Analyst Insight: PLM applications have grown up in engineering or technology-oriented value chains where product and technological complexity required a much firmer grasp of specifications and proactive lifecycle management, but a number of market trends suggest PLM applications might offer important capabilities to process manufacturers.

Analyst Insight: New product launch success remains elusive cross-industry, with fewer than 60 percent on average considered successful in high-tech alone. Yet PLM applications have been deploying for over 10 years. Manufacturers claim time-to-market and cost benefits, so why such poor success? The answer is a combination of narrow PLM deployments and PLM providers not grasping the attention of all stakeholders.

Analyst Insight: The industrial economy has been replaced by the information economy. For high-tech supply chains battling the recession and focusing on demand-driven strategies, it's the customer that has undergone the most dramatic transformation. Selling, fulfilling and servicing these customers will require new supply chain designs.

Analyst Insight: Advisors are often asked what's the best system to develop a product. Time and again our data indicates that simple spreadsheets just don't cut it - commercial packages and internally developed systems provide the real-time visibility into the data that organizations need to succeed.