Key Takeaways:
- Product lifecycle intelligence is a transformative business approach that uses data-driven intelligence to optimize a product’s lifecycle.
- Advantages of product lifecycle intelligence, or PLI, include more accurate demand forecasting, better inventory management, enhanced supply chain visibility, and improved customer satisfaction.
- PLI’s other applications include its ability to help businesses monitor seasonal demands, improve sales for slow-moving products, optimize logistics and transportation, and enhance returns management.
- The process of PLI implementation involves data collection, data analysis, implementation, and ongoing improvement.
- The integration of “smart” plastic pallets can help companies further optimize their supply chain management and reduce costs.
Product Lifecycle Intelligence for Supply Chain Optimization
Product lifecycle intelligence, or PLI, is a transformative business approach that uses data-driven intelligence to optimize the lifecycle of a product, from its development to its eventual end-of-life. By exploring a product’s journey through a holistic view, organizations can make informed and insight-driven decisions that help reduce costs, streamline efficiency, and ultimately improve customer satisfaction. This process plays an important role in driving innovation and optimizing operations in the realm of supply chain management.
Key Advantages of PLI for the Supply Chain
As part of the entire product lifecycle management (PLM) continuum, PLI affords organizations important business benefits throughout the supply chain, from product research and development, through materials sourcing and manufacturing, through ultimate delivery to the consumer. These benefits include:
- More Accurate Demand Forecasting – Thanks to PLI, businesses can more thoroughly analyze market trends, sales data, and buying behaviors to more effectively gauge future product demand. This accuracy can help prevent both overstocking and stockouts, as well as reducing needless inventory costs.
- Better Inventory Management – PLI facilitates enhanced management of inventory levels, by identifying top-sellers and underperforming products while simultaneously reducing storage and transportation costs.
- Decreased Risk – Potential risks, including supply chain disruptions and costly product recalls, can be mitigated with effective PLI. Continuous monitoring of product performance and consumer insights and feedback helps organizations head off costly issues and reputational risks before they become unmanageable. This process can include, for example, the identification of materials and parts suppliers that are located in regions prone to political instability or natural disasters, and the development of redundant sourcing strategies to reduce reliance on single-source partners.
- Enhanced Supply Chain Visibility – Supply chain managers who leverage PLI data have better visibility into the supply chain, including raw materials sourcing, manufacturing, transportation, and eventual delivery. This improved visibility can help managers identify bottlenecks as well as more optimized transportation routes.
- Improved Customer Satisfaction – All the supply chain optimization in the world means little if the end consumer isn’t happy with the product, including its price, quality, and availability. Companies with a powerful PLI infrastructure are able more readily to ensure product availability, meet timelines for delivery, answer customer questions, and ultimately understand customer expectations.
Additional PLI Applications
In addition to these important benefits, PLI has other applications that add to its value. Organizations can use PLI to study seasonal demands for specific products, adjusting inventory levels both to avoid stockouts and to avoid the costs and headaches of storing excess inventories. Slow-moving products, meanwhile, can be targeted for discounts or marketing campaigns that may improve sluggish sales.
Businesses can also use PLI to optimize their logistics operations, improving carrier performance and transportation routes not only to reduce transportation costs, but also to improve delivery times in different regions, taking into account countless factors that include distance, geographical obstacles, and varying traffic conditions.
Still another important application relates to returns management; product lifecycle management can be used to analyze common reasons for returns as well as return rates and trends. For example, if a particular product is found to have a high rate of returns due to a commonly occurring manufacturing defect, new or improved quality control measures can be put in place to address this specific issue. Not only does this process reduce the considerable costs and overhead associated with return logistics, but it is also vital to maintaining both organizational reputation and overall customer satisfaction.
The PLI Implementation Process
- Data Collection – The implementation of a holistic product lifecycle management approach begins with the comprehensive collection of data from multiple sources, including but not limited to sales and transportation data, returns data, supplier data, inventory records, and customer feedback. Various platforms exist to centralize and analyze this data, some of which offer the benefit of powerful integrated AI tools.
- Data Analysis – Once the data is collected, advanced analytics help turn data into actionable insights, including trends and patterns that enable informed decision-making.
- Implementation – The actual implementation of these decisions can take many forms throughout the supply chain, impacting automation, inventory management, transportation planning, customer service, sales and marketing, and risk evaluation and mitigation.
- Ongoing Improvement – Along the way, constant monitoring and evaluation of whether PLI decisions are effective (and evolving industry trends, patterns, and other factors) can help managers make ongoing adjustments — which can involve either slight tweaks or extensive overhauls of processes and operations — to facilitate continuous improvement.
PLI in Action — A Case Study
Product lifecycle intelligence is crucial not only to safeguarding brand reputation and the customer experience, but also improving an organization’s sustainability footprint. A good example of this in action is the implementation of Amazon’s AI-driven “Project PI” model.
At Amazon sites where this technology is available, millions of items pass through imaging tunnels that use computer-aided vision and AI-driven decision-making to detect flaws and defects. Not only are defective items quickly isolated so that they aren’t delivered to customers, but the system also enables further “upstream” investigation to determine whether similar issues exist with other products, whether manufacturing quality issues need to be addressed, and so on. Rather than simply being discarded, defective items can be assessed whether they can be donated, repurposed, or sold at a discount.
Amazon also uses PLI by cross-referencing customer feedback with information gathered by Project PI, further improving accuracy and reducing the possibility of repeated returns and other issues.
Of course, this process reduces costs and improves customer satisfaction. But Amazon has another goal in mind as well: improved environmental sustainability. Product returns generate wasted packaging and increased greenhouse gas emissions due to the additional transportation legs needed.
The Integration of Smart Pallets
Organizations committed to supply chain optimization and the implementation of PLI can further streamline their operations by choosing sustainable, RFID-enabled pallets, such as plastic pallets from iGPS. iGPS pallets are lighter and safer, which reduces overhead costs with every pallet load, and the integration of RFID technology enables more efficient counting, tracking and tracing, and integration with automated storage and retrieval systems.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is product lifecycle intelligence?
Product lifecycle intelligence (PLI) is the process of gathering, analyzing, and understanding data throughout a product’s life cycle. It helps businesses make informed decisions about product development, marketing, sales, and customer service. PLI involves tracking various metrics such as sales, customer satisfaction, and market trends to identify opportunities for improvement and optimize product performance.
What is product lifecycle management?
Product lifecycle management (PLM) is a strategic business process that manages a product’s entire life cycle, from concept development to end-of-life. It involves coordinating various activities across different departments, such as engineering, design, manufacturing, and sales, to ensure product success and efficiency. PLM systems use software to store and manage product data, enabling collaboration, streamlining processes, and improving decision-making.
What are the stages of a product’s lifecycle?
The four stages of a product’s lifecycle are introduction, growth, maturity, and decline. During the introduction stage, a new product is first launched into the market. As the product gains popularity and acceptance, sales increase rapidly in the growth stage. The maturity stage occurs when sales growth begins to slow down due to market saturation and increased competition. Eventually, sales begin to decline in the decline stage as the product becomes outdated or is replaced by newer alternatives.
Manufacturers looking to improve their supply chain optimization can opt for iGPS plastic pallets. Plastic pallets are more sustainable than wood, and integrated RFID technology improves visibility and supply chain intelligence. For more information, contact us at 1-800-884-0225, email a specialist at switch@igps.net, or visit our contact page.