Faster, More Informed Decision-Making in NPD with PLM as a Single Source of Truth

The vital endeavor of new product development (NPD) is highly complex and necessitates the active involvement of a number of different departments. That makes having a unified database to serve as an organization-wide system of record for critical information a key priority—especially in the fast-moving and trend-driven process manufacturing industries of food, beverage, personal care and cosmetics.

A product lifecycle management (PLM) solution can be that “single source of truth” that your business needs to excel in cohesive, optimized and ultimately successful NPD undertakings. Leaders at consumer packaged goods companies have embraced this idea, with 85% indicating that a PLM platform is critical for digital transformation.

Our recently published whitepaper, A Single Source of Truth: How a PLM Solution Drives Faster, More Informed Decision-Making in NPD, explores this idea in depth by covering four key elements of every NPD project and how PLM systems serve each. It also highlights how Aptean PLM Lascom Edition—our offering for food, beverage, personal care and cosmetics businesses—helps our clients in those markets overcome their unique challenges.

In this post, we’ll give you a sampling of the insights in this new asset to pique your interest. Be sure to check out the full piece available for download for a deep dive on PLM software and how the tailored features of our solution can improve NPD outcomes.

Achieving Accuracy and Visibility in Specification and Document Management

Having clear, detailed records of the specifications, prototypes and test results tied to products in development is crucial for maintaining cohesion and accuracy throughout the process. PLM solutions allow you to maintain all relevant paperwork in a digital format and make the critical information accessible to everyone involved in the NPD process.

Aptean PLM takes this a step further by offering a Supplier Portal that facilitates collaboration with external partners. Those businesses can feed component and packaging details directly into the shared platform, alleviating your team members of the need to manually re-enter the information and accelerating overall progress.

Driving Innovation and Accessibility in Product Design Management

Creating new products for the food, beverage, personal care and cosmetics markets requires highly specialized tools for managing the process at a component level. An industry-specific process manufacturing PLM system can provide the recipe and formula tools that your developers need to tune in product parameters with precision while also keeping them aligned with the original brief.

Your team members become much more effective in searching for the information they need with the categorization and search capabilities of Aptean PLM, as they’re powered by our integrated Business Intelligence (BI) application. The software also comes with advanced search functionalities that allow for the indexing of components, which helps reduce duplication of effort.

Strengthening Collaboration and Efficiency in Project and Task Management

Maintaining a high-level view of your NPD projects is crucial for identifying bottlenecks in the process and keeping things moving along to a successful conclusion. With a PLM system in place, you can establish observable milestones in the journey from concept to store shelves, establish cohesion between teams and maintain momentum as you move forward.

With Aptean PLM, your project managers can use easy-to-read Gantt charts to track progress, monitor team workloads and navigate hand-offs between various stages. Meanwhile, the program management tools that our software provides help you organize many individual products under a single line into an overarching “program” that shares a unified set of data for each variant.

Promoting Consistency and Assurance in Quality and Compliance Management

Meeting the standards of your brand, the expectations of consumers and the requirements of enforcement agencies are all vital objectives during NPD. PLM systems’ features for quality and compliance management help to ensure that all necessary checks are made and steps are taken to cover your bases in terms of regulations.

Solutions built specifically for process manufacturers in the food, beverage, personal care and cosmetics markets can automatically record important quality events and the affected ingredients for future reference. Aptean PLM also has tools to cross-check product parameters with regulatory libraries, flag allergenic ingredients and automatically generate Product Information Files (PIFs).

Aptean: A Trusted Provider of PLM Software and More

PLM software acts as the playbook from which all of your team members operate, and that in turn can produce a host of benefits for food, beverage, personal care and cosmetics manufacturers. With all the pertinent facts and figures at their fingertips, your professionals can make smarter decisions on the fly, which helps accelerate time to market, promote innovation, ensure consistency and boost efficiency.

Aptean PLM Lascom Edition is the choice of many leading businesses in the industries to which it is tailored, and that’s thanks to its powerful set of functionalities as well as our reputation as a trusted provider of business solutions. We also have a broad portfolio of other systems to complement a PLM, including enterprise resource planning (ERP), overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) and enterprise asset management (EAM) software.

Now, read the full whitepaper to get a more complete understanding of PLM systems, and then reach out to us to learn more. You can also request a personalized demo at your convenience.