Agile - SaaS PLM

sme.agile.com Today's small and medium enterprise (SME) is pressured as never before to preserve capital assets, maximize return on capital investment, and minimize costs. At the same time, these organizations face intense competitive pressures.

A powerful product lifecycle management (PLM) system can help level the playing field for an SME against larger competitors by speeding product innovation, cutting product costs, improving cycle times, increasing efficiencies, enhancing product quality, ensuring regulatory compliance, improving customer satisfaction, and driving overall profitability.

Agile Advantage, a world-class PLM solution from industry leader Agile Software, delivers the benefits of PLM quickly, with the flexibility, fast time to benefit, and low total cost of ownership that is crucial to small and medium enterprises. Our licensing options, including Agile On Demand and its rapid implementation, combine with services that are right-sized for SME needs to deliver the value SMEs seek.

Since its inception in 1995, Agile has been serving more than 1,200 customers successfully. We understand the business processes and challenges facing our customers and we've built our solutions to ensure that you can rapidly turn your products into profits.

Overview

Agile Software Corporation is an industry leader in product lifecycle management (PLM) solutions and provides Agile Advantage for small and medium enterprise (SME) customers. Agile Advantage is a comprehensive PLM suite that enables SMEs to drive profits, accelerate innovation, reduce costs, and ensure regulatory compliance throughout the product lifecycle. And, Agile Advantage was designed to offer the flexibility that SMEs require. Choose the product modules your organization needs, and be confident that at any time, as your needs change, fully integrated additional functionality is easy to add.

Agile Advantage delivers quick time to value. In fact, for those who choose the Agile On Demand model, the system can be implemented in one day, and customers begin to realize value on the second day—guaranteed! Additionally, Agile Advantage was designed to assure low total cost of ownership, with services, maintenance plans, and training options, all right-sized to meet the requirements of SME customers.

Agile customers include SMEs like Colubris Networks, Novoste, ONStor, Proxim, ReVera, Sonic Innovations, Visx. Agile’s enterprise solutions, developed to meet the requirements of large and global enterprise (LGE) customers, serve the needs of global enterprises such as Alcatel, Boeing, Dell, Flextronics International, Hitachi, Lockheed Martin, Logitech, Magna Steyr, Siemens, QUALCOMM and ZF. Our Agile solutions serve more than 1,200 customers in the automotive, aerospace and defense, consumer products, electronics, high tech, industrial products, and life sciences industries.

Agile Product Compliance Management is one of many new solutions added to Agile Advantage(TM) 2006, Agile's new and expanded, industry-leading PLM solution for SME customers. Agile Product Compliance Management enables SMEs to market their products and compete in global markets by tracking of material and substance information concurrently against multiple compliance directives and environmental regulations for each specific product. Today's SMEs face a growing amount of increasingly stringent environmental regulations around the world. Environmental mandates such as the European Union's Restrictions of the Use of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) and Waste Electrical and Electrical Equipment (WEEE) have proliferated worldwide as large corporations, the state of California, and even China implement similar standards. Product manufacturers who fail to comply must pay significant penalties or risk the loss of sales by exclusion from certain markets.

For SMEs, regulatory compliance management imposes a disproportionate burden. With smaller IT staffs and leaner budgets, SMEs cannot afford the additional burden of compliance management solutions. And while many SMEs contemplate manual solutions, such approaches are mistake-prone, slow the pace of innovation, and often fail to stand up to environmental audits.

"As an industry pioneer in the highly technical and rapidly advancing WiMAX market, tools such as Product Compliance Management enable us to design for compliance," explains Scott Woodworth, senior vice president of manufacturing and operations, SOMA Networks. "By incorporating environmental compliance at the design stage, we can ensure that our products meet the latest regulatory specifications, eliminating costly hardware re-spins, and accelerating our ability to respond rapidly to market demands for product innovation and enhancement. We work with a large supply chain, but compliance responsibility for all product content ultimately rests with us. Agile Product Compliance Management is an easy-to-manage solution that provides us with the necessary safeguards to ensure complete regulatory compliance."

As a fully integrated module of Agile Advantage 2006, Agile Product Compliance Management links all product content (design, manufacturing, and compliance) into a single system that provides visibility, enhances productivity, and facilitates audits. One of the most powerful advantages of Agile Product Compliance Management is its change-based logic. When an Agile Advantage user changes a Bill of Materials (BOM) or Approved Manufacturers List (AML), those changes are noted and checked against relevant regulations in the database. Such capability provides assurances that regulatory compliance management will not slow the pace of innovation, a vital competitive advantage for SMEs.

"With increasingly stringent environmental regulations and limited IT resources, small and medium enterprise customers face many great challenges managing regulatory compliance," said Craig Livingston, vice president of worldwide SME operations at Agile Software. "Recognizing these constraints and the serious business problems created by manual compliance methods -- lost efficiencies, the potential for human error, long investigations, the potential heavy fines, and even exclusion from lucrative markets -- Agile Product Compliance Management, with its ease of implementation and management, is designed specifically to help SME's meet today's regulatory management requirements."