Saffron, a cognitive computing platform designed for mission-critical operational intelligence, announced the availability of SaffronStreamline, a product lifecycle intelligence solution that provides end-to-end knowledge about issues and defects in a product’s lifecycle, helping manufacturers shorten time to market and manage potential risks. The rapid growth of connected devices, machines and software makes this capability an urgent business requirement.
SaffronStreamline’s Product Lifecycle Intelligence layer sits above a customer’s existing Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) and Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) systems. SaffronStreamline unifies multi-sourced data with enterprise data into a single layer of intelligence that enables organizations to share knowledge from one to many experts across their ecosystems. Customers solve problems quickly and shorten time to market via access to information about multi-discipline issues, to expertise and to the shared causes of problems.
A new class of software has emerged from research labs and is increasingly embedded in our smartphones, tablets, laptops, Web sites and even enterprise systems. These cognitive systems are disrupting the world of technology and are causing significant changes, including augmenting and improving knowledge workers’ activities, collaboration and productivity,” said Dave Schubmehl, research director for IDC’s content analytics, discovery and cognitive systems research. “SaffronStreamline leverages this technology to help organizations deliver quality products to market and respond quickly to issues and defects. With the proliferation of embedded software in products of all types, cognitive systems such as SaffronStreamline will play an important role in Product Lifecycle Management and Quality Assurance.”
Without such cognitive systems, manufacturers rely on traditional PLM and ALM systems, which make it difficult for them to learn from current and past issues or identify the experts who have experience resolving specific issues. This in turn can lead to poor-quality software outcomes, which exposes companies to two types of threats: the potential risk of problems that could lead to development, liability and warranty costs, and the certain cost of diverting resources from innovation to fixing software. With fewer resources available for innovation, manufacturers find it hard to gain and keep competitive advantage.
Smart Products Come from Smart Processes
With the rapid growth of smart products containing embedded software, more manufacturers are becoming de facto software companies, even though software management is not their traditional area of expertise,” said Gayle Sheppard, CEO of Saffron. “SaffronStreamline helps customers resolve issues that arise from hardware, software or the fusion of the two by leveraging all relevant knowledge across disciplines and the enterprise. Now engineers can quickly determine duplicates or similar issues from the past and present and also find experts within their companies who share expertise in similar issues, skills and interests. Management can quickly assess where risks exist across the product lifecycle and rank priorities for resource allocation. SaffronStreamline delivers manufacturers the product lifecycle intelligence they need to swiftly identify and resolve quality and safety issues.”
The unspoken cost of software development, issue resolution and debugging is a productivity sink for engineers and developers:
- They lose 50 percent of development time to these problems
- 40 percent of issues/bugs are duplicates in kind or occurrence
- Resolving issues takes an average of 6.9 days
By accelerating resolution, SaffronStreamline helps manufacturers and service providers:
- Bring new products to market faster.
- Increase customer satisfaction with faster fixes, new features and better quality.
- Protect profit margins from warranty and service demands.
- Capture competitive advantage by focusing resources on innovation.
- Develop and leverage company-wide expertise in software management.
SaffronStreamline Product Details
SaffronStreamline helps manufacturers integrate application lifecycle management into their product lifecycles by:
- Learning from disconnected enterprise-system data sources such as PLM, ALM, Testing and CRM.
- Finding similar issues, duplicates and shared causes for engineering resolution automatically.
- Classifying business risk of issues and defects such as safety, customer experience, reliability, performance and more.
- Identifying experts who work on similar issues and have similar skill sets for collaboration.
- Unifying issues expertise, gathered from external sources such as Stack Overflow and other data sources selected by the customer, with internal enterprise data.
Availability
SaffronStreamline is available now for early-release customers. General Availability is scheduled for April 27, 2015. Cloud-based and hosted through a web app, SaffronStreamline eliminates the need for costly per-user installation.
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