SharePoint – Based Product Data Management. A Major Advantage for Small and Medium Businesses.
Whether you're a small-to-medium-sized supplier (SMB) or OEM, your success in today's markets depends as much on the speed and accuracy of your design process, as on the quality and performance of your products. Squeezed by tight delivery deadlines and limited resources, you're being asked to do more – and do it faster, but without adding to your cost structure.
The solution to these challenges begins with your CAD software, but it doesn't end there. The more robust your CAD output becomes, the faster you're able to turn ideas into virtual prototypes. However, there's a by-product to this increased production: the more data you're producing, the more you must track, document and distribute this data to all those who make up your product-development community.
You face the same PDM (product data management) challenges as your larger competitors, but you don't have the resources – the IT staffing, the finances, and the expertise – to build a comprehensive PDM environment, and maintain it with confidence. But thanks to the collaborative functionality, growing maturity, and prevalence of Microsoft Windows® SharePoint Services technology, you now have an opportunity to bring in product data management (PDM) functionality at a reasonable cost, with minimal effort. The ubiquitous MS Office® SharePoint solution has recently become very appealing as a supporting PDM platform for SMBs today, mainly because it is familiar to most every business user, and it's based on the standard Microsoft Windows interface.
Windchill ProductPoint serves as a vivid example of how CAD software can leverage the benefits of MS Office-collaboration technology on behalf of small and medium-size product development companies. Thanks to the advent of SharePoint-based PDM, product development SMBs can now compete more effectively with larger manufacturers by taking on more complex jobs while keeping budgets stable. Also, product designers can spend more time thinking creatively, and less time trying to organise and manage the data that underlies their product designs.
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