The most crucial information for any product-based industry is to maintain and provide accurate and true product details to its end users. These product details are essential for all the teams involved in product development, sales, marketing, consumers, partners, collaborators, etc. Providing accurate and high-quality product details to the users helps in building trust and confidence in the product and the brand thus helping in boosting the business.
What is Product Data Management (PDM)?
Product data management (PDM) is a process used for managing product information. This process includes collection, organization, optimization, and sharing of the product and operation details related to the process development. The PDM system includes all the technical details like the product models, description, dimensions, information of parts involved, supplier and vendor details, manufacturing instructions, costing details, etc. It keeps an in-detail record related to the product at a single platform that is essential for various teams like design, engineering, and technology.
PDM includes the features for product data management and process management essential for product lifecycle management (PLM) that keeps the details of the product from its conceptualization and designing, product until its obsolescence. PDM allows centralized storage of the details and sharing with different teams involved in the development, marketing, purchase, sales, etc. for accurate and updated product details. These details are essential for marketing campaigns and sales. This system allows for gaining the details that are helpful in future improvements.
Goals of a Product Data Management (PDM) Tool
The PDM tool acts as the efficiency backbone of a company, it brings more transparency and a sustainable increase in productivity. The ultimate objective of a PDM tool is to regulate product data handling with more efficiency. It helps companies to handle their product data with perfection across all locations and channels.
In general, the product data management (PDM) implemented company-wise allows business enterprises to connect other software products like CAC & ERP to connect easily with the existing tech modules.
Here are the lists of a few key goals that companies can achieve through product data management (PDM) software.
The quality of the product development process maximizes significantly.
The product development cost and time get reduced to a minimum.
The occurrences of errors like incorrect versions, inappropriate product data, manual data entry error, and so on, gets reduced dramatically.
Data traceability becomes easy with the PDM software.
Brings automation to business processes.
The PDM offers a centralized data repository where all collected data is stored and interrelated based on the relationship.
Why is PDM Important for Business?
The competition in the market is increasing and every enterprise should try its best to stay ahead in this competition by providing its best product. Digital transformation is the needed way for achieving the upper edge in the competition and organizations implement newer methods to improve their product and provide a faster delivery solution at an economical cost. It is important to select the best strategic approach for making the process smarter with reduced risk, enhanced decision-making, improved market performance, etc.
The different activities involved in product data management ensure the establishment of a data-driven process that is essential for optimizing and accelerating the product development process and workflow for meeting the increased market demands. PDM handles the data efficiently with reduced risk of errors and disagreements. It allows for enhanced communication between the different teams within the organization leading to improved performance.
Product data management is very helpful as it saves the organization from the failures that can result from mishandling of the data and reworking in case of failures detected in late cases of product development. Product data management keeps track of the process development at each stage of the product life cycle thus identifying the errors at an early stage and finding a solution. PDM is a helpful tool essential for improving the internal process and enhancing market performance.
Benefits of PDM:
The main aim of implementing the product data management system is to accelerate the process of product development and enhance business competitiveness. The different benefits gained by implementing the PDM system in any organization include:
1. Increasing productivity:
Implementing the PDM gives you centralized storage for storing and sharing updated and accurate product information with all the teams within the organization. This helps in improved communication between the teams leading to better interaction and thus increasing productivity. PDM gives access to all the teams like developers, designers, engineers, etc. to access the same accurate and updated information.
PDM also allows for automation of several operations and processes thus reducing the manual work and errors incorporated as a result of it. This leads to speeding up the process and increasing staff efficiency. PDM can easily integrate with other applications used in the organization thus allowing the direct import of the data from these applications.
2. Maintaining quality standards:
PDM collects product data from various sources and helps in data optimization for enhancing the quality of the data. It ensures that the data quality and standards are maintained. Process management helps in controlling the system revisions and change control requests. This prevents the different teams from accessing outdated versions of details.
3. Accelerating market response:
The quality and data organization has a major effect on the process of product development. Unorganized and decentralized product data can negatively affect business growth. Implementing PDM allows for efficient data management and also helps in saving time, energy, and effort in handling vast data. It also reduces the incorporation of errors caused by manual handling of the data. PDM implementation helps in increasing agility and thus reducing the response time to the market.
4. Reducing development costs:
The occurrence of error due to manual handling of data can lead to wastage of time and money. Also, it will lead to reworking the same task. Implementation of PDM reduces the chances of errors and there is no wastage of time and money without affecting the quality of data.
5. Facilitating collaboration between teams:
PDM offers centralized storage containing updated product information that is easily shared with the different teams within and outside the organization. This helps in better communication with the different teams. These updated details lead to enhanced communication and better decision-making. It keeps all the teams well informed about the several timelines and deadlines thus keeping all updated and ready.
6. Enabling innovation:
PDM shared the updated details with the different teams which lead to increased communication. These teams can collaborate and open newer ventures for innovations. PDM also allows for getting the customers’ feedback from the sales thus understanding the customer needs and demands and using these details for the development of the product. This feedback and insights can help in the development process by providing innovative solutions for further development.
7. Increasing data security:
The centralized data storage facility of PDM provides selective access to the different teams based on their positions and job authorities. It can provide enhanced data security through password protection and different levels of access to the different teams. All the teams can access the data while only the authorized person can have the access to modify or edit the data. It also keeps the track of changes made to the data thus increasing data security. It also protects the data against viruses, loss, and theft.
How can Product Data Management (PDM) Influence Business Productivity?
Gaining the productivity of the business is one of the most vital benefits offered by Product Information Management (PIM). Let’s take a look at how the PDM software helps businesses to increase their productivity in depth.
The PDM software helps businesses to improve their data handling process by storing all the data in a centralized single location.
The possibility of the error due to manual task handling will be high. The PDM solution introduces automation in task handling and eliminates the risk of error occurrence.
The product data management platform allows businesses to integrate with 3rd party applications or software with its seamless integration capabilities.
The presence of good PDM software helps businesses to reduce data handling errors significantly, saves money, and more importantly, reduces employee time by introducing automation. This helps workers to focus on improving work efficiency.
The PDM software supports a collaborative workplace. This enables workers to work as a team and it significantly boosts productivity.
All the above-mentioned operations of PDM contribute strongly to business productivity improvement. Also, it supports businesses in many other ways like optimizing business processes, speeding up the product delivery process, and more importantly, helping business leaders to take efficient decisions during critical or typical situations.
The PDM software is considered the most effective data management software that supports a company to achieve fast and sustainable growth in all aspects. By introducing automation in task handling, the PDM tool increases the development of recycling systems by 4 times.
Conclusion
Product data plays a very crucial role in product marketing as it helps in creating various strategies that allow the customers to connect to the product. The shopping trend has changed drastically and customers rely on the product description, technical specifications, costing, and other details for comparison before making their selection.
PDM allows for managing all the product details right from product conception to its sales and marketing thus providing insights to the development teams for future product development based on customer needs and responses.
