A blog by Oleg Shilovitsky
Information & Comments about Engineering and Manufacturing Software

What Are The Metrics For PLM Innovation?

What Are The Metrics For PLM Innovation?
olegshilovitsky
olegshilovitsky
14 April, 2010 | 3 min for reading

A couple of weeks ago I had healthy debates about PLM and Innovation with Jim Brown of TechClarity. If you haven’t had chance to be part of this discussion you can check out the following post – PLM vs. ERP: Don’t Manage Innovation. During the last couple of days, I had chance to have an additional discussion on the “innovation” topic with some of my readers off line and online, and I came to the conclusion that I need to refresh this topic. I want to take the notion of “management” and “innovation” as starting points. The combination of them together made me think about the fact I need to bring some metrics in this “innovation management” process. Since, if you don’t know how to measure it, you hardly be able to “manage it”.

PLM and Product Innovation
I think, that PLM-minded people think about the innovation in the context of product development. Since, the  goal of CAD/CAE/PDM/PLM and other system related to engineering is about how to create products, this is the only innovation that counted for product development. Obviously, other areas of business such as manufacturing planning, supply chain, business accounting also may contain innovative aspects, but they are not in the scope of PLM vision. So, I came to the conclusion that development of new, innovative products is the ultimate goal of PLM innovation.

Innovation and Golden Eggs
When I think about an innovation process, the best association I can bring is the idea of golden eggs. Each new idea or product can be actually considered as the potential golden egg. However, the biggest problem with golden eggs is that they can crack. To decrease the risk of having cracked egg, I can potentially think about having more than one egg in my innovation bag. So, when I think about innovation management, I’d like to think about how to turn my innovation process to goose that will lay down golden eggs. As soon as I can do that, I can manage this process to produce as many eggs as I can and choose the appropriated ones applying specific metrics.

PLM Innovation Metrics
When I think about potential measures of product innovation, I can come with set of criteria related to the different aspects of organization and product performance performances. I’d like to put below some of the ideas about possible metrics.

Organization Performance
– Revenues from new product
– Customer satisfactions from new product
– ROI from new product

Product Characteristics
– Cost
– Performance
– Usability
– Novelty

Innovation Process
– Number of new ideas in the pipeline
– Number of new ideas comes from outside of the organization
– Time from the idea to the realization
– % of the ideas materialized as a new product or new development.

I’m sure this is an incomplete list and may be different for the specific organization. However, I hope gives an idea about what can be considered as a metrics for PLM (product) innovation.

Just my thoughts… I’m very interested to know your opinion and get your feedback.
Best, Oleg

Recent Posts

Also on BeyondPLM

4 6
24 May, 2011

Ask people about usability of PLM and other enterprise data management systems. From my experience, the answer is simple –...

11 February, 2011

Today everything can be virtualized. If you think about your dedicated IT environment, proprietary or public cloud, the ability to...

1 December, 2016

IoT is coming everywhere these days. The interest in technologies enabling to deliver connectivity between customers, products and product development...

17 August, 2010

I want to continue the discussion started last week in my post ‘PDM vs. PLM: A Data Perspective‘. Thank you...

6 July, 2016

Digital environment is changing habits and behaviors of people. Think about how your individual behaviors changed for the last decade....

5 May, 2010

User experience is important. It comes with all cool gadgets, Web 2.0 websites and iPhone apps. I think, people started...

25 April, 2019

Going back in 2011 when I attended ACE 2011, I captured Aras idea and vision in my article – Aras...

6 March, 2019

User interface or how we more often call it these days “user experience” (UX) is tough. Enterprise systems, PLM and CAD...

30 November, 2009

Dear Friends, One year ago I started Daily PLM Think Tank with this post! Thank you all for support and...

Blogroll

To the top