Building a Product Launch Portal Internally?

Most manufacturers today are collaborating with their direct material suppliers on critical business processes via email and spreadsheets. This includes supplier quality management, strategic sourcing, advanced product quality planning (APQP), production part approval process (PPAP), non-conformities, supplier tooling, value analysis and value engineering (VA/VE), as well as order management. While some of these companies have attempted to leverage Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, the reality is that ERPs don’t store or manage most of the information necessary for these tasks. As a result, essential operational data is collected in spreadsheets and stored in SharePoint drives—or even worse—on employee laptops. Forward-looking companies are realizing the benefit of integrated management of this data and determining the best approach to implement a solution.

Prior to the introduction of a portal designed specifically for product launch — such as LiveSource — manufacturers had few commercial options, because nothing could manage the complexity of engineered parts. Furthermore, when organizations try to address the missing requirements by building point solutions internally — integrating them with rudimentary interfaces — the results typically fall far short of expectations. Additional departmental solutions are developed to append an inadequate solution, compounding frustrations.

When beginning to address these direct material supplier challenges, departments typically identify a specific problem to address in isolation. In many cases, these departments engage internal IT resources. At first glance, this approach appears to make sense, as internal IT projects are suited to address projects with a limited, well-defined scope. This is particularly important, because in many cases funding is viewed as a one-time expense; long-term support and maintenance are often not part of the funding plan for internal IT projects.

However, the complex business processes of product launch span multiple departments and include collaboration with external suppliers. This makes solving upstream supply chain problems more comparable with enterprise systems, rather than point solutions, requiring long-term planning, funding, and thorough business analysis to ensure that business processes and data are properly integrated. In these cases, commercial solutions are more likely to achieve the project’s long-term objectives and provide ongoing maintenance and support.

This document explores the minimal requirements of a product launch portal — both from capability and technical standpoints — in order to illustrate the benefits of implementing LiveSource, rather than creating another point solution from the ground up.

LiveSource is engineered to support direct materials supplier specific functionality. The following criteria are designed to support ease of use and support for both internal and external users worldwide.

Single sign-on minimizes implementation and ongoing administration support of a user’s access. A well designed, role-based user access, linked to the organization’s LDAP, provides a robust solution to manage a critical area of the application.

Given that the application is open to suppliers outside of the company’s firewall, security that scales to support thousands of users across the globe is vital. To address both security and scalability considerations, the use of a Content Delivery Network (CDN) and Web Application Firewall (WAF), such as Akamai, increase responsiveness and minimize the risk of unauthorized access.

With a global supplier network, multiple language support, including 2-byte languages such as Chinese, is key to ensuring adoption by suppliers around the world. Moreover, translations into all supported languages — even translations of enhancements and minor updates — are made by LiveSource employees that understand the business application. (Third party translation organizations lack the business knowledge necessary to deliver value).

Two-way integration with existing enterprise systems, such as ERP, QMS, and PLM systems supports ease of use and reduces the risk of data issues. A REST API is created for each LiveSource module.

LiveSource leverages a data lake comprising structured and non-structured data, along with data visualization tools that support machine learning algorithms. Modern data lakes are designed to query vast amounts of data in milliseconds — the billions of records in LiveSource can be queried in a fraction of second.

Data is integrated into LiveSource modules in real-time, and LiveSource has developed an easy-to-use data visualization layer. With the visualization tool, users have up-to-the-minute visibility into activities taking place throughout the supply chain — without needing to leave the application. Machine learning allows organizations to move from looking at historical data to predicting the future by looking for changes in behavior that could signal a potential disruption.

The production environment can be hosted internally or through an accredited hosted provider — an option that becomes cheaper every day. LiveSource is hosted only on Tier 4 providers that meet rigorous security requirements and feature minimal-downtime disaster recovery capabilities at a fraction of the cost to maintain two production environments.

GDPR and ISO 27001 certification has become expected when supplying solutions to manufacturers. GDPR is required to adhere to the European data privacy standards — any misuse of data, such as a supplier’s email address can result in a $20M fine for every occurrence. ISO 27001 requires development organizations to follow strict quality processes and procedures during the development and release of software, with a strong focus on security. While these certifications make the development process more expensive and time consuming, they ensure that LiveSource delivers a stable and secure solution.

Direct material suppliers are strategic business partners, which justifies an enterprise approach to supplier management for product launch. Don’t make the mistake of treating this initiative as a one-off business process project — it’s an ongoing initiative. Your organization’s expertise is manufacturing, not software development. Why spend countless man-years having your best people architect a solution that already exists and is proven in the market? LiveSource has nearly 20 years’ experience working with a diverse group of leading manufacturers to design and develop a state-of-the-art solution.

Collect all associated supplier-related data into a single database. Most organizations start with the supplier master, which contains basic supplier data, certificates, and compliance. Currently, LiveSource customers maintain more than 400 data points on each supplier. Once suppliers are connected to your network, you can move to the next priority process, such as Strategic Sourcing or PPAP.

Integrate departmental business processes to ensure everyone is collaborating with a single source of critical information: a single source of the truth. This minimizes the number of production interruptions or surprises experienced during product launch. This is easily achieved if all portal modules are properly integrated.

Implement a robust data lake to support both structured and non-structured data, as well as data visualization tools that support machine learning algorithms. To provide a comprehensive review of suppliers, it’s important that the data lake have the ability to pull in additional data managed outside of the portal. LiveSource analytics is designed to enable users to quickly and easily create powerful dashboards leveraging the vast data stored in the LiveSource data lake.

Our professional services team will help your organization navigate the process of moving from a manual process to an integrated platform. And don’t forget about support. Development of your launch portal will require years of development beyond the initial project scope. Plus, as a LiveSource customer, your key users will have input to new features, developed in extensive collaboration with your manufacturing peers.

Looking for more concrete evidence to purchase a commercial solution? Our calculator, Estimating the Cost to Build a Product Launch Portal, will help you navigate the process of estimating initial internal development costs, as well as ongoing support and maintenance. The figures referenced are from our own experience in developing the product over the last two decades. In fact, we calculated that it would take a team of 20 developers over seven years and $15M to rebuild today’s current version of the LiveSource solution, plus an additional $2.5M annually in hosting and support costs.