CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive

12 September 2008

CIMdata News

CIMdata Releases Poll Results for “Have You Established Formal Metrics to Track the Improvements Resulting From the Use of Your PLM Solution”

CIMdata announces our August opinion poll results:

Bar Graph Results for Poll Results: Establishment of Formal Metric to Track Improvements from use of PLM Solution

NOTE: The results of these polls are anecdotal, not scientific.

If you have a suggestion for a poll you'd like to see contact us at info@cimdata.com.

The results of CIMdata's latest on-line poll shows that just over 50% of responders indicated that their companies have not established metrics to track business, productivity or process improvements related to their PLM solution deployments. However 23% indicated that they had metrics for engineering and another 23% indicated that they had established metrics in other areas (enterprise wide 13%, and other non-engineering or manufacturing 11%).

CIMdata strongly recommends that companies use metrics to track and validate the impact of their PLM solutions on the business. Only by measuring changes can they quantify the return on their investment and identify areas and processes that have been improved, or those that need additional effort to be improved. Failure to measure can result in incorrect perceptions of the impact of PLM investments on the business and make it difficult to justify further investments. Further, the use of appropriate metrics helps communicate the benefits that PLM provides to individuals and managers within the enterprise that are being affected by PLM-related changes in processes and methods.

While many of the early metrics were focused on the engineering processes and departments, the trend to use enterprise level metrics that look beyond engineering reflects the knowledge that PLM can have a broader impact on a company. Metrics that look at enterprise performance can help management understand both the overall impact of PLM and how it should be positioned compared to other business investments.

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