A Product Innovation Platform – The Foundation for Product Success?

In recent years, platforms have emerged as an important element for enabling business activities.

In this era of increasingly complex and connected products, especially as product teams grapple with the demands of today’s Industrial Internet of Things, product teams want to drive their product lifecycles based on the use of platforms that streamline operations, reduce the costs of doing business, and simplify integration of data and processes across the enterprise and throughout the entire lifecycle.

A PLM solution enabled by a product innovation platform is structured to solve many of the difficulties inherent in having to drive innovation with a heterogeneous solutions suite. Such a platform uses modern software and information technology (IT) constructs (well defined layering, modeling, services, native internet support, standards, etc.) to support key elements of sustainable solutions including maintainability, adaptability, upgradability, integration in heterogeneous environments, and others.

product innovation platform commentary

Product Innovation Platform Report

CIMdata cites the Aras PLM platform as such an enabling technology in their recent commentary entitled A Product Innovation Platform and Its Impact on Successful PLM Deployments.

The paper offers key takeaways including

  • Insight demonstrating that product innovation platforms are the foundation upon which functional capabilities, data, and processes are enabled—leading to the potential for much more innovation
  • Evidence that a strong product innovation platform dramatically eases the burden of integrations with an enterprise’s broad range of PLM-enabling solutions
  • Real-world scenarios illustrating that Aras Innovator provides an open and extensible product innovation platform that can be employed to provide an enterprise with a PLM solution that can grow into the future
As the paper concludes, product teams will benefit with a PLM platform strategy and technology that offers an open, flexible, scalable way to manage business process and data complexity and change, supporting the multi-faceted business environments faced by many companies today.

The report notes that the underlying web service platform provides support for many key product innovation platform characteristics including the extension and even replacement of core capabilities. This contrasts with those legacy PLM solutions, especially monolithic solutions, that struggle to adapt. CIMdata sees this situation too often in consulting engagements with industrial companies.

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Read the full CIMdata paper A Product Innovation Platform and Its Impact on Successful PLM Deployments.