By John Mark V. Tuazon
Computerworld Philippines
July 13, 2010

Enterprise software firm Oracle recently released the new addition to its product value chain in the form of Oracle Agile Customer Needs Management (CNM), a collaborative application that enables users to capture and record ideas and customer feedback internally.

The new application will be part of Oracle’s product value chain solution, which currently includes Oracle Agile Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), Oracle Product Hub, Oracle’s AutoVue Enterprise Visualization, and Oracle Product Data Quality.

The new module will open up the product conceptualization process to other stakeholders of the company, not just the research and development division. “The solution complements current systems by being a central point where different vehicles of ideas can be collated and managed,” explained Hardeep Gulati, vice president for PLM, PIM product strategy, Oracle.

The CNM module can pull ideas, feedback, and requirements from a host of different sources—whether it be from the company’s support community, the support form of the website, the CRM application, or through specialized communities such as Facebook and online forums.

“The beauty of the application is that we have designed it to leverage tagging, group reviewing, comments, and an easy-to-use user interface for easier adoption,” Gulati noted.

Users can also link the ideas to a specific project that materialized in the PLM software “so you can track the entire process down, as well as the entire workflow,” he added.

Gulati likewise emphasized the integration of business intelligence elements into their Agile PLM software, which has been added to the offering a few years back. “If you look at the maturity rate of PLM products today, most are focused only on being able to manage product data, design information, and put all these into change control so that they can have accurate information,” he explained.

Gulati said customers have moved to a point where they not only want to manage, but also get insights from their PLM installations as well, in order to “make better decisions about their products, know what to invest on, see what new products to launch, know the quality aspects of their products, and discover which suppliers to get.”

With the recent versions of Oracle’s PLM solution, Gulati said they have continued to expand on its analytics capabilities. “We can now capture quality, see the root causes of issues, time it takes to give a resolution, map the customers’ questions and complaints, among others,” he emphasized.

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