New Offering Automates Front-End Innovation Process Across Product Value Chain

News Facts

• To manage and automate the fuzzy front-end innovation process, Oracle today introduced Oracle’s Agile Customer Needs Management, part of Oracle’s Product Value Chain suite.
• Oracle’s Product Value Chain solution includes Oracle’s Agile Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), Oracle Product Hub, Oracle’s AutoVue Enterprise Visualization and Oracle Product Data Quality. This gives 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.
• Agile Customer Needs Management enables 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.
• This new module helps ensure product teams can capitalize on key product and innovation opportunities by managing and optimizing the ideation processes via a collaborative environment designed to facilitate the capture, collaboration, conceptualization, design validation and prioritization of customer needs, product ideas, customer feedback and product requirements.
• Agile Customer Needs Management 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 supports the innovation process for products across many industries including high tech, life sciences, consumer goods, retail and industrial manufacturing. The product also includes functionality for managing specifications and quotes for custom products for engineer-to-order divisions of hi-tech and industrial manufacturing companies.
• Leveraging Oracle Universal Content Management and Oracle’s AutoVue Enterprise Visualization, Agile Customer Needs Management enables customers to collaborate, view, and digitally annotate any product information and engineering drawings to facilitate multi-disciplinary document collaboration.
• Agile Customer Needs Management is integrated with both the PLM process and Product Value Chain to help ensure traceability and an integrated idea-to-design to launch a closed loop product development process.

• “We believe that it’s critical for companies to treat the product dimension of supply chain as a holistic value chain challenge,” said Jon Chorley, VP of SCM Product Strategy. “This is why Oracle has developed a differentiated suite of integrated capabilities targeted at the overall Product Value Chain.”
• “We are broadening our Product Value Chain leadership with the launch of Agile Customer Needs Management, allowing companies to effectively manage creative ideas and customer requirements that will generate the most value for their R&D investment,” said Hardeep Gulati, Oracle vice president PLM and PIM Product Strategy. “By providing enterprise 2.0 social features and an easy-to-use user interface, customers can leverage the collective intelligence of their employees, customers and partners to identify the features with greatest market potential. This helps promote a culture of open innovation.”

Oracle’s Agile Customer Needs Management is currently available.

Oracle’s Agile Product Lifecycle Management
Follow Agile PLM on Twitter
Agile PLM Blog
Join Oracle’s Agile PLM Community on Facebook

Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) is the world's most complete, open, and integrated business software and hardware systems company. For more information about Oracle, please visit our Web site at http://www.oracle.com