Profitable growth is essential to the success of your business. In today's volatile and demanding economic environment, forward-thinking product divisions continue to shrink time to profit to distance themselves from the competition. The most effective way to decrease time to profit is to bridge existing silos and establish decision-support dashboards, enabling holistic measurement of the critical combination of products, processes, and financials. However, according to a recent AMR report "PLM Top Business Drivers for 2008," "closing the loop from actual manufacturing execution, field operation, and financial performance to product development for continuous improvement has yet to become standard practice with product life-cycle management."*

Software and services from SAP and our partners can help you tie together development, sourcing, manufacturing and external partners to enabling collaborative development, embedded sourcing for materials and components, and integrated manufacturing for smooth production ramp-up and market launch. Portal and business intelligence technologies also can help provide real-time insight into key processes and performance indicators across your entire business network.

With a portfolio of software and services from SAP and its partners, best-run businesses can minimise time to profit by:

• Shortening development times through collaboration
• Cutting costs for materials and components through an increased sourcing window
• Reducing quality-related issues and costs through smooth production ramp up

Solutions for Streamlined Product Development

Collaborative Development
During product and service development, you need full visibility and control over product data and documents, engineering changes, and cost. SAP helps you accomplish all this in collaboration with your development ecosystem with one single solution. Additionally SAP's prime partners – the PLM Alliance – help connect authoring tools with SAP's flexible product structure management. Together, they contribute towards dramatically reduced development times.

Embedded Sourcing
SAP's strategic sourcing capabilities are a vital part of our overall solution and create insight into the development process from a sourcing perspective. Early visibility of required materials and components enable cost savings through an increased sourcing window, demand bundling, and fewer parts needed across the development portfolio.

Integrated Manufacturing
SAP Business Suite and SAP NetWeaver can help you avoid quality and scale issues by helping to ensure seamless processes, a common material master, and aligned development and manufacturing bills of material.

We understand that your business is unique and existing systems are indispensable. To support your specific situation, SAP Consulting services and our partners can help implement the right processes and data models and integrate the SAP solution with your existing landscape – putting all the capabilities in place that will help you to shrink time to profit.

* AMR Research, PLM Top Business Drivers for 2008, Jeffrey Hojlo and Michael Burkett, Jan 25, 2008.

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