A semiconductor company upgraded to a new 9.3.x minor revision and saw a decrease in performance. All standard health checks were fine including Averify. GoSaaS dug deep and determined that a core automation API call was slower than expected due to a slow API call. An Oracle patch for the Java API fixed the issue.
While Agile Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) is an excellent tool for product innovation, product development, your company may not be fully leveraging your Agile PLM investment. Your system may greatly benefit from a technical health assessment.
We have compiled a list of some of the most common challenges our customers encounter that you may be experiencing but haven't had a chance to investigate:
Critical Business Process Evaluation
Change cycle time was getting longer to get parts released for broadband equipment designers. This was slowing down both critical and non-critical product modifications. Upon evaluation with the customer, two separate workflows based on criticality were implemented, the low critical one having just engineering approval instead of the entire CCB.
We can help evaluate usage by doing deep analysis reports on trends in utilization and trends to suggest business process modifications aligned to the users and objectives. GoSaaS can help you implement workflow optimization, criteria-based rules, right sizing, classes, attributes and process extensions to gain the best value and efficiencies from Agile PLM.
Disaster Recovery
A data center is vulnerable to unpredictable events, therefore you never keep on data in one location. Mission-critical business continuity in the face of natural disasters and unforeseen events requires advanced preparation and saving irreplaceable business-critical data.
Global corporations are geographically distributed over the world. Data centers should also be separated with a backup built into the infrastructure. You should plan for backup systems with failover or move to a more cloud-centric infrastructure. We can help you create a multi-node architecture with failover or help you migrate to a hosting provider or AWS.
Backup Testing
A company diligently backs up Oracle database exports but not the server backup. A server outage requires a rebuild but is determined that the OS is unsupported. A database backup cannot be recovered unless the server was backed up also.
Having a backup system in place is critical since it will save you from productivity and financial loss if your system gets compromised or corrupted. Re-evaluation of your backup strategy with restoration testing ensures that the backup is operating and performing its purpose. In times of need or emergency, a bad backup is of no use. We help ensure you can get operations back quickly from any loss.
Security Checks
A defense contractor had allowed suppliers and manufacturers to log in and were using a single select list to inhibit visibility to other parts. This was changed to a multi-select list since the business required that multiple vendors could supply the same piece-part. The security worked fine but the multi-select attribute was visible and vendors could see the competition.
Your business may require suppliers to have restricted access to your PLM systems. You may need to audit that data access is entirely secure and that necessary precautions are taken to prevent crucial information from being leaked. Unrestricted access can expose your company's intellectual property. These can also lead to compliance issues that must be adhered to in your industry.
Load Testing
Users at a network equipment company were refusing to use PPM due to system slowdowns and going back to spreadsheets for NPD eliminating the value of enterprise projects and resource visibility. A load test leads to discovering corrupt indices and an incorrect PX implementation causing recursive events.
Users of Agile Product Lifecycle Management may be dissatisfied with the system's response time. A sluggish system may compound over time and be bound to incur frustration and loss of adoption by users. It's worth investigating and comparing with the benchmark for your Agile PLM. A load test of your Agile system can uncover potential underlying optimization issues.
Custom Live Dashboards
A mixed signal IC manufacturer had engineers reluctant to use the approval process and stayed with manual activity. GoSaaS designed an approval dashboard that summarizes all the changes with relevant information laid out on one screen with the ability to approve from the dashboard controls or drill down further for details.
Users of Agile PLM often feel that the interface is not user-friendly when dealing with the feature-rich out-the of-the-box interface. Sometimes, a simplified user experience (with the option to drill deeper) helps get faster human processing.
GoSaaS thrive.gs makes customized dashboards that are interactive. The dashboards show you the most important information first and helps you navigate quickly through the unnecessary details.
Each custom dashboard is made to complement the needs of the user, and the interface outside of the dashboard is given a lot of attention. GoSaaS thrive.gs finds the problem and fixes it so that the experience is more intuitive and efficient.
Recurrent Unknown Errors
Some errors have no apparent reason and require root cause comprehensive analysis. Many companies have had user frustration and process outages due to intermittent errors.
We overlook and become accustomed to the errors generated by refreshing or logging out. This may be a symptom of a more serious underlying server issue. Constant errors and crashes reduce productivity and have a negative impact on your business, such as lost opportunities and income. GoSaaS can determine the root cause whether it is server side, proxy/network, Java version, browser incompatibility, or misbehaving process extensions.
Ignored Security Patches
With a supported Agile PLM version, you get access to all security patches as part of the support. Your system will be vulnerable to malicious activity and exploits. Updates of security patches on a regular basis prevent such data breaches at the application or database level. Security patches are a small effort of prevention to avoid entangled security corrective actions.
Difficulty in Agile PLM Integrations
A medical device company acquires two other smaller companies and as a condition of the acquisition must retain their ERP systems. The PLM team, on the release of a BOM must “swivel chair” to copy part information into the other ERP systems. This can easily create points of failure and consistency of data through the operational systems.
Connecting PLM to other core enterprise software like ERP, MES, CRM or even CAD can create efficiencies and guarantee integrity of data down the enterprise. Integrations are critical to do right on a reliable platform that assures reliability, queueing, sequencing, and failure re-processing.
GoSaaS integrator, GSI, is a reliable integration platform that quickly deploys integrations using common prebuilt adapters or creates new ones. Our GSI solution follows standards for how integration should perform with transactional integrity with persistent queueing. It has a collection of pre-built adapters that lets it support dynamic mappings and data transformations based on complex business rules.
If any of the above problems are happening to you, your Agile PLM system could use a Technical Health Check. GoSaaS Thrive Technical Health Check is a comprehensive multi-point that assesses the architecture, tests the functional performance of both configuration and process extensions, evaluates the database parameters, and if determined, gives suggestions of areas of improvement via Oracle scripts, Oracle patches, or other areas of improvement.
Schedule a convenient time slot with GoSaaS thrive.gs to learn more about how we'll help you spot early signs of an Agile PLM system that have been ignored. We’ll also identify ways that the company can operate more efficiently and give your employees a better experience with the system.
