Regal Marine\'s Use of Product Lifecycle Management

Regal Marine's Use Of Product Lifecycle Management

How Regal Marine Is Using Product Lifecycle Management

To Stay Competitive

The ability to effectively manage product lifecycles, including the ability to quickly launch new products profitably, is what often separates the most and least profitable companies in any industry. In industries that are highly reliant on customers, this ability to quickly translate market requirements into finished products is even more significant. The role of Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) is centered on taking the most important product attributes of a future product, coordinating with suppliers, manufacturing centers, marketing, sales and service to ensure the product is produced to specifications and at a profitable price (Agarwal, Gort, 2002). For the Regal Marine Company, the profitability and long-term growth of their company is directly related to how well they can continually design, produce and sell state-of-the-art pleasure boats, water craft and yachts for their customers. By incorporating PLM into their workflows, Regal Marine will be able to be more responsive to market conditions while also attaining higher levels of profitability, as the PLM processes will minimize extraneous costs and delays in getting the next generation of products out. A core aspect of any successful PLM strategy is the use of Computer-Aided Design (CAD) techniques and technologies (Von Buchstab, 2002). Regal Marine can significantly improve overall performance of the product design and development process by switching to CAD-based applications and techniques to further streamline the new product development process.

Accelerating the New Product Development Process Using Product Lifecycle Management

The pace of new product introductions are significantly different across industries, with high tech products having the most rapid, and many commodity-like items including soap having the slowest. For Regal Marine, their lifecycles are between three an five years for leisure and pleasure boats. The pace of new product introductions and the diversity of designs are accelerating in their industry, which is putting more pressure on their product designers and production staff to keep up the pace. Clearly Regal Marine needs to automate more of its new product development process through the use of a PLM system, supported by CAD-based systems to streamline the design process.

The more rapid product lifecycles become in a given organization, the more important it is for extensive cross-department and interorganizational communication to occur, especially in the launch of new products or services (Ming, Yan, Wang, Li, et.al. 2008). For Regal Marine, this is especially important as the company has consistently relied on a high performance-based product strategy that requires intensive communication across the entire company. This is seen in the development cycles for the 42-foot Commodore yacht or luxury cruiser. Regal also has a line of low-end boats and leisure craft as well, which have even quicker product lifecycles than their larger boats. This further underscores the need for having a company-wide PLM system to streamline their new product development and introduction process. Regal will be more competitive when they are able to capture both the explicit and tacit knowledge in their company while also combining it with systems of record to create a knowledge base that their designers and developers can work from to expedite new design and product development efforts (Haydaya, Marchildon, 2012).

In addition to this focus on creating a single system of record, Regal Marine needs to be thinking about hwo they can use PLM as a foundation for system and process integration throughout the entire company as well. By using PLM as this foundation of communication and collaboration throughout the company, designs and drawings can be digitized and shared through their CAD system, making specific design criterion and requirements more immediately known and acted on company-wide (Irani, Themistocleous, Love, 2003).