Desktop Engineering recently wrote an article about Microsoft's new PLM implementation and the benefits of the innovative approach they took.
After many PLM (product lifecycle management) implementation attempts that did not meet their standards, Microsoft decided they needed to do something different. The team required rapid deployment capabilities, ruling out pretty much any other traditional PLM/PDM system. The company decided they needed to take an agile approach to PLM in order to meet their aggressive timeline.
Desktop Engineering says that the global leader set out to consolidate and standardize its hardware groups on a core product development platform using an alternative approach - building on top of an open, cloud-based PLM platform and leveraging its expertise in agile methodologies. The approach Microsoft took is beneficial to many companies because it is a flexible process that has high user involvement, which reduces the risk that you spend a lot of time developing something that isn't what the users want. Microsoft's agile implementation of Aras led to a global deployment completed in record time and has lots more functionality than the previous PLM system they had.
Boris Cononetz, the senior business operations and program management manager at Microsoft explains that with Aras and the agile implementation method, "We built the same capabilities or better in nine months than what it had taken us about seven or either years to create with the previous systems."
Read the full article by Desktop Eningeering: http://aras.com/plm/003286