Service providers dealing with enterprise product management are now running twice as fast just to keep up. As they continue to package new offers as quickly as possible to generate new revenue streams, they’re struggling with multiple systems, inconsistent data, and manual workarounds to keep the process moving forward.

With huge portfolios to manage, relentless pressure to get new offers to market faster, and customers who expect a better experience across the board, service providers lack an effective product lifecycle management (PLM) solution which is a critical gap in their current software infrastructure stack.

Inefficient processes negatively impact business

Product portfolio enrichment, shortening time to market and increasing success rates doesn’t happen overnight. It’s a complex operation with lots of moving parts coupled with serious resource constraints, constant politics, and legacy systems that slow everything down.

Two main challenges which revolve around PLM are the general lack of an integrated PLM solution and an essential agreement among key marketing and IT stakeholders on the need for a solution that addresses core challenges and serves the needs of all contributors to the success of PLM. Most service providers do follow a high level formal PLM process with a fairly standard set of stages from definition, evaluation and planning through sales, monitoring and retirement.

But simply having a process in place does not mean it’s an effective one. PLM has always been challenging in large organisations. As service providers transition to always-on, converged networks, however, the scope of the challenge has become much greater. The following dimensions of PLM today put severe stress on effective operations:

The size of the portfolio

The number and complexity of product and service offerings has exploded in recent years. The majority of service providers have more than 450 distinct products and services in their portfolios, and the search for new sources of revenue virtually guarantees the numbers will keep growing.

The number of stakeholders

The primary stakeholders in the product lifecycle process work in marketing, research and development, product management, finance, IT, network, sales, and customer service. Most providers have 40-50 employees directly involved in planning, defining, and managing products and portfolios.

Meanwhile, the traditional PLM model that keeps everything within company walls is falling apart as growing networks of partners become ever more important to offer development, launch and management.

The demand for new products

Today, service providers are launching at least 50 and sometimes 200 or more new offers each year to remain competitive and satisfy an ever widening range of subscriber expectations and demands for personalised services and packages. Service providers in emerging markets, on average, launch almost twice as many new products as those in more mature markets.

Time to revenue

Bringing new products to market requires enormous collaboration across the various stakeholder groups. Some tasks can work simultaneously, such as product marketing, customer service training, and sales; others need be sequential, such as testing and quality assurance. Average timelines to get from initial idea to sales and revenue can range from 32-64 weeks.

System constraints

Most service providers rely on a hodge-podge of systems, applications, and both manual and automated processes across multiple divisions and functions, including product catalogues, charging and billing, customer relationship management and network and service management.

The end result, all too often, is critical gaps in process efficiency. Through the course of the product lifecycle, users generate and distribute data that remains inaccessible to other stakeholders; standard tasks are reinvented from scratch time after time; and critical information is created, edited, and forwarded via multiple spreadsheets, presentations, and project plans without consistent standards, supervision, or enforcement.

All this leads to shortfalls in critical areas of PLM, including product quality and compliance, cost, time to market, cross-functional collaboration and operational efficiency.

A single view of product and service data

PLM is not just technology or a group of people collaborating. It’s a combination of both with a single shared view of product and service information, process automation, product lifecycle process optimisation and change management. In order to be effective, an effective PLM solution must encompass the following:

·Centralised repository with a 360 degree view of product and service information: Enables high levels of collaboration and flexibility across the organisation as processes need to change, at least partially, to accommodate different offerings. Cross-functional collaboration today is rife with slow, manual processes, miscommunication, and missed handoffs.

·A comprehensive process-led business solution: Optimised human interaction capabilities and automation that supports a wide range of standards.

·Better planning and reporting capabilities: Fragmented PLM data and systems make it extremely difficult to monitor and answer critical questions such as the timeliness and impact of individual launches and the profitability of specific offers. Improved PLM provides a clear view into these and other key concerns.

·Integration with network planning: Smartphones and proliferating applications put tremendous pressure on network capacity but gaps in PLM make it difficult to align events in the BSS layer organisationally and technically with network requirements to insure appropriate investment. Improved PLM provides tighter connections with network planning to help ensure the right capacity investments at the right time.

·Product requirement management: Internal, customer, and competitive dynamics almost guarantee that product requirements change as products move through the lifecycle, such that final products are often quite different than those initially planned. Improved PLM would support consistent tracking, documentation, and measurement of those changes.

Service providers exploring new PLM solutions should bear in mind the following:

Maximise existing assets: The practical reality is that most service providers have substantial PLM-related assets that are currently underutilised. In other words, the people, processes and systems are mostly in place already to support a more effective approach. Focusing first on maximising the value of existing assets can generate important improvements across the PLM ecosystem.

Emphasise incremental improvement: Although improving PLM is clearly a priority with substantial revenue implications, big bang overhauls are extremely difficult to manage and fund. It’s generally better to focus on a series of incremental steps that make a difference in their own right, such as consolidating ordering and billing data, moving toward a single product catalog, and streamlining critical processes.

Ensure stakeholder access: For service providers, the most frequent points of failure in PLM come in the connection points across departmental lines. Particularly in large organisations, the sheer number of people and functions involved (product managers and marketers, business analysts, IT and network managers, etc.) makes efficient coordination and collaboration extremely challenging. Zeroing in on the core challenges of information access, sharing, and collaboration yields significant benefits in relatively short order.

Invest in an enterprise product catalog (EPC): The one critical gap in many PLM environments is a central product catalogue. Multiple catalogues result in fragmented and inconsistent product data which form the base of essential PLM systems and processes. In this context, critical steps such as product configuration demand elaborate and often manual efforts to ensure product quality. As such, attempting to streamline and better integrate PLM across the organisation in the absence of a centralised catalog greatly increases the difficulty of the initiative.

PLM gets results

Investing in PLM improvement results in faster time to market, thereby allowing more tasks to run in tandem, while reducing time-consuming administrative work that can cause delays. It also brings about enhanced automation making it easier for service providers to take advantage of early successes and quickly move toward more substantial growth and a competitive advantage.

Improved product quality and accelerated time to market through more efficient PLM inevitably leads to improved customer satisfaction, loyalty and, ultimately, reduced churn.With the process more transparent, inefficiencies such as duplicate work, administrative overhead and overly redundant systems are greatly reduced while opportunities for cost savings increase, reducing churn and translating directly into higher revenue.

For service providers, tackling PLM problems while simultaneously racing to keep up with daily demands is no simple task. It can be exhausting simply thinking about the myriad of people-process-technology issues that need to be addressed. Avoiding the problems now will only make them tougher to contend with down the road.

On the flip side, the benefits of improved PLM are substantial. The fundamental agreement among key stakeholders that product quality, compliance, and improved collaboration are critical areas which need to be addressed should make it easier to get started.