Oracle offers new product lifecycle management capabilities for process manufacturers

Oracle says the latest version of its Agile product lifecycle management (PLM) software suite will help process-oriented manufacturers such as food and beverage makers better cope with the twin challenges of getting new products to market quickly while also adhering to rapidly expanding regulatory reporting requirements.

By Sidney Hill September 23, 2009

Oracle says the latest version of its product lifecycle management (PLM) software suite will help process-oriented manufacturers such as food and beverage makers better cope with the twin challenges of getting new products to market quickly while also adhering to rapidly expanding regulatory reporting requirements.

The new solution, Oracle Agile Product Lifecycle Management for Process (PLM) 6.0, was released September 22.
"PLM is now a strategic tool for process manufacturers as they seek to mitigate risks, improve productivity and drive profitable innovations," said Hardeep Gulati, Oracle VP, PLM product strategy. "With this release, Oracle is able to offer customers the most complete food and beverage PLM capability in the market today. This further extends our enterprise-class PLM offerings by providing the food and beverage industry with what they need, out-of-the-box, all delivered within a scalable PLM framework."
According to Gulati, the new package has three capabilities that will greatly enhance the product development and management processes for food and beverage manufacturers:
• Enhanced functionality for product traceability and regulatory compliance:
• Features for integrating formula and label development; and
• The ability for rapid deployment and adoption of all solutions in the package.
The product traceability and regulatory compliance functionality includes:

• Improved Computer-Aided Compliance Screening Tool: Simultaneously analyzes recipes for compliance against multiple government regulations and market-driven constraints in real-time. The enhancements also help break down the barriers between recipe design teams and quality and compliance groups, speeding time to market and ensuring compliance.
• Impact Analysis and Change Management Dashboard: Identifies and traces products affected by recipe or packaging changes and initiates change management processes across all relevant products, balancing the need for governance and traceability with the need to react quickly to changes. This helps minimize errors and increase productivity, while also enabling customers to manage complex inter-related product hierarchies with easy to use tools.
• Integrated Label Claims Determination Tools: Analyze products to determine if certain label claims are valid across multiple regulatory rule sets. Increased automation in claims determination processes reduces risk of error, reduces cycles between R&D and regulatory, and can help identify additional opportunities for marketing.
• Improved Supplier Collaboration and Compliance: Electronic signatures and an expanded supplier self service portal that includes supplier-initiated product change requests and support for finished goods collaboration for co-pack and private label business scenarios.

The integrated formula and label development capabilities include the following:
• Enhanced Formula Commercialization Tools: Enable and streamline the evolution of bench formulas into commercialized recipes.
• Improved Label Development Tools: Dynamically generate label nutrition, ingredient statements and other technical label data directly from recipes for multiple markets, regions and countries.
Rapid deployment and adoption are aided by the following:
• Standardized Out-of-the-Box Industry Data Model and Processes: Accelerates time to value and promotes best practices.
• New User Interface Controls: Improves user adoption by providing drag and drop, type-ahead search, in-line table editing, powerful querying tools and more streamlined navigation.
• Exposed PLM Backbone: Helps improve deployment time by quickly integrating unique customer needs through the easily accessible SOA layer.
Tyson Foods has used Oracle Agile for Process and is bullish on the new release. "Oracle has been a great partner and has worked with us extensively to understand both our strategic goals and our day-to-day processes," said Craig Bacon, Senior VP, research and development, Tyson Foods, Inc . "We have seen tremendous benefit to date using Oracle’s PLM for Process solution including an improvement in our time to market of over 50 percent. We anticipate even greater benefit with this release as it will help us better manage our product complexity and provide important new capabilities that will allow for efficient and deep collaboration with our suppliers."

 

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