NPD Solution Architecture | IFT’s solution is a single, all in one application, relying on Planisware™, a software technology that was designed and built from the ground up, with over 300 man-years of development effort. Since you may have other systems and tools that need access to your NPD solution’s master data, we provide several ways to easily share data with other systems. | | NPD Solution Feature Summary | IFT’s solution includes all the tools necessary, including web services, to automatically share data with other software and to quickly build and maintain custom interfaces with your other systems. |
Strategic Planning and Roadmapping
- Strategic objectives roadmaps, by business unit
- Composite roadmaps combining activities from multiple roadmap layers: customer needs, technology, product, platforms, etc.
- Dependencies between roadmap items, visible in a single view
- Simulations and impact analysis of adding, delaying, replacing or deleting a platform or product
- Integration with portfolio management, scoring & prioritization capabilities and financial budgeting
- Configurable, graphical executive dashboards
Resource capacity planning, Budgeting and forecasting
- Resource breakdown structure to define resource pools and generic resources
- Define generic resource supply over time
- Define generic resource demand by project
- Calculate resource costs based on resource cost rating tables
- Visualize resource supply versus demand for portfolio oconstraints
- Scenario analysis for different resource plans
- Graphical dashboards for resource capacity planning
Stage-Gate Governance
- Multiple innovation processes comprising multiple stages and gates
- Mandatory and optional activities for each stage for each process
- Links to worksheets and deliverables templates for each stage and gate
- Navigation to each stage and gate content through graphical process diagram
- Mandatory deliverables per stage
- Proactive mechanisms for gate meetings : alerts, schedule, content, deliverables to review, etc
- Scorecard : specific to each gate, individual scoring with automatic consolidation for gate meeting
- Each gate can have a different set of gate-keepers
- Output of gate meetings stored including scoring
- Project status can be set to Kill, Hold, Go and Re-do at each gate
- Fully configurable role based access to projects, stages and gates
- Full integration of the stage-gate process with the project plan, resource scheduling and cost management
Document Management
- Documents all stored in a central repository
- Mandatory documents can be associated with processes (for approvals, etc)
- Check-in, Check-out
- Document version control
- Document access control
- Incoming and external dynamical URL links for any pages and all types of external applications
- Document work-flow, to route documents for editing and review
Project Management & Collaboration
- Project templates
- Management of key milestones: gates, deliverables, contractual events
- Standardization of WBS based on activity templates
- Issues management: scope, integration, quality, risks, etc.
- Version control, unlimited baselines
- Workflow for project validation and scope changes
- Automated estimation of activity duration, cost, load, etc. based on business rules
- Web-based, integrated and comprehensive scheduling engine
- All graphic functions, web-native and interactive: Gantt, critical path, load charts, PERT network, etc.
- Bi-directional seamless integration with MS Project, as an alternative to built-in scheduling features
- Inter-project dependence links between milestones for management of shared platforms & development
- Integration of OEM/contractors schedule
- Comprehensive scheduling model: support of CPM and effort driven scheduling
Resource Management and Time Tracking
- Work request management with resource search engine
- Time tracking for all types of activities: projects, administration, etc.
- Multi-level configurable workflow for resource allocation and time-tracking approval
- Medium-term capacity planning
- Management of internal and contractor resources
- Skills management
- Multiple and variable rates for resource cost calculation
- Matrix organization for management of shared resources from different departments.
- Multiple viewpoints for resource effort consolidation: departments, skills, etc.
Portfolio Management
- Dynamic portfolio definitions and membership based on defined project criteria
- Metrics for project prioritization, based on financial value, strategic alignment risk and portfolio balance
- Project dependencies on other projects
- Graphical visualizations of portfolio analytics including bubble charts and pie charts
- Definable scorecards quantative evaluation of projects
- Multiple constraint analysis for portfolio selection
- Efficient frontier visualization
- Configurable key performance indicators
- Roll up of metrics from projects to the portfolio level
- Multiple portfolio scenario definitions
- Comparison of rolled up portfolio metrics
- What-if and sensitivity analysis
- Configurable portfolio performance dashboards
Idea Management
- Configurable idea capture forms
- Configurable idea workflow automation
- Idea searching and browsing
- Centralized idea bank
- Document management
- Task management and email notification
- Collaborative discussion threads
- Recognition and rewards
- Dashboards and KPIs
- Screening and idea selection
- Simple and sophisticated scoring criteria: financial (ROI, NPV, IRR), market, risks, etc..
- Performance dashboards and KPIs
- Visualization of the idea portfolio according to multiple dimensions and dash-board types: funnel, matrix, scorecards, etc.
- Automatic conversion of selected ideas into stage-gate project templates
Reporting and Analytics
- User configurable graph wizard. Graphs can be defined, saved and shared with other users, and report on any and all data in the system. Graphs include bubble charts, 2D and 3D bar charts, radar charts, scatter graphs, line graphs, gantt charts, pert charts, organization tree charts, funnel charts, pie charts, performance dials and tornado charts.
- User configurable table wizard. Create, save and share tabular reports including scorecards, pivot tables, and time-trend tables.
- User configurable dashboards. Create, save and share dashboards that combine user-configured tables and graphs.
- One-click data export to Microsoft Excel of all graphs and tables
- One-click PDF reports of all graphs and tables
- Report builder for pre-formatted standard reports for online and pdf viewing
- Data export wizard. Define data to be exported via XML to Microsoft Excel and Word for preformatted Excel and Word reports, forms and dashboards. One-click refresh of data from MS Excel and MS Word documents.
- Automatic email alerting. Dynamically formatted emails sent based on exception, scheduled events or user events.
- Metric trend tracking. Capture values of any data field or metric on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. Display metric trending over time, and whether the metric is higher, lower or the same as the previous period.
- Data simulations. Take multiple copies of subsets of data, for what-if analysis, and simulation modeling.
Data Sharing with Other Systems
- One-click data export to Microsoft Excel
- One-click PDF reporting, with inbuilt PDF generator
- One-click bi-directional XML interface with Microsoft Project
- Standard SAP certified web services and BAPI connectors to SAP modules
- Data exchange to other ERP systems such as Oracle, PeopleSoft and JD Edwards
- Configurable XML interface to Microsoft Excel and Word
- XMLa support to exchange data with business intelligence tools like Cognos and Business Objects
- Data exchange with Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) systems
- Data exchange export with data warehouses
- SMTP interface for email integration with systems such as Microsoft Outlook and Lotus Notes
- Full support of web services as server and client
- Batch and real time interfaces supported
- Data exchange using SQL, XML, and flat file import/export
- Internal scheduler and event alerts can trigger data exchange on an event or time basis
- LDAP interface for password authentication
- OLAP connector to Mondrian and Microsoft Excel
- Publication feeds (RSS format)
- Interface building using macros and javascript compliant API
| | NPD Software Platform Technical Architecture | | | | The software platform is a single, fully integrated web-based application with a relational database, which can be accessed from any web-browser connected to the internet. It uses a standard three tier architecture to support a web client, a java-based webserver application and a relational database management system. | | |
PC Client
- Internet Explorer 6.0 +, Firefox 2.0 +
- Choice of java applet plug with sun JVM or Ajax inteface
Application Server
- Apache, IIS Server, iPlanet webserver
- JBoss 3.2.5 or 4.0, WebSphere 6.0 or 6.1,
- SMTP Compatible Email Server
- Windows NT/2000/XP/2003, Unix (HP, Sun, IBM) or Linux operating system
Database Server
- Oracle (8.1.7+, 9+), SQL Server (SQL 2000 SP2 and +)
Network:
- TCP-IP, http, https. Works through proxies, firewalls, DMZ, extranet, VPN etc
| | | | Please call us for any updates on our supported platforms. |
|
| | Architecture Overview |  | | | 
 | | | | Related NPD Processes |  | |
| | |
|
|
