MatrixOne Adds Flexibility To Product Life-Cycle ManagementMatrixOne Adds Flexibility To Product Life-Cycle Management

MatrixOne Inc. on Monday released an updated version of its collaborative product life-cycle management system, Matrix10. The release includes applications aimed at further helping companies reduce development costs and cut the time to market for new products by providing more visibility and interactivity along the value chain early in the development process.

Two new applications in Matrix10 are designed to improve product planning. MatrixOne Product Central tracks the requirements, features, and options that make up a product. This lets a product manager share that data internally and externally to ensure that products are being configured based on specific customer and market requirements. MatrixOne Specification Central tracks all specification-creation processes around the components of a product, such as raw materials, component specification, and packaging issues, including regulatory requirements that could impact the product's development.

MatrixOne also has improved the integration capabilities to create easy interoperability between the application suite and engineering software, ERP systems, or CRM systems, as well as enhanced the security and scalability of its applications. "With this release, we've opened up how our customers bring products to market and leverage the value chain," says John Flemming, MatrixOne's senior VP of worldwide marketing.

General Electric Industrial Systems has been deploying MatrixOne applications using a building-block approach since 2000. GEIS uses features ranging from electronic request-for-quote processing to engineering documentation. Automating the product-development cycle saves the company money and cuts costs, says Eric Reed, manager of Global MyWorkPlace at GEIS. On the revenue-generating side, for instance, MatrixOne applications have helped GEIS cut down the time needed to make a design change from 60 days to four hours. "For every day I get the product to market sooner, that's another day of sales I get to bank," Reed says.

Reed, who served as an adviser to MatrixOne in developing Matrix10, is looking forward to the enhanced customization features and integration capabilities of the newest version.

Matrix10 will be commercially available in June. Pricing begins at $100,000 to $150,000 for smaller deployments of a 25-user system, but deployments can also reach into the multimillion-dollar range.