Reduce Time-to-Market with Efficient New Product Data Management

Moving new products to market can often feel like a careful game of coordination. As engineers review new data and designs, they must ensure any changes get passed on to manufacturing, operations , suppliers, and other stakeholders who need them. And as these various stakeholders receive new product information, they need to ensure they are looking at the latest data alongside everyone else so that they can ask the right questions and stay aligned.

All this can take up a huge amount of time. Engineers may struggle to properly package and share product data with those who need it, while other team members may have difficulty interpreting this data and efficiently interfacing with experts. The result can be miscommunications, errors, and a whole lot of back and forth — ultimately increasing the time and cost it takes to get a product to market.

This makes knowing how to properly manage new product information vital — not only because it will help streamline your development process, but also because it can free up your team to focus on their jobs and to innovate.

Importance of High-Quality Engineering Data

Not all engineering data is created equal. Anyone who has ever tried to interpret CAD files from a PowerPoint or had to pull material information from a company chat will know this well. Instead, in order to build an efficient and effective product development process, stakeholders need access to high-quality data.

What do we mean by this? It's a lot more than just a 3D model. High-quality engineering data contain one or more of the following: Model-based definition (MBD) data, product manufacturing information (PMI), Geometric Dimensioning & Tolerancing (GD&T), saved model views, associated derivative files, PLM data, and other relevant engineering product data. That's a lot of information that often gets lost in vast authoritative sources of truth and an array of data exchange technologies.

To go faster, all of this information must be properly packaged and presented in order to provide each stakeholder with what they need to advance the product to market. Not only that, but it should all be easily accessible so that SMEs can update it and stakeholders can be certain they have the most accurate information.

The benefits of all this are extensive. Consistent access to high-quality engineering data creates a common language across different departments, helping to facilitate better communication, align goals, and ensure everyone is working toward the same objectives, instead of wasting time searching for answers. In turn, this helps team members make decisions faster, as well as reduce bottlenecks throughout the manufacturing process. With fewer delays and greater alignment, products can move from development to delivery much more efficiently.

Connecting People to the Digital Thread

A key to more efficient product data management can be found in the digital thread. This is a concept in which all your product data — as well as any related communications — is connected together across every stage of the product lifecycle, from design and production to distribution and sales. This makes it much easier to find essential product information, share it with any relevant stakeholders, and improve the efficiency of your development cycles.

But with so many possible sources of data and potential points of contact, creating and implementing a cohesive digital thread can be challenging — which is why we’ve designed the Anark Product Innovation Platform to help you out. Built to give manufacturers a central place to view and share data, as well as collaborate, our solutions make it easy to bring together and manage every aspect of your product information, no matter how technically complex.

For example, automated PLM and CAD syncing gives everyone a central place to view and collaborate with the most up-to-date data, while the ability to easily upload user content, discuss and markup content, and manage tasks helps further streamline collaboration and data exchange. Recipes for publishing and delivering content, such as 3Di PDFs, make it simple to release technical data across the manufacturing and development process. And robust security features throughout, including role-based access controls and dynamic watermarks, ensure your digital thread remains secure, further helping you build faster and more efficient product innovation cycles.

Strategies to Reduce Time-to-Market

Connecting your data and communication methods together is just the first step. Here are some specific ways Anark’s tools help you manage your new product information so that you can reduce your overall time-to-market:

• Collaborative Review Tools: Not only can you connect Anark to your CAD and PLM systems and your various engineering data exchanges, helping you centralize and organize all of your product information, but you can also view this data alongside our powerful mark-up and communication tools. Chat in real-time with your collaborators as you review product information, ensuring you stay aligned as you get work done.
• Simplified Data Sharing: Finding, packaging, preparing, and sharing critical data can take up a significant amount of time. Anark streamlines this whole process by consolidating your data and making it easy to search through, as well as by providing you with automated tools for packaging and publishing information into DoD-compliant formats. This helps eliminate repetitive work, allowing engineers and experts to focus more on innovation than administrative tasks.
• Visual Work Instructions: Manufacturing processes can be complex and hard to understand without proper explanations. While work instructions are useful, accompanying them with visuals ensures that even non-experts will be able to understand each incremental step. Anark’s intuitive tools make doing this simple, helping you to minimize errors and defects, reduce training times, and keep your product line moving smoothly.

Conclusion

Making sure new products move to market as efficiently as possible means delivering accurate, up-to-date product information to every stakeholder. But streamlining this flow of data — which can include design specifications, material details, compliance information, and much more — can feel like a complex operation.

Anark’s Product Innovation Platform is designed to streamline this entire process. By consolidating all your product data and giving you a central place to access, view, and search through it, you can ensure everyone stays aligned. And by providing you with powerful tools to collaborate on that data together and quickly share it with those who need it most, you can ask the right questions, get the right answers, and keep your development process moving forward.

Find out what Anark can do for you. Request a free demo today.