CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
12 October 2004
Product News
Agile Introduces Agile Advantage-PLM for Small and Medium Enterprises
Agile Software Corporation announced the release of Agile Advantage 2005, a PLM solution designed specifically to meet the needs of small and medium enterprises (SMEs).
The SME market demands built-in product capabilities and business process templates around product record management, quality, program management, product sourcing and integration, along with a delivery model that reflects the reality of limited IT resources typical of the small and medium enterprise.
Agile designed Agile Advantage to specifically focus on minimal time to deploy, minimal need for system administration and overhead, while still offering a rich set of capabilities required by product-oriented companies to do their jobs and achieve business results.
Recognizing that customers require maximum flexibility and ability to rapidly adjust their solution capacity, Agile offers Agile On DemandT PLM fully administered through Agile's application service provider (ASP) services. With subscription licensing, capacity can easily be adjusted up or down based on a customer's business requirements. Agile Advantage can also be deployed in the more traditional, on-site model if desired by the customer.
Agile Advantage 2005, the latest release of Agile Advantage, is available immediately, and is made up of 8 optional solutions all built on a common application model. Agile Advantage 2005 solutions include:
• Product Record Management-This Agile Advantage core solution manages a wide array of product data including bills of material (BOMs), manufacturer management, item masters, revisions and product changes.
• Document Management & Control-Advanced document vault and searching speeds information retrieval and sharing, ensuring compliance with regulatory agencies.
• View & Markup-This capability provides full support for 2D and 3D engineering drawings, EDA schematics, and business documents to view, redline and markup with hundreds of file formats supported and is integrated with the engineering change process.
• Quality Management-This closed loop Corrective Action / Preventive Action (CAPA) solution links problem identification and reporting with engineering and product change processes in compliance with FDA Part 11, Sarbanes-Oxley, and ISO 9000 regulations.
• Product Sourcing-This capability enables companies to manage the process of direct material sourcing, approved vendor lists and product cost, and facilitates collaboration across the supply chain.
• Program Management-This solution integrates program planning, execution and resource management with the product record to better manage schedules across the entire product lifecycle and provide executive level visibility of key performance indicators.
• Engineering Integration-This solution integrates and manages CAD tools with BOM, documentation and product changes.
• Enterprise Integration-Agile Advantage can be linked to other systems of record including MRP, ERP, CRM and in-house solutions using Enterprise Integration.
Agile Advantage 2005 is a newly developed product that leverages Agile's PLM functionality and uses models proven across more than 1,200 customers on an architecture that supports multi-tenancy on the physical server/networking infrastructure, while maintaining complete intellectual property (IP) privacy and security through isolated databases. The result is a PLM solution that is readily available, quick to implement, and inexpensive to deploy. And, Agile Advantage can be offered at substantially less cost because each customer and each deployment does not require its own dedicated physical server, unlike other on demand offerings.
Agile Advantage 2005 uses technology components in common with the Agile 9 global enterprise solution such as PDX product data exchange and import/export allowing for rapid data migration during the implementation phase. Full data exchange via the PDX standard also enables fast integration of supply chain partners. Just as important as implementation speed and supplier integration is that the information contained in the PLM solution is not locked away in isolation from MRP, ERP or other internal business systems.
The Agile On Demand PLM also overcomes the frequently undocumented instances of data access denial, ownership disputes, and non-recovery associated with companies who have chosen the wrong on demand or ASP solutions. The inability to easily and robustly integrate their intellectual property with business-critical systems of record within their enterprise is an example of one problem. Even worse, companies have been denied access to their intellectual property out of the vendor's hosted or on-demand system when the on-demand vendor is either unwilling to turn the data over, lacks tools for making the data usable, or in the case of start-up vendors, is on weak financial footing and cannot meet the support demands of their customers in a timely manner or at all.
With headquarters in Vancouver, British Columbia, and research laboratories in Redmond, Washington, Ondine Biopharma Corporation is developing a laser-activated approach to broad-spectrum disinfection, capitalizing on a decade of successful preclinical research. Ondine Biopharma recently purchased the Agile On Demand PLM solution.
"In purchasing Agile Advantage, we chose a world-class PLM system from a company with a track record of successfully meeting the manufacturing, operational, and quality assurance requirements of customers in the biotechnology and medical device arena," said Dr. Nicolas Loebel, chief technology officer, Ondine Biopharma. "By deploying the Agile On Demand PLM solution, we will be able to manage each product lifecycle and our company- wide quality system using a proven, low-risk solution, while simultaneously achieving a low total cost of ownership, rapid internal rollout and realizing a short time to benefit."
"Ondine Biopharma is a prime example of the customer we had in mind for the SME focus at Agile," said Bryan Stolle, Agile CEO. "These customers are busy growing their businesses and interested in how they can best leverage resources. A world-class PLM system is critical to them, but the ROI for a long implementation or for expensive IT resources doesn't align with their strategic goals. Our SME product and its solutions-including Agile Advantage 2005 and Agile On Demand PLM-meet just such critical requirements for these customers."
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