Product lifecycle management (PLM) has come a long way in just a few years. Throughout the 1900s a product’s lifecycle held a similar concept to today’s understanding: introduction, growth, maturity, decline. What’s changed is the management of that lifecycle. PLM was created as a manufacturing tool to track the millions of parts from hundreds of manufacturers. Today, most companies across several industries are dependent on it to be successful. And, if your company hasn’t created a digital strategy for PLM, you’re at risk of being wiped out by the competition.

Dealing with increasingly complex products and growing competition has caused many businesses to take another look at how they can improve their product design processes. Identifying solutions that will yield the expected improvements can take a long time and may require organizations to let go of long-held beliefs and practices.

Historically, customer data has been often difficult to acquire, clean and, most of all, interpret. With the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT) there has been a sharp increase in both the availability of customer data as well as how much information manufacturers are able to collect from their product’s everyday use. This year alone, Gartner estimates that 8.4 billion connected "things" are already in use.

Companies are still struggling to find ways to manage massive amounts of data in a way that drives their customer-centric strategic initiatives without becoming a bottleneck to the entire organization. Along the path to success, data quality, governance, and other critical decisions around your master data need to be made that can significantly impact your company’s growth.

The consumer packaged goods (CPG) industry faces a number of challenges relating to data, e-commerce and time-to-market. This is a recap of a recent webinar that you can listen to now or continue reading.

Given the current state of data growth and the brink of Industry 4.0, the importance of organized data is greater than ever. The way your organization adapts to the large amounts of data about your suppliers is crucial to your success in the industry.

We live in a world where virtually everything is a source of data. Yes, I mean the type of world depicted in the opening credits of the movie, The Matrix – walls of mostly indecipherable information streaming in from all directions floating around in the air. This may seem like an extreme analogy to some, after all, it is just a movie, right? However, with the advent of housing data in “the cloud”, data actually is all around us. Data is constantly appearing, streaming, calculating and disappearing based on each one of our actions and interactions. So how do we differentiate between taking the blue pill, waking up with real data in our hands, and the red pill, traveling down the damaged data Matrix-like rabbit hole of duplicate and partial information?

This is a featured post from our Stibo Systems Healthcare blog. 

Data security is a topic that’s splashed across headlines for every industry these days. While data is the source of great strategic power for the future of doing business, it’s also become the biggest threat, used as a tool by hackers to hold hostage and demand ransom to ensure its safe return. Like this year’s HIMSS17 conference focus on privacy and security, Stibo Systems Healthcare recognizes the great power and threat that constantly growing data pools present to every person and organization that touches the healthcare industry.

Remember a time before the internet? How about before the main form of business communication was delivered with a little “swoosh” noise indicating that “you’ve got mail”? There was a time when information about your customers lived in notebooks and rolodexes. The only way of gaining insight into your customers’ behaviors was reading hand-written notes, contacting them over the phone or even going so far as seeing them in person! While it feels like the internet has been around forever, the World Wide Web wasn’t invented until 1991 and people have been doing business for far longer than that.