Case Study
Product Lifecycle Management Optimization for a Luxury Retail Goods Manufacturer
Background
The client, a manufacturer and distributor of luxury products such as handbags and assorted leather goods, wished to determine if the third-party product lifecycle management solution would be able to fit the needs of its creative teams, materials unit, and sourcing team.
A product lifecycle management tool (PLM) is designed to assist several teams of users with very different concerns. Creative teams need to design the end-product while knowing that the company has the resources to build the end-product. Materials must be and adequate supplies secured. These materials must be shipped to third-party manufacturers for assembly and delivery. And throughout all these processes, expenses must be monitored.
Challenges
The client needed to keep costs of merchandise planning, creative design, materials development and management, and product sourcing and costing low while maintaining the product and brand quality for which it is known and valued. In order to do so, they wished to purchase a product lifecycle management solution rather than build one in-house, to focus on their core competencies. While their functional testing team was adequate to test the features of the solution, they did not have the expertise to determine whether the application would scale effectively to the far-flung teams that would need to coordinate their actions through this solution.
Strategy
After investigating the issues involved, RTTS decided that our standard process and practices for performance testing would accurately determine the workload necessary to properly exercise the PLM solution.
Solution
Working with the designers, requisitions, and production teams, RTTS developed a workload that emulated the maximum expected population of each. This workload was run as the system was instrumented and monitored by the PLM integrator, who examined the data RTTS provided from the test runs. Working from the data, the integrator was able to propose several changes to system and data organization to improve performance.
View the Early Optimization Results
These optimizations were then systematically implemented and tested against the standard workload until the client was satisfied that the end configuration could handle the expected workload effectively.
Benefits
The client was able to proceed with their PLM implementation knowing that it was configured to deliver optimal performance for the needs of the different teams working to deliver cutting-edge fashion in minimal time and cost.
Delivering the estimated workload to the system over and over again, RTTS exercised the server with randomized but realistic data that was consistent but not identical from run to run, allowing the PLM system integrator to optimize the solution to the needs of the client.