not only crucial for generating innovative ideas, but also for ensuring smooth implementation and iteration of them throughout product development.

• Insights Into Consumer Needs: Understanding customer needs and generating feasible ideas accordingly are essential steps in product innovation. That means that without clear insights into customers’ pain points, desires and current trends, your product innovation may fall short, wasting time, money and other resources. As well as not capitalising on profit opportunities, you may also negatively impact consumer sentiment towards your brand if a product fails to meet their requirements.

• High Costs: Financial investment in research, prototyping, testing and marketing is essential for pursuing new products. These expenses can be prohibitive, particularly for smaller enterprises. And with the rising cost of doing business hitting other areas of your operation, from material procurement to energy bills, additional costs for innovation and development are often the first to be squeezed in budget adjustments.

Addressing these challenges is crucial for efficient and successful new product development. That’s where having the right product lifecycle management software comes in to streamline the entire NPD process and help you drive cost-effective innovation.

How Your Business Can Drive Innovation With a Product Lifecycle Management System

By digitising data, automating processes and efficiently managing the entire product development process, product lifecycle management software helps your organisation focus on innovation rather than administrative tasks. This allows room for idea generation, facilitating the creation of innovative product and service ideas that meet market demands.

1. Freeing Up Your Teams

In traditional product development processes, your team must spend considerable time inputting data into various systems, updating spreadsheets and ensuring that all information is accurate. This manual approach is time-consuming, prone to errors and can lead to potential reworks and delays in the development cycle.

Product lifecycle management software automates routine tasks and significantly reduces time spent on administrative product development processes. By automating data entry, document management and compliance checks, your PLM system eliminates the need for manual workflows and reduces errors. It also facilitates effective product data management, ensuring all product-related data is accurate and accessible.

What’s more, if you’re operating in an industry with stringent and extensive regulatory standards, such as food, beverages, cosmetics and personal care, a PLM system can automatically flag problematic ingredients and trigger alerts saving time for your users and mitigating the risk of non-compliance and penalties.

All of these automations and streamlined processes translate into faster time-to-market for new products, leaving your engineers and designers more time to focus on product innovation and development rather than administration. And as we all know, when we’re less encumbered with tedious, time-consuming or repetitive tasks we’re more open to that spark of creativity or inspired idea.

As a result, companies that adopt product lifecycle management systems report significant improvements in productivity and a greater capacity to handle complex development projects—ultimately driving innovation, competitive advantage and differentiation in the market.

2. Increasing Visibility, Communication and Collaboration

PLM software offers you real-time data visibility, ensuring all team members can access the latest, reliable information, eliminating data silos and enhancing transparency. This organisation-wide visibility also enables better decision-making and faster problem resolution. For example, by using intuitive indexing and search options, your staff can quickly find the data they need without searching disparate systems or spreadsheets. Not only does this ensure no important information is missed, it allows speedy decisions to be made in line with documented requirements and specifications.

The best product lifecycle management solutions connect departments across your organisation, ensuring all relevant parties can communicate quickly and efficiently. Whether that’s marketing and sales departments adding customer insights to inform innovation, or external partners feeding information about packaging or materials directly into the system. This enhanced communication capability is crucial for executing strategy, reducing blind spots and meeting project deadlines.

Your product lifecycle management system will also facilitate effective collaboration to promote teamwork and cohesion in the product innovation and development process. This unified platform enables your cross-functional teams, such as research and development, marketing and procurement, to work together seamlessly. It also grants managers a bird's eye view of the full process so they can identify bottlenecks, balance workloads and ensure collaboration across the wider team.

Finally, with a cloud-based PLM system, your teams across different regions can work together seamlessly during the product development process, accessing and updating data in real time. This level of collaboration is essential for innovative product development, as it brings diverse perspectives and expertise into the process and ensures products will meet requirements in all your markets.

3. Reducing Costs and Speeding Time-to-Market

As we’ve seen, implementing the right PLM software streamlines and automates the entire product development process which significantly reduces costs and accelerates time-to-market straight out of the box. By centralising all product data you cut down on labour costs, minimise errors and reduce delays—freeing up time and critical funds for additional product research and innovation.

With the help of digital modelling tools, your product lifecycle management system also reduces the need for physical prototypes. It allows teams to assess product viability through simulations and digital modelling. This reduces material costs and accelerates product design, enabling you to bring products to market more quickly and efficiently. And, as you know, the more creative or attractive new products you can bring to market before your competition, the more profit you stand to make.

Moreover, a PLM system enhances cost control through better visibility of your product-related expenses. By providing detailed financial analytics and cost-tracking tools, product lifecycle management software helps your organisation monitor material costs, optimise resource allocation and identify cost-saving opportunities. This financial insight supports strategic decisions such as bulk purchasing and efficient resource management, improving your profit margins while maintaining high product quality.

4. Improving Product Portfolio Management Efficiency

PLM software offers streamlined product portfolio management (PPM) to ensure you’re creating, iterating on and selling only the most viable products. By providing a comprehensive view of all your products, PLM helps your organisation evaluate its performance in the market by analysing user satisfaction, functionality, efficiency and reliability. It also helps you assess risks associated with particular products and identify opportunities for further innovation on specific lines or items.

This holistic approach ensures that NPD resources are allocated effectively and that high-value products receive the attention they deserve. Aligning your portfolio with strategic goals enables you to target revenue and profitability more accurately, ensuring that innovation efforts are focused on areas with the greatest potential impact.

Implementing a PLM-driven PPM process accelerates time-to-market for your new products by providing a structured framework that guides products from concept through commercialisation. This framework includes built-in checkpoints that monitor progress, address potential issues and ensure timely delivery. By streamlining the development cycle and reducing project durations, your product lifecycle management system enables faster execution, which is crucial for driving creativity and capitalising on market opportunities before competitors.

Moreover, a PLM system enhances the agility of product portfolio management by allowing constant revision based on evolving market conditions, competitive threats and resource availability. With an automated solution that integrates data across your teams and geographies, PLM software provides real-time insights into the performance of your product and pipeline status. This transparency facilitates better decision-making, enabling quick adjustments to strategies and priorities, which maximises return on investment and ensures alignment with your objectives.

Adopt Aptean’s PLM for Future-Ready Innovation

With the best product lifecycle management system in your corner, you can drive innovation and creativity, boosting success even in the most competitive environments. That’s because PLM software optimises the entire new product development process, addressing common barriers to innovation such as time constraints, lack of collaboration and high costs—so your teams can focus on creating exciting products that delight your customers and bolster your bottom line.

Even better, by choosing an industry-specific PLM system, you can solve the unique challenges of your market—from food traceability to stringent cosmetics regulations—ensuring you can fuel innovation while accounting for key operational processes.

Enter Aptean. With decades of experience working with businesses just like yours, we understand the unique challenges of various sectors, including food and beverage, personal care and cosmetics, and fashion and apparel. That specialised knowledge helps us design industry-specific PLM software that combines tailored features, cloud deployment and a proven implementation process to help you thrive in your dynamic market by fostering innovation, streamlining processes and enhancing collaboration.

What’s more, our PLM solutions seamlessly integrate with our other critical business solutions like enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) and enterprise asset management (EAM) systems, ensuring a comprehensive approach to digital transformation.

By choosing Aptean, you’ll benefit from a partner dedicated to your success. Offering expert guidance and best practices throughout your software deployment and beyond, our expert teams deliver robust PLM solutions, helping your business stay ahead and achieve sustainable growth.

For more information on Aptean’s industry-specific PLM system and a full lineup of best-in-class business solutions, contact us today to schedule a personalised demo.