Oracle has introduced Oracle's Agile Customer Needs Management, a new part of Oracle's Product Value Chain suite. Oracle's Product Value Chain solution already includes Oracle's Agile Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), Oracle Product Hub, as well as Oracle's AutoVue Enterprise Visualization and Oracle Product Data Quality to provide customers a comprehensive solution to manage all product information, integrated product lifecycle processes, secure collaboration, data quality and knowledge management across the product value chain - design chain, supply chain and demand chain. These tools give customers a full breadth of products to manage the entire product value chain, Hardeep Gulati, Oracle vice president of PLM, PIM, and Configurator Product Strategy, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
Agile Customer Needs Management is intended add to these capabilities by enabling customers to easily capture and prioritize product ideas, customer feedback and product requirements from internal sources including product managers, engineers, sales and executives and external sources such as customers, design partners and suppliers. "Companies still rely on what we call this ‘fuzzy front end' process," says Gulati, noting that the sharing of ideas and customer requirements still being done largely offline. But if you think about it, he notes, the front end is where the biggest impact is. For example, an organization can be chasing the wrong set of requirements and do a great job of getting the product out to the market on time at cost and quality, but if it doesn't hit the right market segment or right customer requirements, then it is still going to be an unsuccessful product.
Agile Customer Needs Management helps ensure product teams can capitalize on key product and innovation opportunities by managing and optimizing the ideation processes via a collaborative environment. The new module provides multiple Enterprise 2.0 features such as tagging, reviewing and comments and an easy-to-use Web 2.0-based user interface to enable a collaborative, open-innovation platform. Agile Customer Needs Management is also integrated with both the PLM process and Product Value Chain to ensure traceability and an integrated idea-to-design for a closed loop product development process.
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