Faced with increased global competition, manufacturers know that to stay competitive they need to be innovative and cost effective in both product development and manufacturing.

Lead time is a very important business factor with respect to product introduction time, since customers require customisations of standard products while they expect short delivery times.

Overall engineering and production efficiency often become the most critical factors of modern engineering-driven manufacturing businesses. The ability to innovate and turn good ideas paired with customer specifications into new products, shipping them to customers and maintaining products on a long term base is paramount to most manufacturing companies.

To be efficient in all business processes, admittance to all relevant information is a must. Without early and controlled access to critical product and production information, decisions cannot be made with confidence. Companies must therefore ensure that all product-specific information is consistent and available to everyone involved in the process, internally as well as externally, e.g. parts engineering sub-suppliers and other collaboration partners.
Manufacturing companies in the engineer-to-order industry have already invested in Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems as they have identified the need to carefully plan and monitor every aspect of the sourcing and manufacturing process in order to enhance the product production lifecycle. On the engineering side, traditional product lifecycle management (PLM) solutions speed up the flow of work and information throughout the product definition lifecycle. However, a lack of integration between the definition lifecycle systems and the product production lifecycle systems often leads to situations, where engineering data and information is inconsistent with production data. Data is typically stored in different locations, and a significant manual effort is required to ensure consistency of data across all company functions and departments.

This can lead to a waste of man hours and errors will occur, since engineers are forced to perform administrative technical data handling tasks, when they really should be spending time on innovating and designing new products as well as optimising production processes. Our product, BlueStar PDM/PLM, stems/springs from an analytical considerations about how to overcome this predicament.

By integrating your existing ERP system with a PLM solution, the gap between your product production lifecycle and your product definition lifecycle is bridged, and your business processes become much more efficient.

BlueStar PDM/PLM offers:

One Company – One System
A full integration of MS Dynamics AX (ERP) and BlueStar PDM/PLM