CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
18 January 2005
Product News
Rules-driven Product Management Spotlighted in Report by Major Manufacturing Research Firm
In a research report issued today, manufacturing research firm CIMdata outlined the emergence of rules-driven product management (RPM), a category of enterprise software that allows discrete manufacturers to respond to customer-specific orders more rapidly, accurately and efficiently by capturing and reusing engineering and manufacturing rules.
RPM is an integral part of a Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) environment that supports product development activities. The CIMdata report estimates that based on existing conditions, the RPM market currently has a total cumulative opportunity ceiling of about $6 billion.
The report describes the foundation of RPM, identifies its key business drivers and benefits, gives specific implementation examples and assesses the market and RuleStream's position in that market.
"Preserving the corporate knowledge base is an essential business requirement in today's competitive world," the report states. "An organization's past experiences are what allow it to work faster and smarter and provide advantages over competitors. On the product design side, this translates directly into an ability for designers and engineers to record their decision making process and to access previous design successes and failures-remember that typically around 80 percent of any design is based on previous work. They must be able to do both of these in a convenient and timely way-studies have shown that engineers spend 35 percent or more of their work time just searching for information that is known to exist. For others in the enterprise, easy access to an organized knowledge base allows faster and more accurate bidding and sales quotes, better information to provide maintenance, improved planning for new products, more accurate costing, improved product consistency, fewer part numbers, and many other benefits."
"CIMdata recognizes the growing importance of both the rules-driven product management market and our approach to solving the needs of engineer-to-order manufacturers," said David Vredenburgh, RuleStream's chief executive officer. "RuleStream may be in an emerging market, but the results we've been able to achieve for our customers are very real. Significant reductions in design time, more accurate and detailed proposals that improve the sales win-rate, and greater confidence in designs are just three that are touched on in this report."
Copies of the report are available at the CIMdata website, online at http://www.cimdata.com .
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