Product Lifecycle Management Buyer’s Guide for Food, Beverage, Cosmetics and Personal Care Manufactu
Product Lifecycle Management Buyer’s
Guide for Food, Beverage, Cosmetics and Personal Care Manufacturers
With intense market competition, food, beverage, cosmetics and personal care businesses often struggle to grab consumers’ attention. CapTech’s Consumer-Driven Innovation Survey revealed that 74% of consumers are likely or somewhat likely to purchase from a company invested in innovation. Managing product lifecycle—from ideation and production to retirement—requires meticulous coordination and control. modern technology like product lifecycle management (PLM) software, you can gain a competitive edge.
The right PLM software can help drive your operations from end-to-end and streamline your new product development. That’s why you need to be methodical in the selection process. This buyer’s guide will provide you with all the necessary information you need to make an informed decision before making a purchase.
Understanding Product Lifecycle Management
In today’s fast-paced, competitive marketplace, businesses need more than just innovation—they need the ability to manage a product’s journey from concept to retirement efficiently. This is where PLM becomes crucial. PLM is a solution that refers to the handling of products and related data and processes through each stage of a consumer good’s existence.
PLM streamlines your product portfolio by ensuring accurate, up-to-date data while providing team members with a single source of truth for seamless collaboration. It can help ensure accuracy between a recipe and its brief and helps generate key values such as lists of ingredients and allergens. Lastly, it can simplify quality procedures and ensure regulatory compliance with features such as ingredient screening. All these processes can become overwhelming if done manually. This is where PLM software can help.
As a software, PLM helps streamline new product development (NPD), speed up R&D processes and ensure compliance and quality control throughout the product lifecycle. PLM helps track product variants, designs and performance metrics, allowing companies to identify redundant products and consolidate offerings, reducing complexity, inventory and production costs. In addition, PLM software can easily create ingredient statements and allergen lists with compliant labels. It provides clear processes and collaboration tools for design, testing and manufacturing. With this efficiency, companies can better evaluate the success of new products and remove underperforming ones faster, ensuring a more dynamic and up-to-date portfolio.
Reasons for Investing in PLM Software
In today’s competitive and rapidly evolving marketplace, managing a product’s lifecycle efficiently is critical for success. PLM can help you keep up with the competition without neglecting your bottom line. Here are some reasons your business should invest in this software:
› Respond quickly in the face of changing consumer trends: Leveraging PLM speeds up NPD and can help your business keep pace with changing consumer preferences. Even with a wide array of products to choose from, consumer needs have been shifting, resulting in new demands emerging. PLM software allows you to respond quickly to any concerns, improving customer satisfaction.
› Create order from the chaos of your product data: Companies generate massive amounts of product-related information at every stage of the product lifecycle. Managing this data efficiently can often feel overwhelming, leading to disorganization, missed opportunities, and costly errors. PLM can centralize all product-related information—such as designs, specifications, bills of materials (BOM), revisions, and compliance data—into a single, easily accessible platform.
› Control your costs as prices skyrocket: PLM can help you cut costs and save money. With consumer-packaged goods prices on the rise, the software can help you mitigate these costs and maintain a healthy profit margin.
Benefits of Implementing PLM
Speed of innovation is the new scale as competition in the manufacturing industry intensifies. PLM helps companies get their products to market up to 75% faster. Bringing a product to market quickly is critical for staying competitive, especially in industries driven by constant innovation and evolving customer needs. Here’s how PLM helps businesses speed up their time-to-market:
1. Improves efficiency: PLM centralizes all product-related data, documents and processes into a single system, reducing the time spent searching for information and lessening errors due to outdated or inconsistent data. It ensures that tasks are completed in the correct sequence and that all stakeholders are notified when their input is required.
2. Enhances collaboration: PLM allows cross-functional teams to work and collaborate seamlessly. It provides stakeholders with access to the latest product information and facilitates communication through shared workspaces and collaboration tools. This ensures that everyone involved in the product development process is on the same page.
3. Ensures regulatory compliance: PLM has tools to help organizations adhere to industry regulations and standards. The cosmetics and personal care industries are subject to the rules of the Modernization of Cosmetics Regulation Act of 2022 (MoCRA) while food and beverage businesses are regulated by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). PLM manages and tracks compliance requirements, certifications and documentation to ensure that all necessary checks are completed and recorded. The software also maintains a detailed audit trail of all changes and decisions, making it easier to demonstrate compliance during audits.
4. Automated workflows and approvals: PLM software automates key processes, such as design reviews, approval cycles and change management, reducing the manual effort needed to move a product through each stage, ensuring that critical decisions are made quickly and efficiently. This helps prevent delays caused by human error or oversight.
Key Features to Look for in PLM Software
PLM software is essential in handling the entire lifecycle of a product from initial conception to design, manufacturing and eventual disposal. The software has robust features for enhancing collaboration, streamlining processes and ensuring access to accurate and updated information. Understanding these features can help you evaluate which PLM software is best suited to your company’s specific requirements. Eventually, you would want to choose a system with the ability to scale with your business. Here are the key features your business should consider when selecting PLM software:
› Data management: PLM comes with capabilities for handling product data, such as bill of materials (BOMs), CAD files and documentation. PLM tracks all components, materials and assemblies required for the product’s production, ensuring the correct items are used and the costs are controlled. Managing BOMs is a core function of PLM because it represents the foundation of any product. It ensures that any updates reflected on the BOM are reflected across departments.
› Product design management: PLM software helps manage product creation and change process at the component level from planning to launch. The product design functionality keeps track of product versions at different iterations to create a single source of truth.
› Project and task management: PLM helps launch new projects, creates observable milestones across teams and monitors bottlenecks. The software provides external suppliers with access to a portal where they can collaborate with your team and track mutual KPIs. The platform also helps combine task lists and workflows to create easy-to-understand Gantt charts.
› Document management: Successful NPD requires a thorough understanding of the foundational role of documentation. PLM integrates with an electronic document management (EDM) system to help generate, track and manage documents. The EDM functionality of PLM is responsible for storing, organizing and managing all technical documents, including CAD models, drawings, specifications, design documents and technical manuals.
› Formulation and indexing: PLM has built-in International Nomenclature Cosmetic Ingredient (INCI) and USDA National Nutrient/CIQUAL databases. Like a search engine, the software indexes or filters component data and matches brief requirements with existing products.
› Product compliance: PLM software auto verifies R&D prototypes against requirements outlined in the product brief. It checks alerts that populate when a product or component is non-compliant or contains allergens. The list is automatically updated when any product modification takes place. PLM ensures that the product remains compliant with regulatory bodies by monitoring substance thresholds based on product type, marketing area and its use.
› Product labeling: Most PLM software has built-in tools for creating worldwide nutritional facts, tables or components lists. It offers multi-lingual support for creating labels that comply with regional formats.
› Packaging development: PLM reduces the time needed for packaging iteration by eliminating back-and-forth emails and editing and approving artwork directly in the solution. The software standardizes the approval process by allowing team members to view the same artwork directly in the system without the need for another file reader or program.
Steps for Selecting the Right PLM Software
1. Identify your business’ specific needs: Gather input from all stakeholders ensuring that their specific needs and requirements are considered. Clarify how PLM will support specific business goals, such as reducing product development costs, improving innovation cycles or ensuring regulatory compliance. Ensure that the stakeholders are fully engaged in the project.
2. Request demos and references: Reach out to vendors to schedule product demos, presentations or consultations. Evaluate how well the system performs in real-world scenarios by having the vendor walk you through different use cases or workflows relevant to your business. This will help confirm that the software you are considering matches your needs. You can also ask for references from colleagues or friends.
3. Conduct a post-demo evaluation: After the demonstration, assemble your team to evaluate each solution presented. Consider the following factors: functionality, integration, customizability and scalability when deciding on a PLM solution. The most important deciding factor is that it should be able to address the needs of each stakeholder.
Best Practices for PLM Implementation
Implementing PLM for food, beverage, cosmetics and personal care manufacturers requires careful planning, collaboration and continuous support. There are several steps that you need to undertake to ensure successful deployment and enhance efficiency, collaboration and effective product lifestyle management.
1. Project planning and preparation: Here, you should outline the timeline, allocate resources and create a budget. Consider the complexity of the implementation and include various stages like planning, configuration, testing and others. Create a plan for training and change management as well as potential risks. The success of PLM implementation depends on assembling the right team and the necessary tools, budget and technology. Thus, you need to make sure that the resources are properly allocated ensuring that each phase of implementation is adequately supported.
2. Requirements gathering and analysis: This involves mapping your current product development process and workflow. Also known as the “As-is” process mapping, this step helps identify inefficiencies, bottlenecks and redundant activities that the PLM can address. In addition, you also need to define performance expectations, such as response time, data processing speed and system reliability. Not all requirements are of equal importance so prioritize them based on business impact, technical feasibility and cost. The final step is to have stakeholders validate the requirements to make sure that nothing was missed and everyone conforms to the goals of the PLM software.
3. Check vendor reputation and experience: Look for online reviews or testimonials from other clients or businesses that have worked with the vendor. This will help provide insights into their strengths, weaknesses and overall reliability. Check their industry experience and years in business to help you get an idea of their reliability and track record.
4. Create a shortlist of vendors: Look for vendors with experience in your industry as they will offer solutions that are aligned with common regulatory, design or manufacturing requirements. Explore their websites and check if there are case studies, testimonials to understand their capabilities. Research about their financial stability. Keep in mind you will be working for as long as possible and the last thing you want is to go bankrupt because your chosen vendor isn’t financially stable.
5. Customer support and training: Customer support and training are essential when evaluating a vendor. New software can be overwhelming for someone who’s not technically savvy, so make sure to determine if the vendor you’re considering will provide the support your team members need so they can be effective in using the new system.
6. Data migration and integration: Transferring data to a new PLM system is critical to ensure accuracy and completeness of the data to avoid disruptions. You must first clearly define data migration goals to help you through the migration process. Establish a timeline that includes critical milestones for each phase of the migration, such as extraction, cleansing, mapping and others.
7. Testing and validation: The new system should be rigorously tested to ensure proper functioning and compliance with requirements. This involves three stages—unit testing, integration testing and user acceptance testing (UAT). Unit testing means you test the smallest testable part of a software system to ensure that it functions correctly. In integration testing, individual components of a system are tested together to see if they work as expected when combined. Finally, user acceptance testing involves actual users trying out the software to ensure it meets their needs.
8. Training and change management: The project team should devise a comprehensive training program catering to different user groups while ensuring that they understand how to use the new system effectively. Change management should focus on communicating the benefits of the PLM, addressing user concerns and promoting adoption across the organization.
9. Go-live and deployment: Once the system has been fully tested and the users trained, PLM software deployment commences. It should be rolled out to users based on the planned timeline. Go-live can be either done in stages (phased deployment) or all at once (big bang approach).
10. Post-implementation support and optimization: Ongoing support is essential to address potential challenges that users may encounter. The vendor handles technical support while the in-house team manages system administration. From time to time, the software should be optimized based on user feedback, evolving business needs and new industry requirements.
11. Review and continuous improvement: Regular review of the system’s performance is a must to determine its impact on your organization. KPIs should be tracked to determine the success of implementation. You should make ongoing adjustments and enhancements to maximize the value of your PLM software.
Here are a couple real-world examples of how businesses have found success with their implementation of PLM software:
“With Aptean PLM, we’re able to make our data more reliable and to work with traceable validation processes.”
R&D Project Manager, Monin
Monin
Monin has been manufacturing high value products for food service and hospitality professionals since 1912. Monin offers flavors of syrup, liquors, fruit-based preparations, sauces or smoothies.
The Challenge
Facing the challenges of globalization and multiple development processes, the company’s R&D department identified the need for a global platform to help them standardize processes and unify teams in a single solution. PLM was the best software to meet these challenges.
The Solution
Monin’s first requirement was to improve supplier document management and simplify the approval cycle. Aptean PLM’s supplier portal provided a secure and collaborative environment for uploading product information. Its recipe creation process allows Monin to automatically calculate nutrition from raw materials and generate labels in all required languages while preventing errors in ingredients and allergen declarations. The PLM solution seamlessly integrates with Monin’s ERP ensuring a smooth flow of information.
The Result
The interface between PLM, ERP and product compliance provided Monin with centralized data and documents in a unique repository. Aptean PLM provided the company and its global users with accurate, reliable and consistent data throughout the entire product lifecycle. Monin also received updates about regulations, ensuring compliance with industry standards.
Yanbal
Yanbal International is a global direct-selling company with over 50 years of experience in the beauty industry, operating across Latin America, Europe and the USA. Headquartered in Lima, Peru, the company employs 3,300 people and has an R&D division in South Florida, focused on developing makeup, personal care and skincare products.
The Challenge
Yanbal faced increasing maintenance issues with a 25-year-old software system, falling short of modern security standards and lacking advanced features like regulatory compliance management. These limitations made it difficult to sustain operational efficiency and adapt to the evolving market. It also sought web-based solutions to reduce the need for maintenance.
The Solution
After a detailed evaluation of PLM solutions, Yanbal chose Aptean PLM for its robust functionality, modular scalability and expertise in the cosmetics industry. The solution was implemented with an initial focus on R&D and compliance features, ensuring seamless integration with existing ERP systems and enhancing product development capabilities. The new solution had the following key features:
» Formulation management: Allows the development of multiple prototypes simultaneously, each managed as a distinct product with its own lifecycle.
» Document generation: Automatically creates high-value documents in compliance with regulatory frameworks, such as US and EU product files.
» Quali/Quanti formula: Supports the creation of both qualitative and quantitative formulations for product development.
» Manufacturing process & batch sheets: Automatically generates batch sheets and adapts manufacturing processes to different production sites.
» ERP Integration: Integrates seamlessly with Yanbal’s ERP system for smooth transitions from design to production.
The Result
Since going live, Yanbal has seen enhanced formula management, automated regulatory documentation and improved data practices. The modular solution supports scalability, aligning with their commitment to innovation and operational excellence. Yanbal’s success also stems from engaging internal subject matter experts from Aptean, who played a critical role in project specification, configuration and stakeholder engagement, ensuring the solution met their initial expectations.
“By
prioritizing security and implementing Aptean PLM, we not only met modern IT standards but also enhanced our product development and fostered better data and document management practices across teams.”
IT Manager, Yanbal
Successfully Manage Your Product Lifecyle with PLM Software
Implementing PLM entails a huge investment on your part. Although your business can become successful without PLM, having one will get your products to market more quickly. With this in mind, you need to be careful and take your time with the selection process and involve all relevant stakeholders as much as possible.
Aptean PLM is designed to streamline NPD processes, increase communication and collaboration with your suppliers and organize and centralize product management data and documentation. With easy access to all the data you need, exactly when you need it, you can improve time-to-market and boost innovation—keeping you ahead of the competition.
At Aptean, we have decades of collective experience helping food, beverage, cosmetics and personal care organizations like yours implement and optimize PLM software. We employ a knowledgeable and experienced team who will leverage their expertise to come up with an “out of the box” PLM solution so you get the exact solution that your business needs.
Wondering how PLM software can help you succeed with NPD in the food, beverage, cosmetics and personal care industries?
Discover how PLM software can boost NPD success in the food, beverage, cosmetics, and personal care industries by reading our blog, How A Product Lifecycle Management System Powers Innovation in Your NPD Process or book a demo to see how Aptean PLM can transform your business.
Aptean is one of the world’s leading providers of purpose-built, industry-specific software that helps manufacturers and distributors effectively run and grow their businesses. With both cloud and on-premise deployment options, Aptean’s products, services and unmatched expertise help businesses of all sizes to be Ready for What’s Next, Now®. Aptean is headquartered in Alpharetta, Georgia and has offices in North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific.
To learn more about Aptean and the markets we serve, visit www.aptean.com.
