Regal Marine's Use Of Product Lifecycle Management How Regal Marine Is Using Product Lifecycle Management

To Stay Competitive

The ability to effectively manage product lifecycles, including the ability to quickly launch new products profitably, is what often separates the most and least profitable companies in any industry. In industries that are highly reliant on customers, this ability to quickly translate market requirements into finished products is even more significant. The role of Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) is centered on taking the most important product attributes of a future product, coordinating with suppliers, manufacturing centers, marketing, sales and service to ensure the product is produced to specifications and at a profitable price (Agarwal, Gort, 2002). For the Regal Marine Company, the profitability and long-term growth of their company is directly related to how well they can continually design, produce and sell state-of-the-art pleasure boats, water craft and yachts for their customers. By incorporating PLM into their workflows, Regal Marine will be able to be more responsive to market conditions while also attaining higher levels of profitability, as the PLM processes will minimize extraneous costs and delays in getting the next generation of products out. A core aspect of any successful PLM strategy is the use of Computer-Aided Design (CAD) techniques and technologies (Von Buchstab, 2002). Regal Marine can significantly improve overall performance of the product design...

For Regal Marine, their lifecycles are between three an five years for leisure and pleasure boats. The pace of new product introductions and the diversity of designs are accelerating in their industry, which is putting more pressure on their product designers and production staff to keep up the pace. Clearly Regal Marine needs to automate more of its new product development process through the use of a PLM system, supported by CAD-based systems to streamline the design process.
The more rapid product lifecycles become in a given organization, the more important it is for extensive cross-department and interorganizational communication to occur, especially in the launch of new products or services (Ming, Yan, Wang, Li, et.al. 2008). For Regal Marine, this is especially important as the company has consistently relied on a high performance-based product strategy that requires intensive communication across the entire company. This is seen in the development cycles for the 42-foot Commodore yacht or luxury cruiser. Regal also has a line of low-end boats and leisure craft as well,…