Varian’s PLM Changes Indicative of Global Shift in Data Management
February 7, 2012
Product Life Cycle Management (PLM) plays an important role in many industries with the medical industry being a prominent one. A recent article, Varian Slashes Redesign Time for RoHS, REACH Compliance, on Environmental Leader, announced a breakthrough by Varian Medical Systems in regards to their PLM effectively reducing their engineering changes from eighteen days to five days.
Of the changes the article explains,
“Using the SAP Environment, Health, and Safety Management application with product compliance functionality and the SAP Product Life Cycle Management application, Varian says it’s been able to understand the chemical composition of its products, more easily redesign components and products…The SAP software embeds compliance checks into the design process, which Varian says helps it avoid late-cycle changes. The software also makes it faster and easier to adjust administrative functions to any corresponding engineering change, Varian says.”
The need to improve PLM is an issue facing all industries, not just the medical. With companies across the globe facing increasing manufacturing prices and lower sales changes must be made across all divisions to cut costs. Improved PLM with integrated cloud services is, currently, the best option for companies. A truly redesigned PLM approach will include a new data management solution and enterprise search to reduce duplicity in design and man hours lost to inadequate searches.
For companies in all industries data has changed and is continuing to change. The difference between thriving despite tough economic times and closing the doors for good could be as simple as how the new, massive influx of data is searched and managed. Adopting new PLM solutions such as Varian is not only prudent but absolutely necessary to compete globally.
Catherine Lamsfuss, February 7, 2012
FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint: Features Breakdown
February 7, 2012
In “Fast Search in SharePoint 2010 – What’s that you don’t get in SharePoint 2010 Search,” the author discusses Microsoft’s acquisition of the enterprise search company, FAST Search & Transfer, and the subsequent Microsoft product development, FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint. The author notes the very visual change to the user experience and a handful of other capabilities that came with the new search. Two of the more noticeable changes include:
Thumbnails and previews for documents — Word and PowerPoint files in the search result will be displayed with a thumbnail of the cover page. Moreover, PowerPoint files can be previewed in the results list without opening the file, either with a PowerPoint client or with Office Web Applications. These capabilities can help end users visually find the expected content.
View in browser — By using Office Web Applications, Office files can be opened in the browser, without installing the thick client on the computer.
The fully integrated search server engine also lets you build user context from user profiles and define Visual Best Bets. New features and capabilities are exciting. But the learning curve and man hours for developing and customizing the features may not be.
FAST search is an improvement over the SharePoint out-of-the-box functionality; however, Fabasoft Mindbreeze is an even greater improvement. Here you can read about enterprise search with Mindbreeze’s quick, service-oriented, and cost-efficient technology:
Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise finds every scrap of information within a very short time, whether document, contract, note, e-mail or calendar entry, in intranet or internet, person- or text-related.
Mindbreeze solutions add value to your business information, no matter the data you’re looking for or the system you are working with.
Philip West, February 7, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Protected: SharePoint 2010 Governance with DocAve Software
February 6, 2012
Gartner Predictions Include PLM and Cloud Services
February 6, 2012
With companies across all industries still struggling to survive after the past few years of economic recession across the globe it is nice to see there is a light at the end of the tunnel. At least that is what analysts at Gartner predict as reported in the article, Gartner Looks Beyond 2012, Sees Big Changes for Payers, Providers, on Healthcare IT News. After studying several industries Gartner produces a report with some very interesting predictions based upon the global economy, technology trends and social media.
A few of the highlights from the report were listed in the article and are as follows,
“Among Gartner’s predictions affecting the healthcare industry in the coming years: By 2014, 30 percent of U.S. private healthcare payers will acquire providers, forcing integration of application suites as delivery and finance merge…By 2015, 30 percent of smart grid projects will leverage cloud services to address big data from converging technologies…By 2014, the five largest product life cycle management software providers will make social networking an integral part of their solution.”
There is a continuing shift to cloud services and new data management solutions as evidenced in the report discussed in the article. As more industries are forced into cloud services due to the economy enterprise search and data management must also adapt. If these predictions hold true it would be a wise decision for businesses to stop viewing cloud services as an ‘if’ and begin making plans on integrating their own enterprise into this brave new world of big data and cloud services.
Catherine Lamsfuss, February 6, 2012
Checklist: Before you Escalate a Ticket to Microsoft Support
February 6, 2012
Joel Oleson of SharePoint Joel blog recently published a list of “7 Things You Should Do Before You Escalate to Microsoft Support” when troubleshooting a system issue. Oleson’s in-depth list goes beyond the obvious troubleshooting that Tier 2, Tier 3, and Engineering should do and includes checklist items such as reading up on your service pack and cumulative update level, rebooting, working with the entire team to isolate the issue, and reviewing code. First on the list:
You know one of the first things Microsoft support will want to know is what version and patch level you are at. If you’re way back, they are going to ask you to upgrade. At a minimum you should be on the latest service pack to address the majority of bugs they will point to. Now understanding that there are different tolerances to patching, this will be something you will need to decide. My recommendation is you don’t install a CU unless you need it. Well, when you’re dealing with what you think is a bug, there’s a chance it’s fixed a CU rollup or more recent CU.
Oleson also suggests reaching out to social solution forums, such as Twitter or the Microsoft Newsgroups.
Steps to help prevent long man hours on the phone with tech support while your system is not functioning properly are, of course, welcome. But this checklist sure sounds like a lot of trouble. Depending on your organization, you may not want to devote the time and effort for extensive troubleshooting prior to calling tech-support. We think it would be easier to go with a simple third-party solution like Mindbreeze, cutting down on the costly man hours.
Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise provides consistent and comprehensive information access to both corporate and Cloud sources. The seamless Cloud solution makes sure you find the right information you need at any time. Check out the full suite of solutions at Fabasoft Mindbreeze.
Philip West, February 6, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Protected: Searching through the Intranet Jungle
February 3, 2012
Big Data Demands Big Changes in PLM
February 3, 2012
There has been a lot of talk recently about big data and what to do with it especially in the consumer packaged goods (CPG) industry. A recent article in Financial Times, Big Innovation Needs ‘Big Data’, gets right to the heart of the issue and lists exactly what CPG must be willing to do to minimize their extraordinarily high rate of failure in data management as seen in the low success rate of CPGs across the industry.
The answer, according to the article, relies on IT departments being allowed to grab the wheel and take a lesson from marketing companies that have proven that big data is the secret to success. Many steps are required to use big data effectively. The article explains,
“The first is building the necessary infrastructure. This includes defining the data and computing architectures for extracting and analysing the data, and working with third-party sources of big data. It also means making the data available to existing innovation management and product lifecycle management systems so that those that are best able to act upon it, have easy access.”
Second and third in this three step process is “identifying operational processes” and “advocating for proper policies and governance.” Only when all three of the steps are in place can the CPG industry begin seeing the overwhelmingly fruitful benefits of big data.
With economies around the world receiving hit after hit cutting costs at any point in the design and production process can mean the difference between a company staying alive and closing its doors forever. Just like the article explains with very real urgency big data is not going away, will only get bigger, and production and designs companies must take the necessary steps to utilize it. New data management plans designed within product life cycle management plans are the last hope for many.
Catherine Lamsfuss, February 3, 2012
Bridging the Gap of Social Business Needs with SharePoint
February 3, 2012
Social business, social media, anything social and it is written up as a weakness in SharePoint. Widely adopted as a broad solution, SharePoint is not exactly end-user friendly or intuitive. The SharePoint Social blog conquers this very topic in, “39 Solutions for Doing Social Business with SharePoint.”
The author proposes:
Doing Social Business with SharePoint is easy and hard at the same time. Easy, because SharePoint has lot’s of basic social functions build in like mysites, ratings, content tagging, blogs, wikis, noteboards, and more. Just start to use them. Hard, because the basic out of the box functions SharePoint falls short of many end-user expectations around social. Customization or the addition of third-party products is needed.
Agreeing with the author above, customization of SharePoint or a third-party solution must be implemented. However, third-party solutions are a much easier answer to the question than customization. Saving time and costly man-hours, there are many good third party solutions that seamlessly provide SharePoint end users with the added functionality so desperately needed.
One solution that is particularly smart and efficient is Fabasoft Mindbreeze. Its suite of solutions solves all the problems listed by our author, including: mobile, website customization, and connectors to other software. Mindbreeze is one solution that works alongside SharePoint but builds connections through an organization’s entire system.
Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise is the leading solution for fast and comprehensive access to corporate-wide knowledge. Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise searches all structured and unstructured data (e-mails, documents, contracts, contacts, notes etc.) within seconds and provides all relevant information structured, prioritized and ready for further use. Staff resources are released to concentrate on their actual task.
Read more about the entire suite of Fabasoft Mindbreeze offerings here.
Emily Rae Aldridge, February 3, 2012
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Protected: Introductory Courses are the Best Way to Learn SharePoint
February 2, 2012
PLM Expert Embraces Next Generation of Data Management
February 2, 2012
A recent blog post titled, Design News Radio Explores Next-Generation PLM, on DesignNews website, announced an interview with Dr. Michael Grieves, a PLM author and professor at the Consortium of Universities for International Studies with the topic being the next generation of PLM. Dr. Grieves has written about how PLM has changed industries for the better in many areas of design and manufacturing.
Within the post we found a most amazing description of PLM:
“PLM was launched more than a decade ago with the lofty vision of creating an enterprise-wide, central repository for all product-related data, from the earliest customer requirements feedback through quality and failure data collected in the field by maintenance and support personnel. The idea beyond this closed-loop vision of PLM was to have continuous workflow and continuous flow of information so every constituent in the product development process, whether in an internal functional group or part of an outside partner, was working off the same set of information.”
Although the description is lengthy we love the focus on data management. Anyone can clearly see that PLM was designed to streamline enterprise search and data management within large organizations. PLM has done wonders since its arrival but as data continues to grow and change new data management solutions must be adopted by companies in order to continue meeting the goals presented first by the original PLM designers years ago.
As Dr. Grieves suggests there must now be a new generation of PLM for it work as efficiently as it has in the past. Companies not willing to invest in the upgrades mandatory to this next level will be left behind dealing with mounds of unreachable data.
Catherine Lamsfuss, February 2, 2012
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