DAN STARESINIC Global Marketing Director, Consumer Products

www.siemens.com/plm/brand

Why is so little IT investment directed at supporting improved innovation performance
when innovation is the dominant driver of brand growth?
chain management, production planning, and
even customer relationship management.
But ERP has not done much to support brand man-
agement, R&D, or the end-to-end innovation
processes of your company.
It is good that your general ledger is under control and
managed by modern technolo-
gy, but your innovation process
still lives in the 1980’s.
A warning from Booz Allen
Hamilton, stemming from its
Global Innovation 1000
[2007] study:

“We found that companies place an increased value on innovation, but more spending doesn’t necessarily lead to smarter spending or better results . . .”

In other words, if the innovation process is broken, fix it before pouring more money through it. Fixing it involves a strategic examination of PLM technology.

improve your new product success rate by control-
ling the processes that begin with consumer insight
and extend the whole way through to consumer
experience (chart below).
PLM is not new; it is just new to most CPG and F&B
companies. It has been around as long as ERP. But
THE ROLE OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
IN LEADING COMPANIES

‘PLM,’ ONE OF YOUR MOST IMPORTANT IT PLATFORMS, might better be termed ‘brand lifecycle management,’ as it puts you and your people in control of the process from consumer research to consumer experience.

In Your Company, IT Must Be

About Innovation

The next wave of enterprise IT in CPG and F&B has begun, and it includes a fundamentally different kind of system that goes under the name “PLM” (Product Lifecycle Management). But it would really be better to think of it as BRAND lifecycle management, because this technology is designed to

while CPG and F&B companies were implementing ERP to get control of the vast numbers of transactions involved with producing billions of individual products for the world’s consumers, other industries were implementing PLM to get control of products such as aircraft carriers or luxury sedans that contain