Product Lifecycle Management Blog

When a Supply Chain Director for a national food company decided that Devex PLM, the company’s system of choice, could be significantly extended within their enterprise, she saw four major areas of opportunity.

The complexity of modern supply chains makes managing supplier relationships with disparate, manual processes challenging. Selerant’s Supplier Collaboration Portal (SCP) replaces and standardizes those manual processes, creating a single, central database that stores, manages, and searches supplier data.

In the past decade the race to innovate changed entirely. As soon as the first smartphone hit the market, consumers flocked to the brands that could deliver the most powerful digital experience, even if it meant severing a lifelong customer relationship. The digital revolution motivated even 200-year-old financial institutions to transform their way of working. Companies had to learn how to out-innovate the competition – quickly – to survive. Those who held out too long went the way of Blockbuster Video.

This provoked business leaders to ask one confounding question – Why do some brands consistently produce groundbreaking ideas faster than others? 

PLM streamlines operations by replacing wasteful manual processes with more efficient, standardized processes, and by replacing fragmentation with a single source of truth. At the 2019 Selerant User Conference, one project manager for a major global bakery shared the long list of manual processes previously handled by the use of Microsoft Excel and Word files which the company left behind in its transition to Devex PLM.

When a certain Senior Platform Manager took the reins at a national nutrition brand in 2016, he likened his experience to playing Asteroids, the wildly popular video game that debuted in 1979.

“The system I inherited was our formulation development solution,” he said. Like in Asteroids, “there were bits and pieces flying around” in the many different releases of the many different systems being used.