Dr Dimitris Kiritsis, EPFL, Switzerland, is the Initiator and Scientific Co-ordinator of the PROMISE EU FP6 IP 507100 project, the pan-European consortium consisting of 21 partners from 9 different countries. Operating from November 2004 until May 2008, at a cost of €14 million, the core concept of PROMISE has been to transfer information generated by Smart Products – products that are able to sense their condition and environment - into knowledge which can then be used to better support existing products and to create new product and service value.<Br> Dimitris will present how this new, innovative technology focuses on end-to-end closed-loop PLM, in the process revealing his most recent and up-to-date results from PROMISE research.

Keith Zobott is Corporate Director, Engineering IT Enterprise Applications at Honeywell where he has been responsible for a strategic initiative entitled VELOCITY PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT. He will discuss how this approach has allowed Honeywell to use PLM as an enabler to dramatically reduce time to market at a cheaper cost, whilst incorporating lean concepts and initiatives. Although only one-and-a-half years into the project, Keith has already witnessed a 30% reduction in cycle time, with targets of 70-80% expected to be met during the next four years. Keith will additionally consider how looking at your own business and your specific product offerings can assist you in gaining the most out of your PLM architecture.

Oliver Anton is Director of PLM at Siemens, where he oversees PLM processes and IT application across 10 different business groups within Siemens, ranging from its automation and drives group to its power generation division. With each business group returning turnovers of several billion Euros per year, each group certainly has its own agenda and objectives. This is where Oliver encounters his most prevalent challenge. Oliver will provide an account of the roadmap towards a harmonisation of PLM across the business groups and the results that have been achieved today. His approach views PLM first and foremost as a process, in turn deciding what must be achieved and what needs to be improved. Once this has been established, discussion is directed towards specific applications and interfaces. Oliver will assert that only this approach can be successful in convincing the differing divisions of the advantages with harmonising the PLM environment in driving the entire business forward.

Gerd Seidenfaden is Senior Manager at DaimlerChrysler and is responsible for Methods and IT-Processes for Engineering. His presentation will reveal Daimler Chrysler's understanding of PLM along with its principles and tools for designing the PLM landscape, and how this is all achieved on a global scale.<Br> Gerd will reveal his work on the E/E Documentation Process within Daimler Chrysler, and how a lot of emphasis is being placed on development, production and after-sales areas. Particularly relevant to this is the seamless integration of an OEM with its supplier based on standards.<Br> Gerd will conclude that this is a key factor for Daimler Chrysler in handling the growing complexities of cars and in assuring the critical quality of Mercedes-Benz cars.

Matt holds over 20 years IT industry experience in engineering and manufacturing environments, working for both large global and smaller specialised companies. Currently, he is responsible for IT within Red Bull Technology/Red Bull Racing, while he also provides technical support to Scuderia Toro Rosso and Team Red Bull (NASCAR). The RBT/RBR IT team is responsible for implementing and supporting applications and associated IT infrastructure for engineering, manufacturing, trackside, and back office customers.<Br> Prior to his position at Red Bull, Matt held Senior Management positions Ford, Land Rover and Jaguar Cars.

Dr Michael Grieves is a renowned international author and PLM expert, whose portfolio of work in this area includes the critically acclaimed Product Lifecycle Management: Driving the Next Generation of Lean Thinking (2005). In his presentation, Michael will emphasise the issue of change capacity within the business, and how he deems it to be a genuine determining factor in the success or failure of PLM. Highlighting the need to train, educate, and engage people on new tools and concepts, he will proceed to reveal the key factors regarding change capacity that business must take into account if they are to successfully manage change throughout the organisation.

Mehmood Khan is Global Leader of Innovation Process Development at Unilever. For Mehmood, what has become prevalent in innovation is the issue of sustainable value creation. Unilever’s award-winning approach to this has seen Mehmood take all stakeholders into account in the product lifecycle. No longer are Unilever solely thinking about the internal players within the product lifecycle. Rather, Mehmood now considers all stakeholders who were previously not involved, such as suppliers, customers and universities in driving Unilever’s innovation process. This presentation will see Mehmood showcase the specifics behind this approach, and how it is enabling Unilever to grow as a business.

Hans de Groot is the Director of Project Plaza, the application within DSM enabling project managers and business management to communicate on project content and facilitating the proper documentation in the phase decision process. Optimising the portfolios for new products and/or applications is key in bringing the right products to the market. DSM end products are in pharmaceuticals, nutrition, performance materials and bulk chemicals, in a wide variety of markets.<Br> Hans is supporting all businesses within DSM in their management of portfolios. The right choices in the portfolios is seen as the front end loading of the whole product life cycles and as a key issue for sustainable business in those new products. Hans will highlight the way DSM organises its portfolio management in a well defined way.

Jody Crow is Director of PDM Implementation at Cutter & Buck. A key benefit from implementing a PLM environment that Jody will discuss has been the vast increase in information visibility across the entire business. Historically, Jody has observed that detailed product information was only accessible to the design and technical groups that created the information. However, with PLM in place, different groups in production, inventory management and customer service can now access such information. Jody will also provide insight into how Cutter & Buck is now able to easily communicate information to vendors all over the world, in turn enhancing collaborative efforts. Finally, Jody will outline her strategy to tackle change management, detailing her approach to gaining acceptance across the business and managing people through change.

Dr John Stark is President of John Stark Associates and is an internationally renowned thought leader and author on Product Lifecycle Management (PLM). John will provide a strategic insight into the key success factors in PLM implementation, beginning with a consideration of the evolving paradigm of PLM. He sees PLM shifting from independent departmental activities to a holistic enterprise model, covering the entire lifecycle as opposed to merely Product Data Management (PDM) or product development. Within this context, John will proceed to analyse the importance of certain factors - such as educating management on PLM, and thinking of PLM beyond engineering and design - which John deems essential in successful application of PLM.

Luc Pinxten is based in Belgium where he acts as Senior Business Integration Manager at VF Europe, a subsidiary of VF Corporation, world leaders in branded apparel. Despite its status as one of the largest suppliers of branded apparel worldwide, VF continues to drive growth across the business. In fulfilling this key objective, Luc has most recently worked on the Product Development Project for jeanswear, an analytical phase looking at the entire business process and considering ways of improving processes along the product development cycle. This has led to VF’s current two-stage mission of, firstly, up-front conceptual line planning, and secondly, full garment development across the organisation.<Br> Luc will elaborate on how this approach has enabled VF to become a leaner and more flexible business, with shorter cycle times, and will use his experience to present exactly how PLM has been interpreted within VF.

Stefano Chiocchio is Head of Design Integration and Configuration Management for the ITER Project, based in France. As one of the most extravagant fusion experiments ever, the ITER Project is widely regarded as one of the most innovating and complex projects in the world today. Consisting of over 10 million parts, and at an estimated cost of approximately €10 billion during its thirty-year lifespan, Stefano will present an account of exactly how the ITER project has planned its roadmap for PLM, detailing its incremental approach for its long-term strategy, and how using a single PLM platform has already enabled ITER to improve collaborative efforts amongst its international partnership in producing faster and more efficient design and development.

Joe Barkai is program director for Manufacturing Insights' Product Life-cycle Management Strategies research service. In this role he is responsible for research and analysis on the types of investments that introduce operational efficiencies to the domain while improving the responsiveness to customer requirements. Specifically, Mr. Barkai examines the automotive, agricultural, and construction equipment industries with a focus on complex, mission-critical capital equipment. His research evaluates warranty cost containment and effective PLM and SLM and the process integration of the two.<Br> A senior executive with over 20 years industry experience in product management, marketing, and business development, Mr. Barkai is a thought leader with strong focus on the business value of technology in manufacturing and customer service.

Rob Mitchell is a Senior Editor in the Economist Intelligence Unit's Executive Services division, where he works on a range of bespoke research programmes, surveys and reports. Prior to joining the Economist Intelligence Unit, Rob worked for four years at the Financial Times, where he edited the newspaper's sponsored reports and publications.<Br> Rob will reveal how an efficient and synchronised manufacturing value chain relies on the identification, contextualisation and transferral of highly specialist knowledge. By making knowledge available and ensuring that it can be reused by multiple partners, new product development cycles can be compressed, and huge benefits gained in terms of greater efficiency and reduced costs. By utilising technology like PLM, best practice can be shared and process innovations leveraged across the entire value chain

As the PM IT Tools Manager for Faurecia Interior Systems Product Group, Peter Stein is responsible for providing IT-tool support to Faurecia’s programs in development and serial life. This covers the complete PLM suite and related tools.<Br> For 6 years, Peter has contributed to the process of implementing and maintaining a common PLM system for all Faurecia Product Groups. Today, Faurecia's PLM system is in use at more than 28 R&D and D&D sites, as well as in many production plants. It serves about 5000 users worldwide. Technology wise, it is built on the Enovia MatrixOne tool.<Br> Peter will discuss Faurecia's challenges and achievements, highlighting how he has witnessed a vast reduction in product development time through operating the Faurecia Excellence System.

As Director of Business and Science Affairs at Actelion Pharmaceuticals, Pasi Piitulainen is responsible for ensuring value across the product development process. In his role, Pasi believes one of his main challenges that he has to confront is risk. Despite the increased investment in complicated clinical trials, success rates in such trials are decreasing.<Br> On top of this, there is a great urgency to ensure transparency across the organisation. Pasi will discuss different approaches to managing such challenges, as well as revealing his portfolio management strategy in maximising visibility throughout the entire R&D pipeline. He will continue by presenting how companies can filter information gathered from multiple programmes so that management has been able to take informed decisions.

Roger Tempest is a co-founder of the PLM Interest Group, which works with its members to develop new tools and knowledge for PLM. Recent work on PLM maturity has highlighted the gap between what can be regarded as “Full PLM” and what most companies are currently trying to achieve. This indicates that PLM implementations across the entire marketplace will under-perform over the next 3-5 years, even within the most experienced organisations. Roger will outline the visible and hidden reasons for this, and will describe the management tools and strategies that can be used to put PLM on the same level as other business improvement initiatives.

Mark Norris, Strategy Director for Enovia Europe, will draw on his extensive experience of applying Enterprise PLM solutions in global organisations to discuss the new challenges of the 21st Century, the evolution of the information technology environment available to support PLM and the routes to improving Business Processes and delivering Business Value in a Global Enterprise.

As PLM expands in scope and offers broader opportunities for business value, defining priorities and establishing a roadmap for investment, including a structured approach of resulting financial benefits, becomes more of a challenge. This workshop will showcase techniques that Siemens UGS PLM Software and its customers use to analyse business needs, prioritise requirements and collaboratively establish a PLM plan that establishes ROI alongside rollout of capabilities.

As PLM expands in scope and offers broader opportunities for business value, defining priorities and establishing a roadmap for investment, including a structured approach of resulting financial benefits, becomes more of a challenge. This workshop will showcase techniques that Siemens UGS PLM Software and its customers use to analyse business needs, prioritise requirements and collaboratively establish a PLM plan that establishes ROI alongside rollout of capabilities.

Nico Bonthuys brings over 20 years of industry experience and thought leadership to the Linx/AS PLM practice. His command over the business processes that drive new product development & introduction, coupled with technical skill that reaches back to SAP R/2, has helped clients maximize their ROI in the SAP footprint, increase speed to market, and lower the TCO for IT organizations.<Br> A process-first proponent, Nico will present a holistic vision for PLM, and then overlay the components of SAP and certified “white-space” technologies that enable a successful solution (while dispelling myths about PLM and SAP along the way). The second half of the workshop will open up to audience participation to do a deep dive on topics of most interest.

Amit Sharma is Business Manager EMEA, Product Lifecycle and Engineering Solutions at Infosys. He will be discussing how your PLM journey involves refinements and changes to existing people, process and technology. This means introduction of new or refined tools, processes, operational and organisational structures alongside a critical need of ensuring minimal disruption in current ways of working and operating.<Br> Each organisation has its unique fingerprints around its PLM journey. At the top most level a well planned PLM initiative depends on its alignment with your business strategy, vision, processes and core competencies. The next level relates to your inter and intra enterprise processes and related tools, people and operations enabled via IT Innovation, new PLM tools and Innovative product development processes.

Manas Kumar Sarkar is the Principal Architect, ES, with focus on BPM, EAI & SOA implementation. He has over 11 years of experience in architecting, consulting & implementing Enterprise Integration solutions.<Br> Over years the key focus areas have been: consultancy, setting up & running of Integration Competency Center (ICC) for customers, consultation in defining pattern based enterprise Integration architecture, and its implementation implications. He has also focused on architecture consulting for SOA adoption and implementation, architecture assessment of Enterprise Integration platforms to harmonise and prepare for SOA deployment, as well as product selection for SOA rollout.