The Oracle PLM to Cloud Strategy

The Need for Continuous Innovation

New technologies, products, services and business models evolve, so Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) and product development must evolve, too. So, what is PLM and how is PLM different today?

The industry has talked about PLM managing the enterprise product record for years. The reality is that traditional PLM systems only created a consolidated product development record, but data was still fragmented in many siloed applications and throughout product development, manufacturing, maintenance, quality management, and IoT…. Older PLM solutions weren’t designed to deliver the speed required to achieve Digital Transformation. Driving faster innovation means you have to think about how you can tightly link cross-functional engineering, development and quality teams with IT. This requires a new way of collaboration and data integration. 

Companies looking to pursue their own Digital Transformation should first consider investing in a connected applications platform that manages the complexities of the enterprise product record.  Having access to reliable product data creates a new business architecture—one with a true enterprise product record for the digital thread delivering a complete 360-degree view of a product. This simplification provides you with visibility into the product changes, quality and business process flows that were once hard to keep track of.

Digitally Thread PLM across ERP, SCM, and CX

PLM must become a Smart Connected Application (Platform) that can deliver the digital thread to support new business models. What companies find is that by integrating PLM with the insights found from analytics, IoT, and social data is the foundation of the connected enterprise—allowing for faster and more informed decisions.

Oracle is the only Tier1 PLM provider making significant investments to deliver this holistic and connected, next-generation, Product Lifecycle Management system. This is what Oracle does differently. It delivers a unique value proposition because PLM, SCM, CX and ERP are all on a single platform with a unified data model and they all scale with the pace of your business. It is not centered purely around the capabilities of the product itself anymore, but around the supply chain and customer. This new evolution of PLM that manages the digital thread can be called PLM 4.0.

Your Foundation for On-Premises to Cloud 

Oracle has established the foundation for organizations looking to go from on-premise to the cloud. With our customer first approach, we have built best-in-class Software-As-A-Service (SaaS) applications so you no longer need to staff an entire IT department for new product introductions (NPI) and product launches. With a true SaaS deployment, the cost is stable and the value of the investment always increases as we continue to add more innovation and capabilities into the Application Services.

True to our approach, we will always continue to deliver the next generation of PLM software as it evolves. This smarter connectivity will only make it easier for you to adopt new business models like Product-as-a-Service and transition to Industry 4.0 (you can watch the video of how that is done here). Because of the unified data model, Oracle PLM Cloud technology comes with built in analytics enhanced by technologies such as adaptive intelligent (AI) apps to plug machine learning into your decisions and digital assistants that can speed up product development. Ultimately, this means you can streamline the development of connected products and services.

Agile PLM Customers, You are Safe

Oracle has a longstanding commitment to making each individual customer successful. Critical to this initiative is our continued support of our Agile PLM customers–not just for today, but for a lifetime, as part of our Oracle Lifetime Support Policy. Our customers enjoy the benefits of the industry’s most comprehensive support coverage, which provides major product and technology releases, 24x7 assistance with service requests, access to My Oracle Support including Knowledge Base, and much more. The Oracle Applications Unlimited program is Oracle's promise to continuously innovate it’s current applications while also delivering the next generation of Cloud applications. You also have access to Oracle’s product roadmap to plan upgrades, allocate resources, and secure budgets so you can tailor your business and IT strategy, enjoy reduced downtime, shorter upgrade cycles, and proven upgrade paths and methodologies.

What we previously announced at Modern Business Experience was the continuation of our customer commitment with a new release model. In the past, we have delivered a new release of Agile PLM in a 9-12 month cadence. But we have switched from a waterfall development process with yearly releases to an agile sprint/scrum model for both Agile PLM and Oracle PLM Cloud. Agile PLM is now on a 2 month sprint cycle and we will release enhancements and bug fixes every 2 months in what we are calling “release roll ups” − this is very similar to what we called service packs in the past. Oracle PLM Cloud will now be on a 3-4 month sprint cycle with 3 or 4 code drops or releases per year. This change enables simplified development, quality assurance and faster innovation cycles. The end results − better code quality and support by enabling development and QA to focus “where it matters” in order to benefit our customers.

But it is Not Simply an “Either” – “Or”

Oracle provides a flexible path to the cloud. We make it easy to augment existing Agile PLM installs with added value from PLM Cloud: Adding Innovation Management capabilities in PLM Cloud to Agile PLM provides ideation, requirements management and traceability, and portfolio management. Adding Product Hub Cloud to Agile PLM provides as single unified item master to your existing PLM/ERP solution forming the digital foundation for a migration to your next generation PLM. Product Hub Cloud simplifies your product master data management (PMDM) practices and also bridges the gap between product development and the downstream processes while adding layers of governance. These appropriate out-of-the-box integrations are available. Yet, if you’re a net new Oracle PLM Customer, we suggest you onboard PLM Cloud directly for quick return on innovation.

Together with our partners, we are well equipped to support our customers in any stage of their Digital Transformation. We have the migration tools to move from Agile PLM to PLM Cloud, and we have the integrations if you want to co-exist. Our partners have built extensions on the same platform and use our PaaS to handle advanced use cases: Inspirage has built a solution for Governance and Compliance, Kalypso has built an extension to manage recipe formulations, and XPLM has built integrations from PLM Cloud to MS Office and CAD such as SolidWorks, Creo, SolidEdge, AutoCAD, Inventor, CATIA, or NX – just to name a few.

The guiding principles of Oracle’s adaptive PLM are openness and choice, added value for our customers, simplicity and ease-of-use. With our open architecture, you can perform easy integrations to cloud, legacy or third-party systems. We will, as always, continue to put you, the customer, first.

If you’re interested in learning what the analysts say about Oracle PLM Cloud, read this ebook written by top PLM analyst firm CIMdata or watch the video.

For more information about Oracle PLM, check the Oracle PLM Website.