Product Lifecycle Management
Fusion 360 Manage with Upchain PLM
Overview
Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) helps you accelerate your product development processes across all departments and locations by automating workflows, key tasks and delivering timely information. Autodesk’s PLM software, Fusion 360 Manage, is on the cloud allowing everyone to have access to their data anytime, anywhere.
Why PLM?
How does PLM fit into your Organization?
In order to have a better understanding of a project / product lifecycle, let’s have a look at a typical product lifecycle example.
If we look at the first stage of a project lifecycle, the cycle begins with a customer need. The customer need is then evaluated by the Sales and Project Managers to determine the product requirements. Based on the product requirements, engineering and design create drawings and CAD models. While engineering is busy with the design, Purchasing orders the required parts to build the product. Once the project is completed, the Quality department checks the product quality, after which your customer receives the product.
Well, this is actually only half of a product lifecycle!
Now if your customer reports an issue, you want to be able to capture the issue and report it back to the right people to make the right modifications.
With Fusion 360 Manage acting as the single source of product information, you can achieve a perfect lifecycle from the beginning of the project to the end. This will allow an organization to capture the product issues and report them to the right people, enabling them to make timely and effective adjustments.
Product Data Management (PDM): keeps your files, metadata and CAD documents organized. It is an engineering centric tool.
Enterprise Resource Management (ERP): Manages resource and transactional tasks for departments such as accounting, purchasing and inventory management.
Product Lifecycle Management (PLM): Manages product development, BOM, ECO, and workflows. PLM connects processes and workflows to each other from different parts of an organization. It is a platform that helps not only the engineering departments but also sales, purchasing, quality, and production.
Autodesk Vault or other On-Premises PDM applications are great tools for managing CAD documents, drawings, metadata and revision control on your local servers. The combination On-Premises Vault PDM and Fusion 360 Manage PLM enables your organization to achieve the following:
- New Product Introduction (NPI)
- Bill of Materials (BOM) Management
- Supply Chain Management
- Change Management (ECO, ECN and ECR)
- Quality Management
- Project Management
- Reporting and Traceability
Today, with the live connection between Autodesk Vault Professional and Fusion 360 Manage, companies can automatically export data such as a complete BOM from Vault to Fusion 360 Manage. In addition, the connection allows users to sync the change management in Fusion 360 Manage to Vault.
What ERP does not provide is functionality suited for managing Engineering Product Data like: Change Management, Quality Management Systems and new product Development. These functions are very iterative in nature and are not well suited to an ERP system.
PLM, on the other hand, is well suited to managing these iterative processes.
The best practice in the industry is connecting these technologies and allowing data to be shared in an effective and streamlined manner.
PLM does not replace ERP, it compliments ERP!
In an organization where each department is using a different technology to achieve their goals, it becomes very difficult to streamline information and communications across teams. These different technologies do not communicate well with each other and can create significant communication barriers between teams.
By using PLM as the single source of information, Fusion Lifecycle complements the existing tools by connecting them together.
With Fusion 360 Manage: information captured by the sales team in a CRM will be visible to the engineering. Once engineering is done, a complete BOM and product information will be available to ERP, purchasing and production.
Fusion 360 Manage gives your organization the visibility through the entire project, from customer requirements all the way to production.
Fusion 360 Manage Capabilities
New Product Information
Configurable New Product Introduction (NPI) project templates standardize phase-gate milestones, deliverables and tasks by product line, business unit, product team, or other designation.
Bill of Materials
Configure and mange structure Bills of Materials (BOMs) and items in a centralized system that is both powerful and easy-to-use in a centralized system that is both powerful and easy-to-use. Compare different BOMs and/or versions of the same BOM interactively.
Change Management
Product changes are fully defined, reviewed, approved, and implemented in a collaborative environment. Easily configured workflows provide a clear view of the details you need to approve Engineering Change Requests (ECR) and Engineer Change Order (ECO).
Quality Management
Configurable workflows coordinate, control and track the complete chain of cross-functional quality processes, tied together in a single system. This creates a complete quality chain from non-conformance identification and analysis to RMA, CAPA and engineering change, improving product quality while reducing time-to-closure.
Supplier Collaboration
Establish flexible and configurable 24/7 collaboration with your global supply chain in a secure environment. Stakeholders can quickly and easily approve suppliers and vendors, manage supplier audits, and supplier corrective actions.
Product Data Management
Autodesk Vault empowers your engineering team to organize, manage, and track product data, revisions, and releases. Keep everyone working from the same design data across your organization.
Short Video Demonstrations
New Project/Product Introduction:
The out-of-the-box features and workflows in PLM help your business to manage products and projects in one centralized location. PLM comes with ready to use NPI, Product Portfolio and Project Management functionalities.
Bill of Material Management:
The flexibility in PLM enables your teams to create and manage the following information in one centralized BOM management environment: Engineering, Mechanical, Electrical, documentation, services and software BOMs.
BOM management with Vault and PLM:
Vault PLM empowers your teams to manage your engineering and CAD BOMs in PLM. On the release of your CAD data in Vault, your CAD data and BOMs become avaiable to manage in PLM.
Change Management:
It is difficult and time consuming to keep track of changes. Additionally, it is not simple to notify your teams ahead of time when there is a change coming. With the out-of-the-box ECN, ECR, and ECO features, your teams become proactive by creating and communicating changes in an automated and timely manner.
Advanced Change Management with Vault and 3D CAD:
The connection between PLM and Vault Professional allows to combine engineering changes and business processes.
Quality Management (QMS):
It is difficult to use Excel files and multiple programs to manage quality related tasks. With PLM, in one centralized locations teams can manage the following processes: Problem Reporting, Non-Conformance (NC), CAPA and Return of Merchandise.
Supplier Collaboration:
Managing your BOM with all the vendor and supplier management information is time consuming and difficult. PLM helps organizations to track and manage suppliers, vendors and manufacturers. It also empowers users to visually track the relationship between BOM items and their related supplier information.
Data Sharing:
Autodesk’s PLM solution makes data sharing and data management easy and accessible. The true cloud capabilities give your users access to the right data at the right time.
Interested in How SolidCAD Can Help?
At SolidCAD, we’re transforming PLM with an affordable, easy-to-use, easy-to-deploy and Cloud-based PLM solution called Fusion 360 Manage.
Our Fusion 360 Manage PLM solution is for the entire company and includes many standard use case applications.
