Product innovation brings new challenges daily -- environmental concerns, shorter product life spans, globally distributed sites and project teams. Today manufacturers must deliver high-quality products quickly and cost-effectively -- while retaining and building a customer base, reducing service costs, and complying with international regulations.

After using sophisticated systems for design, enterprise resource planning, and customer relationship management, you may still need to get new products to market faster. Critical departments and functions may still operate separately. Suppliers and partners may have challenges getting through your firewalls.

You need an integrated product life-cycle management (PLM) software solution for collaborative engineering, product development, and management of projects, product structures, documents, and quality. That PLM software should provide an information backbone to help you access relevant information anywhere, anytime. You need the mySAP Product Lifecycle Management (mySAP PLM) application.

The mySAP PLM application provides integrated product life-cycle management software - a single source of all product-related information needed for collaborating with business partners and supporting processes including product innovation, design and engineering, quality and maintenance management, and control of environmental issues.

The mySAP PLM application can help your organization:

• Support strategic sourcing by interfacing with supplier relationship management software
• Provide role-specific, context-driven access for internal and external users to relevant information, tools, and services
• Improve decision-making through insight into projects; flexible reporting; and analytics for portfolio management, occupational health, product safety, and product quality
• Increase strategic and operative control by monitoring product and production changes affecting timelines, costs, and resources
• Provide an open-technology framework that delivers up-to-date data required by enterprise processes for demand planning, manufacturing, purchasing, and sales