The benefits of PLM platforms are obvious – what organization doesn’t want to enable better collaboration, efficiency, and quality? However, the reality for many organizations is that the benefits of a PLM platform are never fully realized.
Why? Because validating quality to ensure a robust PLM platform is often neglected because it’s a highly manual activity that takes effort and focus away from revenue-generating activities. The result is a slow decline in the benefits of a PLM platform.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. As we’ll find out in this blog, there’s been a paradigm shift in the way that PLM platforms are tested, maintaining and enhancing quality – and securing all the benefits they offer.
The QA Black Hole That Prevents PLM Systems Achieving Their Full Potential
A PLM platform creates a single point of truth by bringing together systems in every part of the business – tools that cover collaboration and reporting, workflow and change management, project management, manufacturing product management, CAD management, business intelligence, quality management, bill of material management, supplier collaboration, change management, and more.
PLM platforms are, therefore, highly complex tools. To add to the complexity, in many cases, it isn’t just one system that looks after each element. Mergers, acquisitions, or migrations may mean an organization has multiple tools for a single activity. Plus, as well as the systems feeding into the PLM, there are also the everyday systems such as Microsoft 365 or Adobe that it needs to interface with.
Every one of those systems will be regularly quality assured individually by the vendor. Any updates will likely be QAed by an organization before they’re rolled out, too. But what about how those updates impact longer user journeys and workflows that involve other systems on the PLM platform?
That’s the big stumbling block for many organizations. The truth is that validating quality in a PLM system is challenging.
It’s typically a highly manual process that often involves end users testing workflows that cross multiple systems and multiple technologies (think web-based or client-based, for example). Often, those end users are highly paid individuals who have got a wealth of other, revenue-generating activities they could be working on.
The reality is that if implementing a PLM platform upgrade requires an engineer to spend a month of their time testing, many organizations will choose not to implement the upgrade.
It ultimately slows down the organization because it isn’t keeping pace with the latest developments and doesn’t have the single source of truth that a PLM needs to provide. It’s also exposed to cyber security risks because it isn’t using the latest software versions that maximize protection from attacks.
So, if those are the problems, what’s the solution? How can organizations validate their PLM systems more effectively and efficiently to reap the productivity rewards across the business?
For the answer, we need to turn to Keysight Eggplant’s automated PLM validation solution.
The Keysight Eggplant PLM Validation Solution
Keysight Eggplant is a leader in validating the end-user experience. It’s a model-based, AI-powered test automation tool.
It is the only software automation testing and validation tool that sees through the end user’s eyes. This gives it three important features that add up to one significant benefit that makes it incredibly valuable for PLM validation.
First, it’s technology-agnostic. As we’ve seen, PLM platforms touch multiple platforms and use multiple technologies. Eggplant sees through the end user’s eyes, so it can look at all those interfaces in the same way that an end user does.
Second, it’s device-agnostic. End users want and need an omni-channel experience – they expect to be able to switch seamlessly between Windows or Mac, Linux or a mobile device. Keysight Eggplant can cope with this device switching.
The third reason is that because Keysight Eggplant uses machine learning techniques to recognize images and read text in the same way that a human user does, it’s non-invasive. It isn’t linked to your code base, and it doesn’t need access to your document object model.
This means Keysight Eggplant can be safely used in secure industries such as healthcare or defense.
But even outside those industries, because Keysight Eggplant isn’t inside your systems, it doesn’t slow them down while it’s validating user journeys, so productivity isn’t impacted when a system is under test.
(Having said that Keysight is non-invasive, it’s also important to note that doesn’t mean it can only focus on the user interface. It can also call on APIs so it can be used as a software test automation tool that supports continuous integration / continuous deployment through the software development lifecycle.)
Taken together, these three features mean that Keysight Eggplant can test end-to-end user journeys. A typical PLM user journey will involve switching between two or more platforms or technologies in a single interaction. Because Keysight Eggplant sees through the end user’s eyes and is technology-agnostic, device-agnostic, and non-invasive, it can cope with this switching with ease.
These features are clearly valuable. But what difference do they make to the process of PLM validation? Simply, a huge difference.
The PLM Validation Benefits That Keysight Eggplant Customers See
Keysight Eggplant requires an initial investment, but the long-term cost savings, efficiency gains, and error reduction mean there is significant return on investment.
Keysight Eggplant customers report numerous benefits from automating the PLM validation process.
For example, automating repetitive tasks can achieve resource optimization of 30-40%. Automating testing scripts enhances repeatability and ensures validation coverage of more than 90%. It enables comprehensive validation across functional and non-functional processes before any new release, meaning updates can be rolled out more frequently. The automated reporting capabilities streamline data analysis, delivering key insights that enhance data quality.
Above all, enhancing the efficiency and consistency of the PLM through automation unlocks the ability to deliver significant customer improvements by ensuring the platform is the single source of truth it needs to be.
See Keysight Eggplant in Action
To find out more about Keysight Eggplant’s PLM validation potential, a great start is our 45-minute webinar Automated PLM/CAD Validation: A Paradigm Shift. During the session, Steve Barreto and Karamveer Singh, Senior Solutions Engineers at Keysight Eggplant explore its use cases and demo Keysight Eggplant in PLM validation, CAD validation, and PDF validation.
Embracing the Automated PLM Validation with Keysight Eggplant
Automation is often touted as the solution to everything these days. But the truth is PLM validation with Keysight Eggplant is a classic example of essential automation. It makes your validation scalable, flexible, agile, and repeatable. It removes manual tasks, and frees your best people up to focus on the new projects and the new innovations that will secure your organization’s future.
To find out more, read How to Test Product Lifecycle Management Platforms or request a software trial today.