In today's demanding economic environment, market-leading consumer products companies must respond to increasingly dynamic consumer needs and continue to shrink time to profit and gain full first-mover advantage.

To decrease time to profitability, market leaders bridge existing silos and establish decision-support dashboards to holistically measure the critical combination of products, processes, and financials. However, according to a recent AMR report, "closing the loop from actual manufacturing execution, field operation, and financial performance to product development for continuous improvement has yet to become standard practice with product life-cycle management."*

SAP helps consumer products manufacturers successfully overcome this challenge by enabling a streamlined product development process. With SAP software and services, you can:

• Effectively leverage your development partners, co-packers, and co-manufacturers to slash development time
• Integrate governmental and regulatory compliance requirements with the front end of your development process
• Give your sourcing department early visibility into the product-development process to drive down cost for materials and components
• Help ensure that your manufacturing operation is tightly involved, ensuring quality and scale and accelerating time-to-market

Solutions for Streamlined Product Development

Collaborative Development
During product development, you need full visibility into and control over consumer needs, product data and documents, engineering changes, and cost. SAP lets you do all of that in collaboration with your development ecosystem in one single solution. Additionally, SAP's prime partners – the PLM Alliance – help connect authoring tools with SAP's flexible product structure management. The result? Reduced development times.

Embedded Sourcing
SAP's strategic sourcing capabilities are a vital part of our overall solution and create insight into the development process from a sourcing perspective. Early visibility into required materials and components enable cost savings through an increased sourcing window, demand bundling, and fewer parts needed across the development portfolio.

Integrated Manufacturing
Quality and scale issues during production ramp-up can be avoided through seamless processes, a common material master, and aligned development and manufacturing bills of material, all enabled by SAP Business Suite and SAP NetWeaver.

We understand that your business is unique and existing systems are indispensable. To support your specific situation, SAP's consulting services and our partners can help implement the right processes and data models and integrate the SAP solution with your existing landscape – putting all the capabilities in place that will help you to shrink time to profit.

* AMR Research, PLM Top Business Drivers for 2008, Jeffrey Hojlo and Michael Burkett, Jan 25, 2008.

Learn More

• Find out more about SAP partner solutions and services.